A year or two ago I bought Lindsey Stirling’s Album Brave Enough. It’s wonderful all around, but I really fell in love with Gavi’s Song. Three weeks ago I took a stab at playing this on my guitar. It’s technically not actually that difficult – After listening to the original and trying to repeat it for several days, I can now actually play through it without too many hiccups (still far from being YouTube’able, though). ... Read More

Three weeks ago I blogged about how to get rid of non-free Google services and moving to free software on my Android phone. I’ve got a lot of feedback via email, lwn, and Google+, many thanks to all of you for helpful hints! As this is obviously important to many people, I want to tie up some lose ends and publish the results of these discussions. Alternative apps and stores Yalp is a free app that is able to search, install, and update installed apps from the Google Play Store. ... Read More

I’ve been a professional Free Software developer in the GNU/Linux area for 14 years now, and a hobbyist developer and user for much longer. For some reason that never extended much to the smartphone world, beyond running LineageOS on my older phones (my current Sony Xperia is still under warranty and I’m fine with the officially supported Android), and various stabs at using the Ubuntu phone (RIP!). On a few long weekends this year it got a hold of me, and I had a look over the Google fence to see how Free Software is doing on Android and how to reduce my dependency on Google Play Services and Google apps. ... Read More

Being a web interface, Cockpit has a comprehensive integration test suite which exercises all of its functionality on a real web browser that is driven by the tests. Until recently we used PhantomJS for this, but there was an ever-increasing pressure to replace it. Why replace PhantomJS? Phantom’s engine is becoming really outdated: it cannot understand even simple ES6 constructs like Set, arrow functions, or promises, which have been in real browsers for many years; this currently blocks hauling in some new code from the welder project. ... Read More

Annett und ich waren drei Wochen im Nordwesten der USA unterwegs und sind wieder wohlbehalten zuhause gelandet. Die ersten zwei Wochen war eine organisierte Gruppenreise von Wittmann Travel und Karawane, und da wir nun schon mal dort waren haben wir noch eine Woche verlängert. Zentrales Ereignis war die totale Sonnenfinsternis am 21. August, und rundherum die vielen Nationalparks in der Gegend. Es war ein sehr intensives und wunderschönes Erlebnis! Hier ist unser Reisetagebuch, garniert mit ein paar ausgewählten Fotos. ... Read More

Hot on the heels of landing Cockpit in Debian unstable and Ubuntu 17.04, the Ubuntu backport request got approved (thanks Iain!), which means that installing cockpit on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 16.10 is now also a simple apt install cockpit away. I updated the installation instructions accordingly. Enjoy, and let us know about problems!

Cockpit has now been in Debian unstable and Ubuntu 17.04 and devel, which means it’s now a simple $ sudo apt install cockpit away for you to try and use. This metapackage pulls in the most common plugins, which are currently NetworkManager and udisks/storaged. If you want/need, you can also install cockpit-docker (if you grab docker.io from jessie-backports or use Ubuntu) or cockpit-machines to administer VMs through libvirt. Cockpit upstream also has a rather comprehensive Kubernetes/Openstack plugin, but this isn’t currently packaged for Debian/Ubuntu as kubernetes itself is not yet in Debian testing or Ubuntu. ... Read More

It has now been two and a half months since I started working at Red Hat in the Cockpit team. I just noticed that after yesterday’s 135 release frenzy I now have more than a hundred commits in it! $ git shortlog | grep Pitt Martin Pitt (111): Of course amongst them are lots of trivialities, simple tweaks, and packaging improvements (all this Debian/Ubuntu packaging experience got to be worth for something ☺). ... Read More

systemd 233 is scheduled to be released next week, and there is only a handful of small issues left. As usual there are tons of improvements and fixes, but the most intrusive one probably is another attempt to move from legacy cgroup v1 to a “hybrid” setup where the new unified (cgroup v2) hierarchy is mounted at /sys/fs/cgroup/unified/ and the legacy one stays at /sys/fs/cgroup/ as usual. This should provide an easier path for software like Docker or LXC to migrate to the unified hiearchy, but even that hybrid mode broke some bits. ... Read More

My WordPress blog got hacked two days ago and now twice today. This morning I purged MySQL and restored a good backup from three days ago, changed all DB and WordPress passwords (both the old and new ones were long and autogenerated ones), but not even an hour after the redeploy the hack was back. (It can still be seen on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. Neither the Apache logs nor the Journal had anything obvious, nor were there any new files in global or user www directories, so I’m a bit stumped how this happened. ... Read More