Debian media team - testing and releasing Debian 11.2 20211218 2030

 We've more or less finished the release of the Debian CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and other media for Bullseye 11.2 release. This is one of the (roughly) quarterly point releases and roll-up releases.

Thanks firstly to the developers, users, helpers, bug filers who help to keep Debian moving and working and to the release team and press team who more or less finish their job before the media team start theirs.

Thanks to Sledge and RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge and to Schweer who single-handedly clears all the Debian-edu testing. This release run seemed to be a bit more slick, a bit faster, a few fewer problems and it's always a joy to work with colleagues who are like family.

The last couple of years have been more than a bit difficult: this (should) be more or less the last major action from the release team and others for 2021.

I'm going to take the opportunity this gives me to wish all concerned with Debian (and every other Linux) the very best wishes for the year to come. Surely, it can only get better - eventually.

Oh, my goodness, where's the fantastic barbeque [OMGWTFBBQ 2021]

 I'm guessing the last glasses will be through the dishwasher (again) and Pepper the dog can settle down without having to cope with so many people.

For those who don't know - Steve and his wife Jo (Sledge and Randombird) hold a barbeque in their garden every August Bank Holiday weekend [UK Bank Holiday on the last Monday in August]. The barbeque is not small - it's the dominating feature in the suburban garden, brick built, with a dedication stone, lights, electricity. The garden is small, generally made smaller by forty or so Debian friends and allies standing and sitting around. People are talking, arguing, hugging people they've not seen for (literal) years and putting the world to rights. 

This is Debian central point - with large quantities of meat and salads, an amount of beer/alcohol and "Cambridge gin" and general goodwill. This year was more than usually atmospheric because for some of us it was the first time with a large group of people in a while. Side conversations abound: for me it was learning something about the high energy particle physics community, how to precision build helicopters, fly quadcopters and precision 3D print anything, the maths of Isy counting crochet stitches to sew together randomly sized squares ... and, of course, obligatory things like how random is random and what's good enough entropy. And a few sessions of the game of our leader.

This is also a place for stuff to get done: I was unashamedly using this to upgrade the storage in my laptop while there were sensible engineers around. A corner of the table, a RattusRattus and it was quickly sorted - then a discussion around the internals of Thinkpads as he took his apart. Then getting a full install - Gb Ethernet to the Debian mirror in the cupboard six feet away is faster bandwidth than a jumbo jet full of tapes. Then getting mail to work again - it's handy when the mailserver owner is next to you, having come in from the garden to help, and finally IRC. And not just me: "You need a GPG key signed - there's three DPLs here, there's a release manager - but you've just missed one of the DAMs." plus an in-depth GPG how-to session on the other side of the table.

I was the luckiest one with the most comfortable bed in the house overnight but I couldn't stay for last night. Thanks once again to all involved but especially Steve and Jo who do this for the love of it, and the fun, and the community and the family. Oh, and thanks to Lenovo - not just for being a platinum sponsor of Debconf but also for providing the official laptop of this and most Debian occasions 😀

"If you do it twice, it's tradition" - says nattie

 Thanks to all who've made Debconf 21 such a good place to be.

 

A song for Debconf21 ["What shall we do with the drunken sailor"]

What shall we do with the online Debconf?

What shall we do with the online Debconf?

What shall we do with the online Debconf?

Earl-y in the morning

 

Close it up as we agreed it

Save each script in case we need it

Work out how we best live-feed it

Next year’s Debconf’s dawning

 

Next year’s Kosovo and Pristina

This virtual Debconf needs no cleaner

Hope when COVID’s gone we’re keener

To meet up every morning

Thanks to the Debconf orga team

Thanks to those who Loopy meme

Things are not always as they seeem

In virtual Debconf’s morning

 

Bullseye’s out – its share is rising

Debconf’s fun and quite surprising

Linux – 30 :)

Yours and my thing - Debian’s 28

 

Thanks to all who video’d sessions

Debconf T-shirts - prized possessions

Debcamp bug-fixed some regressions

Now onto next year!

A closing song for Debconf 21 [Frere Jacques/Brueder Martin]

 

DebConf21

Virtual DebConf’s

Now all through

Closed for you

Kosovo is next year

See you in Pristina!!

DebConf 22

Twenty twenty-two

Happy Birthday, Debian!

 28 today. In a video call for Debian day earlier on, I was reminiscing about the earliest distributions: MCC Interim Linux gave instructions to turn it's final version into Debian. Debian is the second oldest Linux distribution, just behind Slackware.

Debian 1.2 was my first Debian: my latest is, obviously, Debian Bullseye. Debian is like a family - often discordant, sometimes dysfunctional but always full of people that care and are cared for. I wish that some of my friends and colleagues no longer with us could be here to see just how well we're doing.

This is something that's been with me for so long that I can't imagine life without it: software, obscure hardware but above all friends closer than family. The biggest software project anywhere, potentially, and it's all for free - and 95.7% independently reproducible. Thanks to all my colleagues and co-workers who've become friends over the years without whom none of this would be possible. Oh, and thanks to Ian Murdock - I never got to meet him but I did get to email him when he was in charge of Progeny. Without him, none of this would even have started.

Vanilla Debian on a Raspberry Pi 4 with UEFI

Thanks to the good folk who put the hard work into building a UEFI implementation for the Raspberry Pi 4 which "just works", allowing you to install Debian straightforwardly, and especially to Pete Batard who has written up the process and collected a zip file together. 

Not quite so straightforward ...

I have an early model Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted to install Debian on an SSD  connected via a cable to a USB3 port. It turned out that the version of the software in the EEPROM would not boot reliably so the first task was to update this with the latest stable EEPROM available from the Raspberry Pi downloads.

The easiest way to do this was to boot an SD card with Raspbian on. Once that was done, I had a Pi that would boot from an SSD.

Untar the files

A tarball of UEFI from Pete's Github repository at https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases - latest is v 1.29 as at 20210814.

Plugging in the SSD to another machine to format the drive: msdos format, one ESP partition in FAT32 and marked bootable and the rest of the drive blank.

One aarch64 DVD image from the usual place. 

 https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/arm64/iso-dvd/debian-11.0.0-arm64-DVD-1.iso

Untar the UEFI  tarball into the ESP partition you've just made

 Plug the SSD into a USB3 port on the RPi using a USB -> SATA cable

Write the aarch image to a USB stick using dd and place that into one of the other USB ports. Add a keyboard.

Install

Power up the RPi4, hit Esc and work your way through UEFI to select a boot device and go, save the settings and go.

The install is almost identical to any Debian d-i install.

There is a setting in UEFI to reclaim the 1G of memory that was masked out, there's a setting for control of the fan shim if you have that style of fan.

End result - happiness

Done the other day and sitting next to me on the desktop.

 

And we're almost there with media testing - 202108142013

It's been quite a long day - last few normal tests are being run through now.

Lots more involvement from more people: nothing too catastrophic and a good many installs run through. The usual back and forth and noticing odd things that crop up: it's always interesting to get someone else's viewpoint and second pair of eyes on something.

Thanks also to Schweer who's done his usual solo testing of all the Debian-Edu software, quietly and with no fuss.

Looking good.

Still chasing through release testing Debian media for Bullseye release 202108141655

 Lots of people - lots of effort - we're gradually closing in on a last few tests.

It's been quite a long time but we're significantly ahead of where we would be on many tests for release candidates and main releases. It's always fun to do and chat back and forth. Having new testers check in from tomorrow (Australia) has also been a novelty.

It's been a very long wait for this but "This is the best Debian release ever", as they say.

Bullseye - Centre of release is going on.

 And so we're building CDs / DVDs and larger images. Lots of people joining us, either to say Hi or to actually add to the tests.

All of the most common CDs / DVDs have been tested. Not too many obvious bugs found in our processes this time and tests are going well.

Some of the usual suspects but also some new testers: Hi to bittin who dropped in before the Stockholm release party, to smcv and to highvoltage and to liz and Linux-Fan

Hope all's going well with everyone.

Debian 10.10 media checking - RELEASE - 202106192215

And that's it for another release. A few bugs but nothing show-stopping.

Thanks again to Sledge, RattusRattus and Isy, to Linux-Fan and schweer.

As the testing page notes, there's a bug in some arm64 installs - the fix should come out via debian-security shortly but you might want to be aware of this.

 Here's to the next one: only a short time until Bullseye

Debian 10.10 media checking - 202106191837 - We're doing quite well

Linux-Fan and Schweer have just left us: Schweer has confirmed that all the Debian-Edu images are fine and working to his satisfaction.

 After a short break for food, we're all back in on testing: the Cambridge folks are working hard.  There have been questions on IRC about the release in Libera.Chat as well. Always good to do this: at some point in the next couple of months, we'll be doing this for Debian 11 [Bullseye] :)

Thanks as ever to all behind the scenes making each point release happen and to those folks supporting LTS and ELTS. It takes a huge amount of bug fixing, sometimes on the fly as issues are discovered, to make it work this seamlessly.

Fixing Wayland failing to start when a desktop environment is installed but your machine needs firmware. ...

This came up in an install that I was just doing for Debian 10.10 media testing.

 I hadn't seen this before and it would be disconcerting to other people, though it is a known bug, I think.

 I was installing an image that had no network and no firmware. KDE failed to run and dropped me to a text mode prompt. This was because the Zotac SBC I'm using requires Radeon R600 firmware to work. There was a warning message on screen to that effect.

 The way round this was to plug in a network cable and edit /etc/apt/sources.list.

 Editing /etc/apt/sources.list was to add contrib and non-free to the appropriate lines to allow me to install  firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-misc-nonfree which includes the appropriate AMD firmware for the embedded Radeon chipset.

 Since the machine hadn't been connected to a network at install time, I also needed to run a dhclient command to obtain a network lease and allow me to install the non-free metapackages over the network.

Result: success: a full KDE desktop. [The machine is an old Zotac SBC with embedded graphics hardware: AMD E350 - specifically, it requires firmware-amd-graphics and amd64-microcode].

Debian 10.10 release 202106191548

 Late blogging on this one.

Even as we wait for the final release of Bullseye [Debian 11], we're still producing updates for Debian 10 [Buster].

Today has thrown up a few problems: working with Steve, RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge, Schweer and Linux-Fan somewhere else in the world.

A couple of build problems have meant that we've started later than we otherwise might have been and a couple of image runs have had to be redone. We're there now and happily running tests.

As ever, it's good to be doing this. With practice, I can now repeat mistakes with 100% reliability and in shorter time :)

More updates later.

Debian 10.9 release - 202103272140UTC - almost there - final stage

We're almost there: last lots of AMD64 testing on the debian-live images - a couple of willing helpers are also testing some i386 images though these can be more problematic on low memory. Steve has just started the final stage to start the final scripts. If all goes well, they should be done within 3/4 of an hour - which should put the images in the final locations on the main mirror by about 2230 UTC. It's been something of the order of twelve hours from start to finish which is still slightly quicker than most of the releases we've done - as ever, thanks to all. And that's it for another however long until we get to sort out 10.10 in a while.

Debian 10.9 release - 202103271900UTC - pushing through live image testing

So we're a fair way through the release, then. Testing of almost all the standard images has finished.  Pretty much all of the disk images are now complete and in place.

People are working their way through the tests of the debian-live images in the various desktop flavours. These have to be done on real hardware - so it does take time. A new tester - peylight - has dropped in to help for the first time. Sqrt{not} has also joined us from the other end of the timezone scale - we have somebody at UTC-0700 and somebody at UTC+0430 today. [I can't remember where Linux-fan is timezone wise] All of the help from all the testers is very welcome, as ever.

A slight pause - a couple of us have a meal to eat - but it looks as if we've done well on timings. The original estimate was for 2000UTC - maybe a little after that and we'll be finished and the images release can be published - there were a couple of minor hiccups but we've done well so far.

Thanks, as always, to the people behind the scenes doing all the work, to DSA and admins providing large machines for us to do the builds on and to the people who drop in and spend a few hours of their time on a working day/weekend to help out.

Debian 10.9 release - well underway 202103271600 UTC

And so I'm rather late: Sledge, RattusRattus and Isy and I have all been busy chasing down bits and pieces for images release today. We're well underway through the normal images: live images are still ongoing. We've had help from Schweer and Linux-fan as last time - a couple of other folk have had chats to us. So far, it seems relatively straightforward - we're all experienced at this by now.

As ever, it's a joy to be doing this with a smart set of colleagues. 

 We can now catch our mistakes _just_ after we make them, so it's really getting sorted: the next stage is for me to realise _before_ I make them.

 

Debian 10.8 release process - We're almost there - Signing and pushing about to happen

 Steve is about to sign the release and to begin the push across to the mirrors.

Although it sometimes seems like an age, this will be approximately 8 hours rather than 15 hours -  a 50% improvement in release timetable means that the behind the scenes work has been well worth while.

We always find tweaks, improvements, things we forgot and genuine bugs. Once again: We've found that live images can be significantly memory intensive on older hardware or machines with limited memory. 

The boot process for any live CD image expands a squashfs so that the image runs entirely in memory. This is particularly noticeable on the 32 bit i386 images. These really require a minimum of 2GB of memory if you are using the heavier weight desktop images like KDE or Gnome: much less and they will either be unreasonably slow or just fail to work.

There is also now a note on the download pages warning on this.

Thanks once again to maswan early on and Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, Schweer, linux-fan and sqr{not} for helping out in testing images. I'm listening in to an impromptu chat explaining the behind the scenes steps to run to actually sign and push the final images so we're a short while away from publishing to the principal CD image machine. At the same time, the torrent seeders will be started and the scripts will push to update the mirrors. And so to the next time :)

Handy tip For people running mirrors of debian-cd: If you're low on disk space, perhaps you could remove the 10.7 images by hand before running your next sync scripts to allow space for 10.8 to move in: any ftpsync or rsync process might only remove the old images after copying in the new ones. It's only about 220GB - but you don't want that to be an instantaneous 440GB.

Debian 10.8 release process - And there are always small bugs which catch you out :)

 This is going very well - we've finished many of the tests. A few oversights - a few changes as we've realised we've missed a couple of things: it's always the same, small bugs catch you out as you spot them and Sledge is fixing as we go. A couple of bandwidth glitches for me but nothing special.

Thanks also to Linux-fan and Sqrt{not} who have turned up to help and each taken a couple of tests. Any contribution is a help because it means we get things done faster and, crucially, we get different hardware and another pair of eyes working with us. We'd hoped that we'd be mostly done by 1700 - we didn't specify which time zone.

The release announcement for the point release as a whole has gone out: with luck, we should have all the media released by later tonight so 20210206 which will be faster than before.

Debian 10.8 release process - Yay, it's a lot faster

Thanks to the changes behind the scenes, images are now being produced significantly faster than they were: the embarrassingly parallel speed up has worked, though at slight cost to the predictability of when we get each architecture produced for us to test.

Thanks, as ever, to Sledge, RattusRattus and Isy over in Cambridge and to schweer who painstakingly tests all the debian-edu releases.

83 out of 94 steps done and it's only 13:50 GMT - less popular architectures are coming on apace. There's still a lot of testing to do: we will never be able to test s390x for example. Other architectures - including mips* - we have no machines, we're building as best efforts and we can't guarantee how well they will work for anyone.

Anybody installing the less popular architectures please let us know that you've installed them and how you get on. We'd like to see a positive report as well as bugs: we don't see much feedback at all to know how useful they are: evidence of installs on any architecture is always helpful to us.

And here we go: Debian 10.8 images release testing process is under way

 As is traditional, every three months or so: another Debian point release is being prepared today. This one is 10.8. As ever, not a huge amount of change if you've been updating your Debian machines regularly. CD/DVD/BluRay and other media files are all being produced today.

 Images are gradually being built and rsync'ed: tests are under way and the ususal suspects are taking part. A couple of issues: thanks very much indeed to maswan for chasing up early problems with petersson. 

Some script changes behind the scenes over the last month or so should mean that the images are built significantly more in parallel and this may mean we finish the release process much more quickly today.