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Miro AKA DemocracyPlayer

www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways […]

The Future of Xen

I’m currently in Xen hell. My Thinkpad (which I won’t replace any time soon) has a Pentium-M CPU without PAE support. I think that Debian might re-introduce Xen support for CPUs without PAE in Lenny, but at the moment I have the choice of running without Xen or running an ancient kernel on my laptop. […]

Offensive Blog Posts

There has been ongoing debate in the Debian community for a number of years about what standards of behavior should be expected. Matthew Garrett sets a new low by making a joke about Jesus being molested as a child [1]. While I believe that debate and discussion about religion is a good thing, such comments […]

The Purpose of Planet Debian

An issue that causes ongoing discussion is what is the purpose of a Planet installation such as Planet Debian [1]. The discussion usually seems to take the less effective form of what is “appropriate” content for the Planet or what is considered to be “abuse” of the Planet. Of course it’s impossible to get anything […]

Planets and Resignations

Recently a Debian Developer resigned from a position of responsibility in the project by writing a blog post. I won’t name the DD or the position he resigned as I think that there are general issues which need discussion and specific examples will get in the way (everyone who is seriously involved will know who […]

Preparing for a Collapse

Rick Falkvinge (leader of the Swedish Pirate Party) has written his predictions about an economic crash in the US [1]. Predicting that the US economy will crash is no great stretch, it’s gross failures seem obvious. The Pirate Party [2] is a one-issue political party that is based on reform of intellectual property laws. It […]

Bugs and User Practice

Wouter points out a mistake in one of my blog posts which was based on old data [1]. My original post was accurate for older distributions of Linux but since then the bug in question was fixed.

Normally when writing blog posts or email I do a quick test before committing the text to avoid […]

Solar Powered PC

I’ve just read an interesting post on TomsHardware.com about a solar powered PC [1]. It describes all the steps involved in creating a modern high-performance low-power computer.

They have a lot of interesting information. One surprising fact (from page 3) is that the PSUs tested (both for AC and DC input) were more efficient when […]

Making Linux DVDs

Anthony Towns writes about using an improved version of jigdo to download CD/DVD images [1]. His improvement is basically to pipeline operation for better performance.

Jigdo (the Jigsaw download) is a tool to download a set of files and then use them to create a CD or DVD image [2]. The idea is that most […]

Motivation and Perspective

Patrick Winnertz writes about the demotivating effect of unreasonable delays on joining the Debian project [1].

While I agree that things need to be improved in terms of getting people in the project in a timely manner (the suggestion of providing assistants seems good), I don’t think that anyone has a good reason for being […]