GNOME 2.12 is mostly in experimental now (for i386, builds for powerpc are very welcome), only missing a control center and gnome-panel upload, plus gal being ACCEPTed so evolution 2.4 can be installed.

Trying these packages is easy: on an up to date unstable system, just issue:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment

Due to a dbus transition, you might get some packages removed if they don't have an experimental build using the new versions. In many cases, there's nothing we can do about it so it's a matter of waiting.

The good news is that KDE has finally entered testing, so I'd expect that we'll be able to upload all of these packages to unstable quite soon. Hopefully before April, when GNOME 2.14 is due. :)

Update: By the way, in case you're still cursing about that major evolution breakage the other day... yes, it was totally me to blame. :)

It's 6AM (for me) and I'm about to collapse. I am in Montréal to attend to the Ubuntu Below Zero conference. Hopefully jetlag won't last long. There's plenty of anecdotes about the flight, but that can wait until tomorrow.

Steinar, I don't know if after our little adventure people picked up the phrase and started using it with the second or third meaning in that dictionary. :)

mdz found a great place that explains where this "Pop the trunk" stuff comes from. DO IT.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Right. A week later, my connectivity issues have gotten so much worse...

Yesterday, I was trying to do some of my neglected Debian work at my mother's house (namedly, updating some packages for GNOME 2.12.1), when the ADSL modem lost its link and didn't come up again. As it was a bit late, I just cursed the nth incident with Wanadoo and left until the next day.

Today, when I go back there, my sister asks if I can have a look, because there's no Internet. I suspect that the Wanadoo people have finally freed us and have cancelled our contract as we asked for two weeks ago. I phone and they confirm this is it. I then ask, innocently, if I am free to sign up with any other telco. They say I now need to wait, without any internet service, until the telephone line is freed so any other company can take care of it. That will happen in thirty or fourty days. WTF! I'm sure this can be reported somewhere, it's totally unacceptable.

I've had to come to my father's house, out of the city, to do the most urgent pending tasks, and it'll be a pain to do this throughout the week. The good news is that today I got a call from Telefonica telling me that my modem should arrive at home on Monday, and some other day my own DSL link will start working. Hopefully that'll happen even before I leave to my American adventure. I am sure The Acetarium will be ready for my arrival.

If you're waiting for some upload from me, please have a bit of patience because my current situation is making it quite difficult.

For the last two weeks I've been in the painful process of moving to a new flat.

Actually, it's not so new, as it was where we lived when I was born and until I was 4 or so. We then moved to the Plaça d'Hondures further down Blasco Ibáñez, although the avenue didn't get that far down to the beach. In its place, there was a huge unpaved area full of soil and puddles.

My grandparents had been living there for a few years when they finally came from Sitges to live here, but after my grandmother died, my grandfather decided he didn't want to be in that house anymore, and moved to Godella with my father. Some months later, we've decided that instead of having it closed and unused, I can move in and save some money, while at the same time I start fixing some of the quirks this house has.

The house is big, is in the 5th floor and has tons of sunlight. For me, the change has been fantastic, having swapped a tiny room in the old flat with a quite big room and a double bed. I can even say that I have too much wardrobe space. There isn't much noise during nights. Living on a 1st floor just above the darkest rock/metal club in the city didn't help...

I feared that living where my grandmother died would make me feel sad, but happily it's all the contrary. When I come in, the smell of the house reminds me of her. When I go into the living room, the first thing I see is her empty armchair, but I easily get flashbacks of her sitting there, getting surprised about my arrival.

Kiko has come to live here too for now, and for now we're doing quite well. He's helping me with some cleanups and shopping, but there's a lot to do. I'll have to call my sister to change the light switches and plugs, because they are either broken, too small, or use an ancient standard for plugs which no device uses anymore.

All of this has sucked all my free time lately. We still have no DSL, and only got our new telephone line yesterday (although the old one still worked, too bad we didn't take advantage of that "flat rate" :) Having no Internet access makes me totally uncapable of doing any Debian work at all, more when my main development box is not online anywhere else. I've tried hooking up to the many wireless accesspoints that are all around the house, but they are either too weak, encrypted or just don't work. I only managed to use one of them reliably one night, but had to sit outside in the terrace. I'm glad we still have Spring-like temperatures in Spain, or I would have frozen.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Sergio pointed me at this website with real Gentoo users quotes.

I am a long time Gentoo user, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I believe that as hardware gets faster, it makes sense to migrate to a largely source-based Linux system. Binary packages encourage inconsistency and incompatibility, whearas source encourages unified development frameworks and integration.

Completely hilarious.

I am, officially, FED UP OF THIS NAME today. I wish I had a protective bubble that could isolate me from all the Alonsomania tomorrow.

Ahoy!

15:27 < Guerrrrin> abrotman: it's not talk like a pornstar day
15:27 < Guerrrrin> thank goodness

Aye, but we could be havin' a Pornstar tide too!

Again, I signed up for Pinedo when I should have not. Just like last year.

My triathlon season has ended being a complete fiasco, after many months of trying to convince and motivate myself about training. But right now, the magic is gone. Whatever got me up at 6AM to go swimming, or got me to stay at home on Friday night just to be ready for early cycling on Saturday is not there anymore, and I've gradually lost all my motivation to train for the competitions.

This year I got my license very late, in May, just before signing up for the Valencian Olympic triathlon. I thought that maybe getting a license would get me in. After València, I did another triathlon in Bétera sometime around June. And then, nothing. Nothing meaning not a single kilometre of cycling, not a single metre swimming. I went running a few times over the summer, but that was it.

Pinedo is the last triathlon of the season, and as I didn't manage to finish last year I guess I wanted to get rid of that bad record even in my lowest times. As my physical condition is quite critical (remember?) and I have lost all the muscle I developed during the last two years, I wanted to make something different out of this tri.

Our team is called Komando Club de Triatló, or simply "El Komando" as people are starting to say. There's a long story behind the name, it's not about we being army enthusiasts -actually, all the contrary-, so I thought that if others in the team didn't care about the result, we could do some "show" with the race.

I proposed dressing up as real army men, with camouflage painting on our arms and faces, and wearing plastic combat helmets and machine guns on the running segment. The idea only got support from a few people... who weren't going to run anyway, so I had to prepare to do a real race.

After spending way too many hours collecting all my triathlon equipment here and there, and fixing my bycicle last night, I woke up at 6:45 to get ready. Today, Brande, my sister's boyfriend and the guy who lead our fantastic week in Rjukan faced his first triathlon. I picked him up a bit late according to our schedule, and set off for Pinedo, which is just across Turia's new course outside the city, near the deadly harbour.

We parked the car just a few minutes past 8, not so late in the end, and after the usual ritual of getting our number cards, swimming cap and everything else for the competition, we got inside boxes, as I tried to explain Brande what are the very obvious reasons for disqualification in a triathlon, and hoping not to forget something that would get him in trouble.

The sea, after yesterday's storm, was pretty rough... perfect start for a beginner. With not much warning, the triathlon started and in a few seconds I quickly got all the nice memories of what the swimming segment is all about. Not having completed the first 200 metres, I already had got kicked hard on my face, run over (literally!) by someone who was swimming nearly in the opposite direction, my swimming goggles displaced twice, my eyes full of salty water and had a few good gups of water. With the sensation that I'd be in the last group in the water, I finished the 750 metres, and ran to boxes.

Surprisingly, there were many bycicles in there, so it probably wasn't so bad given my condition. On the road, I tried to connect to a pack ahead of me, but prompty gave up thinking I'd pay the effort later on. And I did anyway, when exiting a roundabout, I tried to speed up to keep up with the two guys in front of me, and my calf got stiff as a rock, before completing the first 10 kilometres. I had to stop cycling to stretch a bit as the pain was way too much, and Brande came from behind in a big pack and overtook me. At that point, with 10 kilometres to go still, I was more than ready to give up, and while I tried to make up my mind, I found myself on the final lap, without any other calf problems.

Running was supossed to be the easiest, being only 5 kilometres, but my legs weren't working too well. The first lap was horrible, and I'm not too looking forward to see my mark for that... But as I kept going on, my legs started to get the idea and I managed to get better and better, doing a quite ok third and final lap, where I managed to overtake Brande, who had been a few minutes ahead of me or so, just 50 metres away from the finish line, and we crossed the line together.

In the end, quite a positive experience despite my final time, a pretty unimpressive 1:25h. Brande said he had liked the race and the atmosphere surrounding it a lot, and is probably thinking about doing more next season.

For me, this is useful to realise how far I am from the best Jordi back in May 2004. Trying to go back to that state is the only way I think I can get the "magic" back to do some decent season for 2006. But it may be too late. I've been thinking and thinking about new goals for my sport activities, which would allow me to concentrate on running and get rid of the cycling and swimming training pressure. We'll see how it goes in the next months.

We get quite some people asking this everyday. When will GNOME 2.12 appear in Debian? Not yet? Why don't you upload to alioth?

For a few months we've been holding all kind of GNOME uploads unless they were absolutely necessary, to try to get GNOME 2.10 in etch. This has been a hard battle due to the unusual number of ongoing transitions in Debian at the time: glibc, gcc-4.0 as default compiler, C++ abi, XFree86 -> X.Org. At first we thought we'd be able to by-pass most of them by not uploading anything but in the end control-center got stuck behind X.Org, and that complicated things quite a bit.

Luckily, the Release Team, with help from the glibc and X maintainers, have managed to get these in testing after getting rid of the RC bugs caused by the new versions, opening the door for GNOME 2.10, which was able to enter testing (unblocking the testing transition for some 150 additional packages) coincidentally a few days after the GNOME 2.12 release. Oh well, these things happen when you want a Debian release out every half decade or so. :) We owe Loïc Minier quite some beers, because he has been tracking problems with GNOME 2.10 for a few months, and has suddenly become one of the key members in the team!

So, with GNOME 2.10 in testing, our current plan to bring GNOME 2.12 to Debian is:

1. Finish up GNOME 2.10

   To avoid making the transition even more complicated, we held any new 2.10 uploads to unstable for over two months. In that time, some GNOME components released new versions, and will now be updated so etch has a completely stable GNOME 2.10 suite. This step is ongoing and should be easy to complete, unless the long list of Mozilla RC bugs holds it for a while.

2. GNOME 2.12 to experimental

   With GNOME 2.10 safe in etch, we'll be able to focus our attention to GNOME 2.12. Some modules have been branched for experimental already, and soon you'll be able to find more and more in there. While doing experimental 2.12, our plan is to completely transition our gconf setup to install defaults in /var instead of /etc, plus start handling the update of icon caches when necessary. These transitions shouldn't be too complicated. There's another transition that will hit 2.12, though; hal/dbus 0.50 which may get a bit more complicated because it affects packages outside the Debian GNOME Team's influence (Qt/KDE being an example). We'll see how that one goes.

3. GNOME 2.12 to unstable

   By the time we're ready to do an experimental upload, hopefully the rest of testing transitions will have been cleared up, and having GNOME 2.12 in unstable and then testing should be pretty easy. Or that's my hope. :)

Be prepared to see more and more 2.12 fun in experimental in some days. When more or less is in place, we'll upload a 2.12 meta-package suit, so it'll be easy to upgrade in just one command. For now, you'll have to ask Google about how to deal with GNOME in experimental.