December 30, 2015

APT 1.1.8 to 1.1.10 - going "faster"

Not only do I keep incrementing version numbers faster than ever before, APT also keeps getting faster. But not only that, it also has some bugs fixed and the cache is now checked with a hash when opening. Important fix for 1.1.6 regression Since APT 1.1.6, APT uses the configured xz compression level. Unfortunately, the default was set to 9, which requires 674 MiB of RAM, compared to the 94 MiB required at level 6. ... Read more 》

December 26, 2015

Much faster incremental apt updates

APT’s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow. Improving performance for uncompressed files The reason for this is that our I/O is unbuffered, and we were reading one byte at a time in order to read lines. This changed on December 24, by adding read buffering for reading lines, vastly improving the performance of rred. ... Read more 》

October 14, 2014

Key transition

I started transitioning from 1024D to 4096R. The new key is available at: https://people.debian.org/~jak/pubkey.gpg and the keys.gnupg.net key server. A very short transition statement is available at: https://people.debian.org/~jak/transition-statement.txt and included below (the http version might get extended over time if needed). The key consists of one master key and 3 sub keys (signing, encryption, authentication). The sub keys are stored on an OpenPGP v2 Smartcard. That’s really cool, isn’t it? ... Read more 》

October 6, 2014

A weekend with the Acer Chromebook 13 FHD (AKA nyan-big)

I spent the weekend using almost exclusively my Chromebook 13, on a single charge Saturday and Sunday. Keyboard I think I like the keyboard better now than I used to when I first tried it. It gets nowhere near the ThinkPad X230 one, though; appart from the coating, which my (backlit) X230 unfortunately does not have. Screen While the screen appeared very grainy to me on first sight, having only used IPS screens in the past year, I got used to it over the weekend. ... Read more 》

October 2, 2014

Acer Chromebook 13 (FHD): Initial impressions

Today, I received my Acer Chromebook 13, in the glorious FullHD variant with 4GB RAM. For those of you who don’t know it, the Acer Chromebook 13 is a 13.3 inch chromebook powered by a Tegra K1 cpu. This version cannot be ordered currently, only pre-orders were shipped yesterday (at least here in Germany). I cannot even review it on Amazon (despite having it bought there), as they have not enabled reviews for it yet. ... Read more 》

September 25, 2014

hardlink 0.3.0 released; xattr support

Today I not only submitted my bachelor thesis to the printing company, I also released a new version of hardlink, my file deduplication tool. hardlink 0.3 now features support for xattr support, contributed by Tom Keel at Intel. If this does not work correctly, please blame him. I also added support for a –minimum-size option. Most of the other code has been tested since the upload of RC1 to experimental in September 2012. ... Read more 》

September 24, 2014

APT 1.1~exp3 released to experimental: First step to sandboxed fetcher methods

Today, we worked, with the help of ioerror on IRC, on reducing the attack surface in our fetcher methods. There are three things that we looked at: 1. Reducing privileges by setting a new user and group 2. chroot() 3. seccomp-bpf sandbox Today, we implemented the first of them. Starting with 1.1~exp3, the APT directories /var/cache/apt/archives and /var/lib/apt/lists are owned by the “_apt” user (username suggested by pabs). The methods switch to that user shortly after the start. ... Read more 》

August 6, 2014

Configuring an OpenWRT Router as a repeater for a FRITZ!Box with working Multicast

Since some time, those crappy Fritz!Box devices do not support WDS anymore, but rather a proprietary solution created by AVM. Now what happens if you have devices in another room that need/want wired access (like TVs, Playstations) or if you want to extend the range of your network? Buying another Fritz!Box is not very cost efficient - What I did was to buy a cheap TP-Link TL-WR841N (can be bought for 18 euros) and installed OpenWRT on it. ... Read more 》

April 9, 2014

ThinkPad X230 UEFI broken by setting a setting

Today, I decided to set my X230 back to UEFI-only boot, after having changed that for a bios upgrade recently (to fix a resume bug). I then choose to save the settings and received several error messages telling me that the system ran out of resources (probably storage space for UEFI variables). I rebooted my machine, and saw no logo appearing. Just something like an underscore on a text console. The system appears to boot normally otherwise, and once the i915 module is loaded (and we’re switching away from UEFI’s Graphical Output Protocol [GOP]) the screen works correctly. ... Read more 》

January 6, 2014

python-apt now native Python 3 code

Today I made an important change to the python-apt code: It is now native Python 3 code (but also works under Python 2). The previous versions all run 2to3 during the build process to create a Python 3 version. This is no longer needed, as the code is now identical. As part of that change, python-apt now only supports Python 2.7, Python 3.3, and newer. I’m using some features only present in 3. ... Read more 》

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