hunspell-en-us (20070829-2ubuntu4) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/extrawords.txt: added "misandry" and "misandrist" (LP: #436145)

 -- Mackenzie Morgan   Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:38:32 -0400

That’s what I would describe as “the hopes and dreams of a generation” (of Software Freedom lovers), and is the result of fantastic product definition, branding, genuine user excitement, years of incredible — and largely unsung — work of thousands of Debian developers (not to mention all the upstreams)… and a pretty substantial X factor.

Update: Whenever I talk about this chart in presentations, I always follow up with another chart which puts that incredible rising line in context: Ubuntu vs. Firefox. Interestingly, that chart is looking far less impressive today than it was last year. Which is great news… The rise and rise of Ubuntu is catching up to the star power of Firefox! Wow!

… and here’s the login screen you’ll find in the most recent release, Ubuntu 9.04. In a massive about face from the previous earthy/fleshy styles — which stood out as utterly unique and complemented Ubuntu’s “Linux for Human Beings” brand attitude — to me, this one just screams, “This is a public service announcement: You are using TECHNOLOGY.”

That said, in almost every other sense, Ubuntu 9.04 is a rocking release. In particular, it’s fantastic to see Netbook Remix and the Dust theme shipping for real, and the integrated Dovecot/Postfix mail server meta-package… Vorsprung durch Einfachheit.

Congratulations again, Ubuntu and Canonical folks!

I suppose the obvious starting point would be…

apt-get install approx

… and that’s almost all there is to it, but let’s fancy it up a bit.

In /etc/approx/approx.conf:

# use my ISP's ubuntu mirror for most packages
# use central mirrors for security, partner and ports
ubuntu     http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu
secure     http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
partner    http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu
ports      http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports
medibuntu  http://packages.medibuntu.org

# you can cache PPA packages too, see the sources.list example below
ppa        http://ppa.launchpad.net

# ISP's debian mirror, particularly handy for getting sources
debian     http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/debian

Demonstrative examples from /etc/apt/sources.list:

# get most packages from my ISP
deb http://approx:9999/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe

# get security packages from my ISP *or* central
deb http://approx:9999/ubuntu jaunty-security main restricted universe
deb http://approx:9999/secure jaunty-security main restricted universe

# partner and medibuntu packages for naughty stuff we need
deb http://approx:9999/partner jaunty partner
deb http://approx:9999/medibuntu jaunty free non-free

# use generic PPA repository to support arbitrary PPAs!
deb http://approx:9999/ppa/jdub/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://approx:9999/ppa/gwibber-team/ubuntu intrepid main

Now you can configure all of your Ubuntu (or Debian) machines to grab their package lists and packages from your approx cache. No more wasted bandwidth when you’re updating, and no more wasted time when you’re stuck watching an update — this is particularly awesome for autmated installs, of course!

Other handy tidbits:

• You can use the cache to share source packages too — just change ‘deb’ to ‘deb-src’ at the beginning of the line, as usual.
• approx comes with daily and weekly cronjobs to keep your cache tidy.
• If you have a bunch of packages lying around in /var/cache/apt/archives which could be put to good use in your approx cache, just use approx-import. Very sweet.

Gosh I’m happy that someone has finally nailed this… I’m pretty sure I’ve tried every attempt to implement a dynamic apt proxy/cache that ever was. Interestingly, approx is yet another OCaml success story. Cool.

Enjoy!

I filed a bug and test case regarding the problem (which will hopefully be be fixed with an official update, given that Hardy is an LTS release), but here’s a quick guide to work around the problem in the mean time. Thanks to Andrew “ajmitch” Mitchell for pointing me in the right direction!

1. Grab and unpack the timezonedb extension tarball from PECL.
2. apt-get install php5-dev
3. phpize
4. ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5
5. make
6. sudo cp modules/timezonedb.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613/
   Note: The precise name of the final directory might be different. For instance, on hardy-i386 it will be 20060613+lfs.
7. sudo vi /etc/php/conf.d/timezonedb.ini
Yes, this is a new file. Content: extension=timezonedb.so
8. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Now your PHP has the very latest timezone data up its sleeve, so you can rest easy knowing that your web visitors won’t think you’re a Queenslander.

Zing!

Update: The php5-timezonedb extension was added to Debian, but removed from intrepid… seems it was because intrepid’s php5 has a patch to use the system tzdata. It would be awesome to get that patch into hardy!

Update: Uh, what about make…?

While the packages were downloading, I noticed a few coming from universe, but fewer than I had expected. I try not to use universe stuff on my mission-critical server, but some things are just too good to live without. Perhaps they’re candidates for main inclusion?

So, here’s some of the universe stuff I can’t live without on my server, excluding supporting libraries:

• collectd: Totally awesome “just works” system information collection and graphing tool. No more dicking around with nightmare configuration of Cacti and friends — collectd comes with a bunch of useful and sensible plugins that are ready-to-go for common graphing tasks. collectd has a vote of confidence from the Red Hat Emerging Technology folks, so you know it’s good.
• libapache2-redirtoservname: Convenience module for making sure you’re always redirecting to the primary domain name for your websites — with only one line in your VirtualHost configuration. Here’s how easy it is to use:

  ServerName bethesignal.org
  ServerAlias www.bethesignal.org perkypants.org www.perkypants.org
  RedirectToServerName On

• rtorrent: Simply the best terminal-based torrent client.
• php5-xcache: Opcode caching for PHP. Handy when running lots of PHP gash.
• mailgraph: Lets me know how much spam I’m killing, and email I’m suffering. See mailgraph on gnome.org for a great example of mailgraph in action.

Surely udev could read and do something useful with /etc/iftab, even if it only provides a fraction of the functionality? Ubuntu successfully migrates the configuration, which is plenty good, but… ew.

I’d kick myself for becoming a “this is progress?! in my day…” curmudgeon, but this is a matter of protecting simplicity rather than pointless defense of “the old ways”.

Here’s /etc/iftab:

# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.
# See iftab(5) for syntax.

eth0 mac 00:15:c5:4a:71:98 arp 1
eth1 mac 00:18:de:03:3e:0d arp 1

While this is /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:

# This file maintains persistent names for network interfaces.
# See udev(7) for syntax.
#
# Entries are automatically added by the 75-persistent-net-generator.rules
# file; however you are also free to add your own entries.

# PCI device 0x14e4:0x1600 (tg3)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:15:c5:4a:71:98", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4222 (ipw3945)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:18:de:03:3e:0d", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth1"

I’ve never understood the ${ubuntu_release}-updates thing.

A separate repositry for security I understand due to the need to bypass mirror lag.

But anything worthy of going into ${ubuntu_release}-updates is surely worth putting straight into ${ubuntu_release} ? Or is it just me?

Post-release, that archive is never touched. It means that users get to choose how much damage they’re willing to accept:

• $release: Don’t touch it, I like consistency, even with my bugs.
• $release-security: I’ll accept patches to existing versions (and very rare version upgrades if absolutely necessary) in the process of keeping my system secure.
• $release-updates: Okay, some bugs are worth fixing, and I trust you this much (holds up two fingers like Maxwell Smart).
• $release-backports: I have something akin to technology ADHD, needing the latest of everything I can possibly get, but I’m a sooky little wuss-fart because I can’t handle running the development branch.
• $devel: I can take it. Seriously. If you break my X, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. I’ll file and maybe even fix the bugs and I’ll do it even if power management is not so much ‘managed’ as vomited all over the wall. Come get some.
• Debian: We do the work so you don’t have to.

Amazingly, a number of followups suggest that this summary should form some kind of official description on the Ubuntu Wiki or similar. I’m sure someone in Ubuntu land will be keen to… revise some of my verbiage… should they choose to use it.

I’ve used this for ages to take full advantage of my Internet bandwidth when downloading large files from the USA to Australia: 320K/s vs. 1.21M/s is an easy choice to make! So it surprised me when Rob suggested that I only had to do this because “ssh was broken”.

If that were truly the case, I ought to be able to do an http download at maximum speed between the same machines… testing, testing, downloading, testing… Holy crap! ssh is broken!

Rob explained some stuff about windowing, and how ssh had to reimplement things, but was doing so badly… I kinda tuned out at that point, as I was negotiating the stages of grief for my beloved ssh.

So, when a new version of OpenSSH landed in Hardy the other day, citing windowing-related changes, I figured I’d have to check if it made any difference for my use case:

gutsy: 183824384 bytes transferred in 559 seconds (320.9K/s)

hardy: 183824384 bytes transferred in 145 seconds (1.21M/s)

Although I tested on different physical machines on my local network, the performance increase is undeniably due to changes in the new release… I rebuilt it on gutsy and now that machine flies too.

Ah, the simple things…