apple, jailbreaking, and debconf in manhattan?!

Well, while I tangle around with annoying conflicts between Xen and NetworkManager I might as well post something semi-related to computing. Today it's Apple's anti-jailbreaking plea. Right off the bat they point to their end user license "agreement" and claim that people who bought an iPhone or iPod Touch somehow agreed to this mystical EULA that's somehow signed at point of sale. Nevermind the fact that EULAs are non-negotiable, involve no transfer of title, money, or services, and frequently never even get shown to the user.

But enough about that. Apparantly DebConf 10 is going to be in New York City. Right next to where I live. That's great. I didn't go to DebConf this year, despite Arthur Liu recommending it to all the GSoCers. Mostly due to paranoia over airline security and US customs searching my laptop.

Debian is apparantly going to actually have release deadlines, albeit every other year as opposed to twice a year like Ubuntu. Still, it's nice to see a commitment to releasing. My first experience with Debian was a while back, when all the worthwhile packages were still in testing.

Hopefully, tomorrow I can get Xen working again. Xend won't start, something about an 'invalid dom0 state'. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that NetworkManager manually configures peth0 when it shouldn't, requiring me to fix up the routing tables. Worst comes to worse I'll have to try and run Xen and euca on my desktop, which is just barely compatible with Debian.

One of the things I'd like to do for VMbuilder is have it automatically package the Linux kernel and ramdisk into Eucalyptus, if the user opts for it. You can already upload new kernels and ramdisks with Eucalyptus/euca2ools provided your cert has the appropriate rights on the cloud. see [0]

[0] http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusImageManagement_v1.5.2

lenny vmbuilder with xen, debconf, I discover key visualization

Well, the current VMBuilder available on the git archive[0] now supports building Lenny on vanilla Xen. We're very close to building AMIs, I can almost taste it. (The reason why you haven't heard about this until today is that accessing Blogger is super-finnicky when not logged in for absolutely no reason at all. My apologies for the lack of updates on this blog.) Additionally we're starting to actually put documentation and stuff on the wiki [1,2,3] about the GSoC project and euca2ools.

The next step is to look at a few packages called 'ec2-init' and 'ec2-modules'. They only exist in Ubuntu right now, and I purposefully disabled VMBuilder from installing them on Debian so far since Debian doesn't have them. That, and I believe I should pick out a suitable AKI/ARI combo sometime (the AKI info in the Debian plugin is just a placeholder right now). This shouldn't take too long. I would like to get the VMBuilder changes in Debian soon, and hopefully get those changes in the VMBuilder trunk[4] too.

My project was part of the Debconf talk on the Debian GSOC projects which I believe was 2 or 3 days ago. I'd look up the presentation and watch it but right now I have my friend begging me to install Ubuntu for him so he doesn't have to use Vista anymore.

[0] git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/vmbuilder.git
(that's a lotta gits)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/VMBuilder
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/euca2ools
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DavidWendt/GSOC09Project
[4] https://launchpad.net/vmbuilder

euca2ools, kmeisthax@Lappy-486.A, and other annoyances

Well, it's finally out so I can tell you all about it: euca2ools, the fabled free software EC2 API client! Unlike a certain other company's tools, these don't have onerous usage restrictions. Yes, our VMBuilder[0] already supports using it as opposed to Amazon's tools, it defaults to Euca tools then Amazon's tools. (Block the usage of either using --ec2-no-amazon-tools or --ec2-no-euca-tools, keep in mind you still need one or the other to bundle or upload.)

And another thing... I recently took a look at the git repo [0], and noticed it's littered with commits by "David Wendt (kmeisthax@Lappy-486.A)"... please ignore the screwed-up e-mail address, I reinstalled Debian and forgot to change it to my normal address. (which is dcrkid (a) yahoo () com)

[0] git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/vmbuilder.git