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Alan Cox, one of the longest standing kernel-developers next to Linus Torvalds, leaves the kernel team and his job at Intel, for personal reasons having to do with his family.

Kernel-Developer for more than 20 years, Cox has implemented a new network stack all by himself in the early 90s and from thereon rose to become number two in the ranks of the kernel-devs. Hardly anyone else has such a solid knowledge of the complexity of the kernel as he does. Linus Torvalds, that he does not always agree with on technical questions, joked about him once, saying:

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he’s actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well. ”

Up to the release of Kernel 2.6 Cox was the operative number two as well. Since then, he only takes care of parts of the Kernel like the serial drivers that he was responsible for until now. His most important achievements were, besides his care for Kernels 2.2. and 2.4, the implementation of SMP in Kernel 2.0. In his professional life during the last years, Red Hat and Intel payed him to work on the Linux Kernel full time.

In his announcement he left it open, that he might be back if the situation allows him to do so. He will not only be severely missed by his colleagues on the kernel team but also by the community for his often sarcastic, witty analysis and comments, where he was never far from the truth.

Today is Setting Orange, the 63rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3178 (man ddate) . As we all know, the world is coming to an end today.  Even though U.S Government is telling us, it’s not happening, what do they know?

So we prepared a little endtime art. We uploaded this as an art package, so if you like to install it, do apt-get update && apt-cache search siduction-art | grep eow .

Let’s hope, the Mayans knew nothing about calendars.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 

We uploaded the final images for siduction 2012.2 – Riders on the Storm last night to the mirrors. We hope, we fixed all issues that you had found in the release candidates. The release notes can be found on our website and the images are ready for download. Torrents will be added during the day. I hope, you will get fun and productivity out of this release. Also be prepared for a little surprise for Christmas.

Happy computing, everyone.

As you might have guessed already if you frequently visit our forums, a new release is in the making. What we already have is a name. Even though sid is kind of tame because of the freeze, we call it ‘Riders on the Storm’ , borrowed from the Doors’ last Album ‘LA Woman’. Thanks for taking part in the vote on our forum. 2012 will see 2 more releases and 2 more desktop environments. Well, not entirely true, as one is not a desktop environment, but a release lacking exactly that. It’ll be called No-X , and that pretty well describes it. The other one will be [hear hear] Gnome, probably in Version  3.6.x. We all know, Gnome is having a hell of a good time trying to make itself obsolete these days, with the latest and greatest being Mr. Miguel de Icaza waking all the bestest  flame monsters.

But nontheless, there is users wanting to have a siduction Gnome flavour, and they will get it.. Convbsd  has joined teams to make this possible. We are still looking for a second maintainer for Gnome to help convbsd in maintaining this flavour in the long run.

On sunday nights’ Core Team Meeting we could not quite agree yet on when to release what. All we know for certain is that both new flavours will have a developement release before entering our release cycle permanently. As a rough date for the release of 2012.2 we picked the days around the beginning of November. The holiday season between the years will see a surprise release of some kind. The 2 new flavours will see a developement release each until the end of the year. The next Core Team Meeting in 2 weeks will be more elaborate on the actual dates.

I personaly am quite exited to see Razor-Qt 0.5 to be released in the next weeks. Qupzilla 1.3.5 is also just around the corner with new features. If all is dandy, Razor-Qt will enter the siduction family of desktop environments with one of the 2 upcoming releases in 2012.

What else is new? A user asked for 3 pet-tools of his to be packaged and put in the repo. This was a good chance to make it clear that we cannot package every wish a user might have. That is the reason why we have a (until now unused) user repository. We might give a hand if a user has a problem packaging something, but we will not do it for him. we just don’t have the time. If there is greater demand for a package in the user repository to be lifted to official repos, we might look at the package and make it ready for prime time.

So please fill the user repository with life and talk about it on the forum, so we can make this fly. We are open for questions and hints.

As after the release is before the release, we grab the opportunity to break some things in our infrastructure and put them back together again in a refined way. Last nights Core-Meeting was all about the shortcomings we found in our infrastructure and how to fix them.

The first change discussed was how our release process works. Up to now, when we release, we wait until a debian mirror sync is finished and start building our snapshots. This leaves us 6 hours between 2 syncs. As long as all is smooth, that is fine. Problems could delay a release easily though. Also, as we have more flavours than before, and will maybe add more in the future, the timeframe will one day become an issue. So we will add a proxy-cache or mirror here to be on the safe side of things. Should problems arise during the build-process, we can release a working snapshot from 6 hours or a day before without much extra work. This needs more discussion still as to what method and/or tool to use.

The 2nd change is upon the pyfll package lists themselves. We find what we forked from aptosid not really suitable anymore. This is maybe due to us having more flavours than our predecessor.We all experienced situations where we were not really sure where to add a new package or that we did not agree on a certain list to do so. This needs to be obvious and logical. Where a package belongs needs to be straight forward and doubtfree. So reorganizing of these lists is needed. Until the next meeting we will think about the modells discussed last night. We got a lot closer to a compromise than we were a month ago, when a boxing fight looked like a fast way to settle the differences

Last, but not least we discussed our repository structure. What packages belong in what repos? Do we have too many or not enough repos and are they named accordingly to what packages they house. We agreed, we have one or two to many and that some renaming is needed. Users will not stumble over this, because we will provide links that keep the sources.list intact and working.

Before i forget: Whoever read the log of our last meeting 2 weeks ago, will have seen that we replaced 2 coreteam members. Vibora and edhunter do not have the time to work in our core teamat the moment. They were replaced by hendrikl and Goingeasy9. The vote on that can be seen in the log. Thanks to vibora and edhunter for their good work in the past few years. Your code lives on in siduction.

I bought a nice and small Samsung ML 1675 Laserprinter not long ago. It is supposed to work with the Samsung Unified Linux Driver. So I googled and went to the Samsung Website and downloaded the driver and installed it. That did not bring the printer to life. The cups interface did not even see the printer anymore. I left things as they were, as it was late. The next morning my dist-upgrade was blocked by strange errors that proved to be from the Samsung mfp-driver. Removing the lot fixed the problems. So, do not install the drivers from the Samsung website, they do not work.

So I dug a bit deeper in Google and found The Samsung Unified Linux Driver Repository.

Here are the steps to get any printer / multidevice, that needs to use this driver, working in no time at all:

open a shell and become root:

su [ENTER]

root@siductionbox: cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d [ENTER]

root@siductionbox:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# touch Samsung_Printer.list && echo deb http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra > Samsung_Printer.list && wget -O -      http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/suldr.gpg | apt-key add – && apt-get update [ENTER]

This will set up the needed repository and install the gpg-key for it. Now you want to install the drivers:

apt-get install samsungmfp-data samsungmfp-configurator-qt4 samsungmfp-configurator-data samsungmfp-driver samsungmfp-driver-4.00.35 printer-driver-splix

That will install the needed drivers for just the printer. If that is all you need, turn on your printer and enjoy.

If you have a multi-device that can also scan, you need some more software. As with siduction, the user is already a member of group ‘lp’. there is no need for action here. Should you use a different distribution, check this by issuing, as user:

devil@siductionbox:~$ groups [ENTER]

devil lp dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev users fuse scanner netdev

If lp is present, you just need to install some extra packages on top of the above:

apt-get install samsungmfp-scanner samsungmfp-scanner-sane-fix samsungmfp-scanner-sane-fix-multiarch

NOTE: before installing the latter 2 packages, read the output of apt-cache show <packaganame> to see if they apply to you.