Some days I wish I could selectively get rid of some memories. I would probably cut out a small chunk of today's evening, to avoid remembering some tough words that I've been told. On the other hand, I feel I have lots of things to learn from these moments, given enough time, after the dust has settled. El tiempo todo lo cura...

Some time ago I wrote about the the state of GRUB2 and a milestone on getting it boot my Apple PowerBook G4 without manual intervention. More than a year later, GRUB2 has changed and improved a lot, as the community keeps growing and patches and ideas are continously being posted.

Some months and commits after my previous post, GRUB broke again on Apple OpenFirmware and I'd get dropped to OF console, the amount of commits since the last known working version and the current SVN was quite big, and although I was able to narrow it to a few suspicious changes, I had no time to bisect it properly, and sadly I had to go back to yaboot for a while.

But procrastinating sometimes helps, and when I should have been writing and studying, on December I gave GRUB a new try on my laptop to see if a few important changes to memory allocation would have changed anything. And it did! So after fighting quite a few problems, I was able to report partial success to grub-devel.

Again, getting GRUB installed correctly was a bit challenging and needed some hackery, due to incorrectly generated device.map, and the linux module mysteriously not getting loaded. Luckily, Michel Dänzer found out that this was due to a bug in sort ordering in the HFS module, which broke the lookup of files with underscores like _linux.mod, and for which he posted a possible fix by taking Linux's table of character ordering, which is a blob of hex values.

GRUB developers didn't seem too happy about applying the patch: they argument that a blob like that should be well documented or written in some other more readable way, and there's a possible problem with the mix of Linux GPLv2 and GRUB GPLv3+ codebases, if a table of data like what Michel posted is actually copyrightable. The discussion ended up dying and nothing was done... until Pavel Roskin picked it up weeks later and posted a new patch, based on hfsutils GPLv2+ code, which addressed these issues. The new patch seems to have a few issues, which makes it fail as before, but hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

Additionally, I wasn't able to boot using UUIDs as the search commands fails to detect the correct boot device on my system (but not on Michel's), so I had to disable that in /etc/default/grub.

To workaround the linux module loading bug while the patch is fixed, I just added this ugly hack to /etc/grub.d/09_local_prelinux:

#! /bin/sh -e

# Work-around for bugs in the hfs module which makes the load of
# linux.mod fail.

cat << EOF
insmod (hd,3)/usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/_linux.mod
insmod linux
EOF

This is enough to get the initrd and linux commands available. However, update-grub will still add search commands to your menu entries even if you disabled UUID support; I can't understand why, but I know it breaks on my PowerBook due to some OF rarety. Just removing the line from the menu entry will leave me with a working config that boots without any manual editing at GRUB prompt.

The latest GRUB snapshot in Debian fixes the device.map issue, but adds one last issue: update-grub will fail due to some gfxterm detection code, a workaround is to replace an exit 1 with exit 0 when this happens in /etc/grub.d/00_header.

On the “weird architectures” front, it's worth noting that this month Dave Miller popped up on the list and started posting patches to fix the rotten SPARC port, and I think it's safe to assume that it'll be on an usable state really soon. Impressive!

GNOME 2.26 was released last week, and I couldn't help adding myself to the long list of celebrating posts in Planet GNOME. Looking at the release notes, it looks like this release adds a good number of very visible features, and also keeps improving on ongoing transitions like gvfs.

The Debian GNOME team is obviously not ignoring this fact and started to work very hard on updating GNOME for squeeze as soon as the lenny freeze was over.

First, the new versions of GLib and GTK+ were uploaded to unstable, and managed to transition to testing very easily. The rest of GNOME 2.24 bits, which had been patiently waiting on experimental for months, has been uploaded with care not to disrupt any of the many transitions the Debian release team is currently dealing with. You can have a quick glance at how things are going in our 2.24 status page, but the summary is that most of GNOME 2.24 is in unstable, with a few notable exceptions which are held back by ongoing testing transitions. Namedly, evolution-data-server is trying to trickle into testing, which is in turn holding the final bits: gnome-panel, nautilus and related packages, but we think this will be over soon.

As soon as GNOME 2.24 is safe in squeeze, we'll immediately turn our focus to the new GNOME 2.26 release. Our initial plan is to package the trivial bits and leaf packages which can't break stuff for unstable, and herd the more complex modules via experimental, to avoid breaking unstable at all. There are some exceptions; we plan to keep gnome-session 2.22 in unstable/testing until 2.26.1 is released to avoid getting a broken session saving in Debian.

People might wonder why we insist on hitting what would seem a dead horse by first dealing with 2.24 and not 2.26 directly. The main reason is that these packages had been ready for a long time, and were in good shape to transition to testing quickly and with little pain. Preparing 2.26 directly would mean throwing away a lot of hours of packaging and polishing effort, and it's not like we're releasing squeeze any time soon anyway.

Enjoy the hopefully not too bumpy road to 2.26!

As of this morning, Damned Lies finally reflects what has been the de-facto reality for at least four major GNOME releases. I started to invest a lot of time on translating GNOME to Catalan in the middle of the long 1.5 journey towards GNOME 2.0. That was a long time ago, and somehow was the way I ended being abduced by Softcatalà to eventually work with them on the localisation of some other projects.

However, I've been watching how my free time and motivation has been slowly shrinking, until the point I was no longer doing some of the stuff I was expected to do, or was doing it badly and late. Luckily, Softcatalà's GNOME team, a model for our organisation, has been able to smoothly replace heavily contributing members with a constant stream of new blood. In my case, I first stopped having that many modules assigned, then focused on coordination and finally stopped doing even that.

Gil Forcada has filled the gap perfectly and has been the main lead of effort for a pair of years. Passing the baton was long overdue; I think GNOME is lucky to count on Gil's amazing drive and motivation. Gil, congrats on earning yet another marronet! ;)

It's here! This weekend is again the time to go up to Valls, my friend Frago's town, to meet his friends and enjoy a new edition of their calçotada. Like other years, this will be a crazy event that will cover the whole weekend. I'm looking forward to our traditional calçot war, and spending tomorrow's night around a big fire in the middle of the country side of Tarragona.

Frago and I, after last year's calçot war

natura.oskuro.net, the home server which still serves this blog, has been suffering hardware problems for some weeks. Apparently the hard drive is failing intermittently, so every now the kernel starts spewing out noisy errors about its main disk dying. If I notice this quickly, it can be rebooted and that normally fixes it for a few more days. But if I don't, it'll end up giving nasty bus errors which will make remote logins a challenge. Most processes still work, but the filesystem appears to be gone. It's easy to know what's going on if you visit the blog's url and get some 404, and in that case I can only phone my father and tell him to press the reset button (I've tried sysrqd, but I need to open the port in the router and haven't had chance to do that yet).

So it was time to do something about it, and the other day I installed a dirty 40GB drive on the second IDE controller, in case I could find the time to do somethng about it. Being with an endless pharyngitis that doesn't seem to get cured entirely, I've had some time today to look at it. This evening, I was about to transfer all the system to the new disk (it's half the size as the broken one, and probably slower, but it hopefully has no bad sectors), but I decided to upgrade the system first.

natura was first installed in late 1997 or at the beginning of 1998, using the Debian bo install media on a Pentium 150MHz, and has gone through seven dist-upgrades which, as far as I can remember, have always worked out without major problems.

The upgrade to lenny hasn't been an exception. The server has gradually lost many of the services it once hosted, so there aren't too many services to take care of anymore. All the mail services I setup for my father ended up being deprecated as they started to get used to Hotmail, GMail and so on, and the frequent hardware crashes made me switch them to the Linksys based DHCP server. In the end, the problems I saw after the upgrade were very similar to what I faced when I upgraded to etch:

• apache2 restored the 000-default symlink in the sites-enabled dir, which resulted in my website showing the classic “It works” message for a while.
• Apache's suexec support had moved to its own package, and was very well documented in the NEWS file, but I somehow failed to notice for some time and kept wondering what was going on.
• The Python upgrade again affected my Pyblosxom install. Fortunately it was a minor problem; I just had to add a coding=utf-8 line to the beginning of my config.py to get it working.
• dhcp3-server apparently restored its init scripts and got started again. This time, it got removed.

Such an ancient install will clearly have old, obsolete packages. I installed apt-show-versions to find out what didn't match my package sources. I found I had every single version of cpp, gcc and g++ from 2.95 to 4.3, and a myriad of obsolete libs. But there were also real gems:

defrag 0.73pjm1-7 installed: No available version in archive
figlet 2.2.1-3 installed: No available version in archive
ipmasqadm 0.4.2-2 installed: No available version in archive
isapnptools 1.26-5 installed: No available version in archive
ms-sys 2.1.0-1 installed: No available version in archive
queso 0.980922b-3 installed: No available version in archive
update 2.11-4 installed: No available version in archive

Spaniards will remember “queso” because it was written by Jordi Murgó and became a classic tool to find out what OS was running on a remote host. “update” was apparently needed to flush your filesystems prior to Linux 2.2.8, and “defrag” is obvious, although leaves me wondering why it was needed at the time.

With the upgrade done successfully, next step is trying to get the system transfered to the spare hard drive. For this, I first partitioned it creating a primary partition using up more or less half of the available space, and setup a LVM volume, leaving some free PE's in the volume group just in case I want to do snapshots in the future, and formatted it using ext3. I then transfered the system to the new disk and now face the boot challenge.

I haven't created a boot partition and that should be a double problem: the BIOS is buggy and will only boot from the first 1024 cylinders, and my root is on LVM and GRUB legacy might not like it (but I'm not sure). However, I've become a big fan of GRUB2, and know I will be able to boot no matter what my BIOS thinks of my disks and regardless the complex root partition setup I throw at it. The plan is to install GRUB onto the new drive's MBR, and set it up using the ata module, which should allow to ignore what the BIOS says, and read beyond cylinder 1024 or even boot from CD-ROM. However, this isn't a setup I haven't tried before, and a single failure will result in me taking a train to fix it on-site.

So, GRUB experts out there, any suggestions? Of course, for now I guess I can install GRUB in the current drive's MBR and make it boot the old kernel using the new system as root, but that's dirty and would just postpone the problem.

I'm glad to announce that I'll be again in Brussels for this year's FOSDEM. Ivan and I will fly from Zaragoza (!) on Friday, just on time for the beer event, and come back on Monday evening. I know azeem would have not been happy otherwise!

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Kike in Iruña, a city I really like but had not been able to visit in five years. I spent three days with him, after a really awful Bilman trip during Friday night.

The first thing that happened on Friday morning was quite unexpected. I went out, crossed a pair of streets to get to Carlos III, and going past the corner I found myself surrounded by all kinds of policemen: red, blue, green and yellow. There were press reporters all over the place, with TV and photo cameras ready to record something big. What the hell? I looked around, and there it was: a huge blue sign read Populares de Navarra, and Mariano Rajoy was seconds away from getting out of the new PP headquarters in Nafarroa. With a few dozen policemen looking at me in suspicion, and realising my current hair dress wasn't the most appropriate for that scenario, I decided to disappear as quickly as possible.

Populares aside, the weekend was really productive. I had a great time trying to find the places I visited 9 and 5 years ago. It was sad to see the fantastic Iruñako Gaztetxea turned into an iron building surrounded by old, traditional houses in the centre of the city. With Kike, I had enough time to learn more about the origins of Iruña and the three cities from which it originated, and visit the Ciudadela.

On Saturday, Kike, Ana and I went to have some fun on a snowy day around Orreaga and had dinner in a small town around the area, maybe Lintzoain? I'm afraid I forgot due to the mix of basque names in my head. We had dinner in lo viejo, where I spotted a poster of Solidari@s con Itoiz for the “Itoitz hustu arte” campaign, a copy of which I unsuccessfully tried to get in several places in the city.

On Sunday, Kike and I took a bus to Donosti, and I travelled across the most beautiful highway I've seen. But of course, that was from my perspective seated in a bus. I can imagine the Leitzaran highway project must have been greatly contested by the people of the tiny towns nearby. The spoiled valleys and views must have been really impressive in the past and seem now irreversibly ruined by a scar and holes through the mountains.

This was my first visit to Donosti, which held its annual Marathon, and were lucky to meet our friend Rubén when he was around kilometre 25 of his race. He managed to finish under 2:50, which was a bit better than what he aimed for in his first Marathon. Well done! The weather was horrible, and our visit to La Concha, the old harbour and the Casco Viejo was short, we were freezing and getting our feet wet.

While I visited Donosti for the first time, Mikel Laboa, one of the most respected singers in the basque culture, was ebbing away. Laboa's songs always give me goosebumps, even if I need to read a translation for the basque lyrics. Many will remember his music from Julio Medem's documentary, La pelota vasca, featuring Txoria txori, which has become a symbol of basque culture over the years. Youtube has quite a few videos, and I'd recommend watching Txoria txori, Gure bazterrak, Lili bat or Baga biga higa performed by the Orfeón Donostiarra to name a few.

Mikel Laboa, goian bego.

Wow, in an hour or so I'll be heading to The Mill, where the unique Chimo Bayo will be performing live. HUA!

I only start believing I'm visiting some new place when I've finally spent way too many hours looking at flight websites in an attempt to find a flight that is slightly cheaper than the only option everyone else is offering you, and after a few days prices have gone up enough so you give up and end up buying.

And, two weeks ago, I finally did. Barcelona-Istanbul means the third chapter of the unplanned saga “Chistmas in Islam”. Two years ago I started 2007 visiting Tunisia, and last year we enjoyed a 10 day trip around the South of Morocco, which was absolutely fantastic (and I've still haven't blogged about).

This year I'll be discovering Istanbul, Cappadocia and other parts of Turkey with Maria. The idea is to try to avoid visiting too many places in a rush, and follow the good advice of our Moroccan friends, “La prisa mata, amigo”. We have plenty of days to explore Turkey's secrets, but I want to be able to enjoy them, and avoid being in a constant hurry.

As always, I'll be glad to get suggestions on “must not miss” places or things, and advice on how to move around, where to stay, what to do or what not to do is extremely welcome. I'm totally looking forward to this, after I missed this years's GUADEC!