In the last months, I noticed that it was a bad decision to use XFS as my filesystem; and before I realized that ext3 was a bad choice as well. File systems have problems. I can’t use ext3 on my laptop, because it would check the whole disk (120GB) every 30 boots. And this check takes a very long time (15 or 30 minutes, I do not know it exactly). XFS is better, but also problematic because deleting a big directory with a deep hierarchy takes a very long time like 1.5 minutes , whereas ext3 needs a few seconds. Also I still wonder why XFS needs no checks. ... Read more 》

After I tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, I also tried Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10, each for almost one day. Creation of bootable USB stick: For both distributions, I created a bootable USB stick because it is faster to install from USB than from CD/DVD. The creation was easy in both cases. Fedora ships a shell script and Ubuntu a graphical program for this task. Both very equally easy to use. **Booting from USB: **Both distributions booted perfectly from USB. But there was a big difference in boot speed: Fedora 10 booted in about the same time Ubuntu needed to find the USB stick. ... Read more 》

The installation was fast and easy, comparable to the installation of Ubuntu. OpenSolaris seems to have big problems in terms of wireless LAN. I am using a WPA/WPA2 encrypted wireless LAN, and it asked to me to enter my passphrase. I entered it, and nothing happened. I was able to get wireless working via commandline, but this lead me to the problem that domain names were not resolved. I could solve this, too. But none of this was permanently, and it should work the graphical way or tell me it does not work. Maybe this whole thing happened because I have a space in the name of my Wi-Fi network. ... Read more 》

If you use wordpress.com, and added a Gravatar, always use the Atom feeds for Planet installation. There seem to be some problems with parsing the code, i.e. planet seems to understand media:title from your gravatar in the rss feed as the title of the post (therefore, the title of this post would be juliank). The URL of the feed is http://juliank.wordpress.com/feed/atom/, replace juliank with the name of your blog.

I just uploaded a new upstream snapshot of aufs (another unionFS) to experimental. But it is really more than just a new upstream snapshot: First of all, this release includes patches written by Jeff Mahoney jeffm@suse.com. These patches enable the usage of NFSv2 and NFSv3 file systems as branches, even on the standard Debian kernel. The package does not support NFSv4 yet, but will support it at a later point (but only with a patched kernel) - the code exists, it’s just not enabled yet. ... Read more 》

14 months after applying for the NM process, I’m a Debian Developer. On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:51:43PM +0000, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote: [ This is a long mail with important information, so please read it all carefully. ] Dear Julian Andres Klode! Your account ‘jak’ has just been created in the central LDAP database of the Debian project. […] Thank you everyone (in chronological order): * Daniel Baumann (daniel) - Sponsored my first packages * Joerg Jaspert (joerg) - The first DD who signed my key * Niv Sardi-Altivanik (xaiki) - Advocated me for NM * Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) - My first AM * Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (tolimar) - The second DD who signed my key (at CeBIT) * Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) - Took over in June, because zobel was very busy * Christoph Berg (myon) - For checking the AM report and requesting the account creation * Jonathan McDowell (noodles) - For adding me to the keyring * Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) - This time for creating my account And many thanks to Google - for helping me to find answers to important questions. Without you, I would know nothing. And of course all the others who helped to make this possible.

I worked a bit with some Gentoo systems the last days and it was no fun. The whole compiling thing is no fun. In fact, it is a danger for the environment. If every computer in the world run Gentoo, power consumption would increase dramatically. There would also be no netbooks, as they are almost unusable for running Gentoo on it, compiling software. The path chosen by binary distributions like Debian is much better. Packages are compiled centrally and users download and install these pre-compiled packages. But it is also much less flexible in terms of which functionality is supported. We, as package maintainers, have to decide which functionality is likely to be used by the users. In Contrast, Gentoo has USE flags, which allows the user to enable the specific functionality he/she wants. ... Read more 》

The most important birthdays in the FLOSS world this year (where age mod 5 = 0): * **10 years: **Google (September), Open Source Initiative (February) * **15 years:** Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD * **25 years:** GNU * **35 years:** Ian Murdock (April), Mark Shuttleworth (September) * **55 years:** Richard Stallman (March)

I’m now an SPI contributing member.

On Monday, I joined Software in the Public Interest (SPI). I’m currently a non-contributing member and have already applied for contributing membership. MJ Ray asked why people do and dont join SPI, and received answers. Not knowing SPI is no good reason, at least if you are participating in Debian’s development, and you should really know SPI if you are a Debian Developer. For me, personally, not joining the SPI would not make any sense. The existance of other organizations is no good reason. Look at me, I am also a Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe. ... Read more 》