Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life

Every year since 2005 there is a very good, big and interesting Latin American gathering of free-software-minded people. Of course, Latin America is a big, big, big place, and it’s not like we are the most economically buoyant region to meet in something equiparable to FOSDEM. What we have is a distributed free software conference — originally, a distributed Linux install-fest (which I never liked, I am against install-fests), but gradually it morphed into a proper conference: Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (Latin American Free Software Installation Festival) This FLISOL was hosted by the always great and always...

Following up with my previous post, it seems the FSF’s board is taking good care of undermining the FSF itself. Over few days, it has: Lost support from tens of organizations and companies, several of them important funders for the FSF’s activities Alienated long-standing staff within it, leading to many important resignations Divided the overall free software community, gathering several thousand signatures both repudiating its actions and backing it In the Debian project, we have started a General Resolution process, with opinions all over the spectrum, to gauge whether the project will back either of the positions — or none....

Context: Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software movement, and commited his life to making what seemed like a ludicrous idea into a tangible reality. We owe him big time for that, and nothing somebody says or does will ever eclipse the fact. But Richard Stallman has a very toxic personality. There is a long, well-known published list of abuse cases; if you must read more into it, some regarding his views on sex, consent, gender, and some other issues are published as a part of the open letter I am about to reference. I have witnessed quite...

I am quite happy with the Raspberry “tower” I bought for keeping my Raspberries organized. Clustering them? No, not by a long shot. I just want to quickly know where they all are, and at a glance, be able to know which one I will work with. Bottom drawer has a RPi1B, second one has a RPi2, next comes a 3B+, and the top two ones are RPi4 (4 and 8GB). That allows me for quick testing of stuff. Yes, I am tempted to get the top one out of the array and use it in “production”… but as it...

Public service announcement In case you want to run our latest release (still cooking, of course) in your Raspberries — I have enabled builds for both Debian 10 (Stable, Buster) and Debian 11 (Testing, Bullseye). Go grab it! Oh… Yes, we are currently failing the builds of ARM64 (RPi3 and RPi4) ☹ Something due to python3-minimal unwilling to get installed right. But that should be fixed soon! Can you help us? Take a look at the [build log for RPi3, Bullseye](https://raspi.debian.net/daily/raspi_3_bullseye.log), or just focus on the step where it breaks It seems to have been fixed, woohoo!: Setting up python3-minimal...

Although it was a much larger step when I made a similar announcement seven years ago, when I started my Specialization, it is still a big challenge ahead, and I am very happy to pursue this: I have been admitted to a PhD program at UNAM, the university I have worked at for almost 20 years, and one of the top universities in Latin America. What program will I be part of? Doctorado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación (Computer Science and Engineering Doctorate… Quite a broad program name, yes, sounds like anything goes). I am happy to say...

Mexico was one of the first countries in the world to set up a national population registry in the late 1850s, as part of the church-state separation that was for long years one of the national sources of pride. Forty four years ago, when I was born, keeping track of the population was still mostly a manual task. When my parents registered me, my data was stored in page 161 of book 22, year 1976, of the 20th Civil Registration office in Mexico City. Faithful to the legal tradition, everything is handwritten and specified in full. Because, why would they...

So… Finally, kernel 5.8 entered the Debian Unstable repositories. This means that I got my Raspberry image from their usual location and was able to type the following, using only my old trusty USB keyboard: So finally, the greatest and meanest Raspberry is fully supported with a pure Debian image! (only tarnished by the nonfree raspi-firmware package. Oh, in case someone was still wondering — The images generated follow the stable release. Only the kernel and firmware are installed from unstable. If / when kernel 5.8 enters Backports, I will reduce the noise of adding a different suit to the...

Need I say more? OK, I will… Still wanting some more details? Well… I have had many cats through my life. When I was about eight years old, my parents tried to have a dog… but the experiment didn’t work, and besides those few months, I never had one. But as my aging cats spent the final months of their last very long lifes, it was clear to us that, after them, we would be adopting a dog. Last Saturday was the big day. We had seen some photos of the mother and the nine (!) pups. My children decided...

Following Antonio Terceiro’s post on tips for using ffmpeg for editing video, I will also share a bit of my experience producing my video for my session in DebConf20. I recorded my talk today. As Terceiro mentioned, even though I’m used to speaking in front of my webcam (i.e. for my classes and some smaller conferences I’ve worked on during the COVID lockdown), it does feel a bit weird to present a live talk to… nobody :-| OK, one step back. Why are we doing this? Because our hardworking friends of the DebConf20 video team recommended so. In order to...