I’d like to have this one on as some kind of personal “zeitgeist” moment if anything, and I’m definitely not making any other “versions” of this video. I have “why I did it”, and all the other things written in my previous posts related to this video.

Enjoy

Related posts:

Linux/Unix sex
Chimaira / Linux sex v2.0

This was my third time in NYC, and NYC as a city never left me empty handed, in every possible sense! And am seriously considering option of moving back one day, whether to get my Masters/phD or just do work we’ll see what future holds for me

DebConf10

I was in organization team for DebConf10, but if you put me aside, what’s particularly interesting is that there was a total number of 7 Bosnians on DebConf10, two of which were government officials. I must note this wasn’t our complete team, and what’s most important of all is that they all pretty much volunteered as much as they could, of course, besides good will to help Debian, but also to at least somehow prepare themselves for organization of DebConf11.

It’s also worth noting that this was their first DebConf, and I as a leader of the team must say I’m proud on how well they performed. I’m sure by being highly active in volunteering they have learned as much as they could when it comes to “how it’s done” and were able to see good and bad sides of DebConf10 organization team.

Of course, I’d also like to thank DebConf10 team for their superb work, perfect Venue selection, their hospitality and being incredibly friendly and helpful to all of us. As I said in one of my lectures, it’s kinda unwritten rule that every next DebConf has to top the previous one, and that being said it’s going to be almost impossible to compete with this year bid, but being Bosnians we’re up for the challenge

My DebConf10 Pictures: Semi-private album – FaceBook public link (no registration required)

DebConf11

DebConf10 was busy period for all of us, but I don’t want to start complaining since even though we’ve done enormous amounts of work so far, the real challenge lays ahead of us. With DebConf10 behind us, the thing we should process now is … it’s our turn now, we’re next

Before anything, I’d like to thank Government of Republika Srpska for their full financial support, which was one of the preconditions to even get this bid. With their full support + sponsors, we’ll be able to get great amount for sponsorships, for you to come to Banja Luka from the most remote places, and also in case you need visa for them to help you in getting one. Government support is just too precious in any way you want to take it.

We would also like to invite you to DebConf11 in Bosnia (Banja Luka) next summer, we also invite all of you to our communication channels (mailing list, irc) since we would really like to get involved as many people as we can. Besides all of you enjoying DebConf11 next year, we would like you to help us in giving directions since we’re a young team

Besides Debian people, I’d like to invite anyone who think he/she could help, or want to get involved, especially individuals/organizations/LUG from whole region!

It’s also important to stress that in all of our communication means, we do speak English, so please do not hesitate if you have any sort of question/suggestion/whatever.

For those interested in next DebConf11, most important page you should follow is our wiki page, where you can find all information and which we keep updated in timely manner: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka

Communication/Links

Languages we officially support are: English, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian

Mailing list:
http://lists.debconf.net/mailman/listinfo/debconf11-bosnia

IRC:
#debconf11-bosnia on irc.debian.org / irc.oftc.net

Twitter:
#debconf11 tag
http://twitter.com/absinthesyringe (shameless self promotion )

Facebook:
Official DebConf11 FaceBook group

DebConf10 Adnan Hodzic – DebConf11 in Bosnia (Introduction and Invitation):
Lecture video high quality (205mb)

See you next year!

This post may sound ludicrous to some of you but please hear me out. I’ve been on Debian unstable/Sid for awhile now and it was all cool until yesterday.

Besides my work on Debian DebConf/some devel, I’m university student, also I do web devel which is my primary source of income, besides all those I try to go out on weekends and have some kind of social life. Somehow I manage to do all these things and I’d say I manage them pretty successfully too.

Now I’m hardcore to the bone, but this is just too much, last week started working on immense web devel project  didn’t sleep more then 2hrs/day whole week; I also didn’t shut down my notebook and just kept it on suspend as I usually do. Either way I was about to print/scan something and I connect my printer and what happens? My whole system freezes, now I’ll let you figure out the result of doing hard reset and having a lot of gedit docs open at that time. And yes, I did had that bug reported awhile ago, can’t find it now, but it was fixed, seems like it’s back again.

In the end I’m left with weekend completing the lost work + late school work + eclipse 3.5.2-2 ought to be uploaded. I do almost all the work (didn’t upload  eclipse) and literally pass out on Sunday. Wake up sometime on Monday, wasn’t able to get up from bed.

Plan: Change my “base” distro, keep Sid as dualboot or virtual machine

Now, for my time of being Sid user this isn’t the first time something like this happened, and by this I mean “unexpected/unprovoked” bugs. I might not be as hardcore as I used to be, or it’s just that I don’t have time anymore.  So my plan is to get Stable or even Ubuntu for my “work/study” platform, while I’d have dual boot or virtual machine of Debian Unstable/Sid. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who’s doing this, so please give me your advice on this one.

1. Main question is dualboot or virtual machine?

Reason I’d like it to be a virtual machine instead of dual boot is that my notebook HDD is 64GB SSD (Lenovo X300). By todays standards 64GB is quite small, while the price of SSD is quite opposite of small. So I’d like to use this only for my main/base OS, nothing else.

Since I use external HDD’s having it virtual it’s more convenient for me to “carry around” my image/s. Other day I ordered 4GB of RAM so I shouldn’t have problems with performance of this virtual machine. Or even with that much RAM, devel on virtual machine is just not possible?

2. In case I go for Ubuntu, and decide to start packaging for Ubuntu as well, what’s the best way to have my work/packages “synced” within both Debian and Ubuntu (sshfs?).

3. How do I take my PGP keys with me? If I just copy .gnupg and .ssh will that be enough?

4. Can I have same keys both on my host machine and virtual machine at the same time?

5. Some other idea of sticking with Sid?

Input to any of these questions/other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

“Don’t tell me you’re moving window control elements to the left side of window in Lucid …”

Either way if this is the “revolutionary” change for Ubuntu, then I have a visual style suggestion for Squeeze as well.

Since Gnome is default desktop environment in Debian and as it looks like right now 2.30 will be what’s going to be included into Squeeze; nothing much, or nothing really will visually change in Gnome by then. So … how about this

For some time now I’ve been troubled by some things in Gnome, and what’s bothering me the most is “System” menu. Why? Well because the list of utilities listed both under “Administration” and “Preferences” is so long that it’s almost useless. So without losing your precious seconds of your life and losing fair amount of nerves …  well this is what’s required to find what you were initially looking for. Interesting enough is the fact (please do stress) that Gnome consists of a fine thing called “gnome-control-center” which is not included in any of Gnome menus. 

I really do enjoy Gnome vanilla flavor (overall am fan of vanilla flavored apps.) but what I’ve been doing for quite time now is “fixing” this ridicule by having my own “version” of Systems menu, which consists of “Add/Remove App.” (synaptic) and “Fool Control” (gnome-control-center)

Final result is that I get what I’m looking for in couple of seconds without any lost nerves

Either way, after reading the redesigning Ubuntu article, this only encouraged me to go live with this suggestion. I know it’s a minor change, but how about we have this implemented into Squeeze? Of course change my silly button labels; if not, what are my options? Make package that will do this for you?  I’m really interested to hear your input on this topic.

Talking about redesigning stuff, is anyone up to do start doing this with Debian homepage? Yea? Count me in

Our team and myself were working on this whole candidature for last ~9 months, and even though we put incredibly amounts on energy, hard work, enthusiasm and everything else that goes along with it, suspense and uncertainty were there until the very last minute!  One of our local team members (trip0d’s) wife almost gave a birth to their child gave birth to twins during the decision process that lasted full 4 hours

As a remainder we were competing with Ecuador and Germany to win this bid, whole process was excruciating and very emotionally distressful in every possible aspect for every team member; at one point Germany took a slight lead ahead of Bosnian team, while in the end by “points” Bosnia was in slight lead by 0.25 points, and this is exactly what touched me the most about this whole bid/decision/process.

This is not a great advantage or anything for that matter, but what happened is that in decision process Debian debconf team and its developers picked Bosnia and Herzegovina as a place where they want to have DebConf11!  Our main competitors from München, Germany showed a real fair play and at the end even yielded to our side; really to both of you, Michael Banck (azeem) and Andreas Barth (aba) it was a pleasure and honor to compete with you guys! See you in NYC for proper handshake and possibly a hug?

Also I’d like to thank Jimmy Kaplowitz (Hydroxide), Moray Allan (moray) who had chairs and who did absolutely incredible job … I guess I’ll just have to thank the whole debconf orga team for all their amazing work ( can’t name names individually because I’ll definitely forget someone!)

This bid really reunited whole Bosnia and Herzegovina, this whole process also united all of Balkans and whole of Ex Yugoslavia, which makes me especially happy since today (March 1st) we are celebrating the day we officially separated from Yugoslavia. Now this just one small step forward, since the real work is ahead of us and we’re starting it all as soon as tomorrow since there’s really a lot that needs to be done.

Again thank you all, we’ll give our best for this to be a DebConf you’ll remember (as a great one of course!), in the meantime see you in New York City!

Adnan Hodzic aka AbsintheSyringe team leader on behalf of whole debconf11-team.

DebConf11 Banja Luka wiki

Debconf11 decision log (#debconf-team log)

“nü” was more of a symbolic meaning, since in meantime we solved our bids “weakest links” and pretty much got it “mature” and at the stage we were aiming it to be. We’ll still make some minor changes to it until the final decision date (in 47 hours) but this is it really So without further ado, let me introduce you to our nü wiki Since besides changing pretty much the whole wiki we have also added (important) new pages for:

Banja Luka and Republika Srpska

We have added a new pages to bring Banja Luka and Republika Srpska closer to every potential visitor.

Full Government Support

Today we have received the most important information when it comes to our bid. Today government council sitting was done, where one of the topics was full financial support in case Banja Luka is host to DebConf11. Proposition was accepted! To remind you, we will get free venue building wheter it’s “Government Building” or “Banski Dvori”, besides that we’re getting them to cover basically all of the costs needed for the conference, and besides that we’re getting 5 additional members to our local team (highly capable and educated govt. officials) which even includes city Mayor. Early tomorrow we’ll get scan/fax of this memorandum from Chief of Cabinet along with the local team names which will all together be added to this very wiki page.

Local Team

We have almost assembled our local team/supporters team whose members were wisely and thoroughly selected. Since before anything this is Balkans Debconf, and a new breakthrough to a region that has ~55 million inhabitants, we have made connections all over Balkans, especially from Serbia and Belgrade. This page might might “suffer” the biggest changes in next few hours, especially since we still need to add people on behalf of ETF  (Faculty of Electrical Engineering) and Goverment itself.

Accommodation

We have made a separate page for accommodation as well, since we have gathered a whole bunch of new information that just required us to make a new page.

Internet

We have made a major breakthrough in Network connectivity and technicalities as well! SARNET – Academic and Research Network of Republic of Srpska has offered us with 1GB link … free as in beer! Please see their Letter of Support/Memorandum, besides that we have Mtel and BHTelecom as our “backup” options.

Besides all that, as I previously noted we made changes throughout wiki page, we have added new contents to fun and free time, as well as to the arrival. Tomorrow with last pages to our local team + govt. support memorandum being added to our wiki … we are ready for the DebConf11 final decision! Remainder, decision is being made in 47 hours on #debconf-team on irc.debian.org; please come and support us for being host to DebConf11!

Bosnia and Herzegovina FTW!

http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka

Well this year, I’ve found an ultimate remedy + stress “reliever” since I’m all jumpy around DebConf11 decision coming around this Saturday So to whoever has the same problem during winter … take your board/skies (whatever your fix is) and hit the mountains! This weekend I went to Bosnian “Olympic” mountain Jahorina; couple of days later … stress free, depression free and ready for new challenges, in the meantime I’ll let pictures talk for themselves

My friend and I

Black and white in colors

Ready to go down the slope

Camera can’t display this beauty

Notice how close the clouds are …

This image is my current wallpaper

On our way to … sky

Road to our cottage

Our little cozy cottage

Board ninja

Applications I don’t want to live with are: evolution, epiphany, empathy, ekiga, liferea, gnome-accessibility and couple of others. Step 1 might seem as it wants to remove “whole” DE, but it all it wants is gnome-desktop-environment which is meta/dummy package so don’t worry.

Step 1:

sudo apt-get remove epiphany epiphany-browser-data epiphany-data empathy
empathy-doc libempathy30 libempathy-common libempathy-gtk28 liferea
liferea-data evolution ekiga gok dasher orca gnome-accessibility
openoffice.org-evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server
evolution-webcal

Step 2:

sudo aptitude keep-all

Step 3:

After you’re done, you can use sudo apt-get autoremove or sudo aptitude -f install just so you can see it won’t “force” you later on to remove any other deps.

Yea, that was it …

I didn’t get my key signed on DebConf9 since I hesitated whether to keep my old DSA 768 bit key or not. However by the end of this month I’m planning to visit some friends on TUWIEN and planing to meet up with some DD from Vienna and get my key signed. Btw I’d like to use this opportunity to call all DD residing in Vienna (Rhonda?) to contact me

So what am talking about after all? Thunderbird 3.0 was released 29 ago, Icedove 3.0 is in experimental but only arm and i386 arch. and I’m using amd64. … After I kept bothering nice people at #debian-buildd they told me to make my own, and once I built my own I don’t have permissions to upload it to ftp-mater … there’s no sense I upload it through mentors …

So I’m making my Icedove amd64 packages available if you want them:

http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-gnome-support_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-dbg_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb

I didn’t even change the maintainer name, I kept it all as original package, except it’s now available for amd64 architecture, hopefully we’ll see these on Debian servers as well

http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka

Our team was working (still is) incredibly hard in order to get it all sorted. Slowly but surely we are taking our bid process to the final stage, where we are planing to finalize the actual funds needed for the DebConf11 to take place and … that would be from us

If you have any questions about something that wasn’t mentioned on the wiki please do let me know.