March was a busy month, so this monthly report is a little late. I worked two weekends, and I was planning my Easter holiday, so there wasn’t a lot of spare time.
Debian
- Updated Dominate to the latest version and uploaded to experimental (due to the Debian Stretch release freeze).
- Uploaded the latest version of abcmidi (also to experimental).
- Pinged the bugs for reverse dependencies of pygoocanvas and goocanvas with a view to getting them removed from the archive during the Buster cycle.
- Asked for help on the Ubuntu Studio developers and users mailing lists to test the coming Ubuntu Studio 17.04 release ISO, because I would be away on holiday for most of it.
Ubuntu
- Worked on ubuntustudio-controls, reverting it back to an earlier revision that Len said was working fine. Unfortunately, when I built and installed it from my ppa, it crashed. Eventually found my mistake with the bzr reversion, fixed it and prepared an upload ready for sponsorship. Submitted a Freeze Exception bug in the hope that the Release Team would accept it even though we had missed the Final Beta.
- Put a new power supply in an old computer that was kaput, and got it working again. Set up Ubuntu Server 16.04 on it so that I could get a bit more experience with running a server. It won’t last very long, because it is a 32 bit machine, and Ubuntu will probably drop support for that architecture eventually. I used two small spare drives to set up RAID 1 & LVM (so that I can add more space to it later). I set up some Samba shares, so that my wife will be able to get at them from her Windows machine. For music streaming, I set up Emby Server. I wold be great to see this packaged for Debian. I uploaded all of my photos and music for Emby to serve around the home (and remotely as well). Set up Obnam to back up the server to an external USB stick (temporarily until I set up something remote). Set LetsEncrypt with the wonderful Certbot program.
- Did the Release Notes for Ubuntu Studio 17.04 Final Beta. As I was in Brussels for two days, I was not able to do any ISO testing myself.
Other
- Measured up the new model railway layout and documented it in xtrkcad.
- Started learning Ansible some more by setting up ssh on all my machines so that I could access them with Ansible and manipulate them using a playbook.
- Went to the Open Source Days conference just down the road in Copenhagen. Saw some good presentations. Of interest for my previous work in the Debian GIS Team, was a presentation from the Danish Municipalities on how they run projects using Open Source. I noted how their use of Proj 4 and OSGeo. I was also pleased to see a presentation from Ximin Luo on Reproducible Builds, and introduced myself briefly after his talk (during the break).
- Started looking at creating a Django website to store and publish my One Name Study sources (indexes). Started by creating a library to list some of my recently read Journals. I will eventually need to import all the others I have listed in a cvs spreadsheet that was originally exported from the commercial (Windows only) Custodian software.
Plan status from last month & update for next month
Debian
For the Debian Stretch release:
- Keep an eye on the Release Critical bugs list, and see if I can help fix any. – In Progress
Generally:
- Package all the latest upstream versions of my Debian packages, and upload them to Experimental to keep them out of the way of the Stretch release. – In Progress
- Begin working again on all the new stuff I want packaged in Debian.
Ubuntu
- Start working on an Ubuntu Studio package tracker website so that we can keep an eye on the status of the packages we are interested in. – Started
- Start testing & bug triaging Ubuntu Studio packages. – In progress
Test Len’s work on ubuntustudio-controls– DoneDo the Ubuntu Studio Zesty 17.04 Final Beta release.– Done- Sort out the Blueprints for the coming Ubuntu Studio 17.10 release cycle.
Other
- Give JMRI a good try out and look at what it would take to package it. – In progress
- Also look at OpenPLC for simulating the relay logic of real railway interlockings (i.e. a little bit of the day job at home involving free software – fun!). – In progress
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