MiniDebconf Cambridge ARM, Cambridge 1020 6 November

Back here. Now a silent room - seven people on laptops in the Video Sprint rooom. A couple of low-key mutterings as various "stuff" is attempted to be ported.

Last night most folk watched the fireworks - November 5th is the celebration in UK which involves fireworks. [Obligatory Wikipedia link  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night ]

Cambridge has a huge free public display and it was apparently well worth watching.

A side conversation on keyboards - Belgians, UK English, Germans - but most of us have US English layout in our touch typing fingers, I suspect. Changing keyboards is fun :)


I may have been talked into packaging something for Debian for the first time in a very long time :)

MiniDebconf2015, ARM Cambridge 1320 5 November

Back after lunch - chatting about video and stuff with the Video Team sprint.
Thanks to the ARM employees swiping us in and out and shepherding the bunch of us over to lunch and keeping track of us.

From behind me, there's the chat over sorting out a switch to handle the LAN setup to test the video equipment later on.

Next door, they're busy, busy, busy - four tables full of people working fairly quietly. Steve McIntyre (Sledge) is running around facilitating, answering questions, sorting out "stuff"

Front desk are still front desking although most of us have arrived: I'm guessing they'll be busiest over the weekend.

Three of us on laptops doing whatever in here: Helen busy working to make sense of scribbled notes on whiteboards into a proper diagramming package - green and red marker pen on two walls full of whiteboard becomes a sensible project - objectives, bullet points, tasking - seemingly far too much organisation for this sort of thing and not the way some of us naturally work but necessary if we're not to forget something tiny but vital.

Thanks for this expertise, Helen, that most of us don't have :)

Cambridge MiniDebConf2015 - ARM, Cambridge 1030 5 November

Now safely here - good to be home with the family. Some old faces who were here last year, some new.

Roomful of laptops: fairly quiet hum of people coding. I've stolen what could be the largest table - but I have integrated a Cubietruck so far this morning :)

Next door is the Video team sprint - working to try and get something sorted to replace dvswitch - the software behind all the Debconf videos.

ARM staff helpful as ever, good surroundings and, of course, good coffee :)

Ken Starks (Helios) of Reglue could use your help

I'm not normally one to respond to online appeals for money: there are often far too many of them. Ken Starks is a well known Linux personality who set up a charity to provide needy local people with Linux and recycled machines. He's also a good guy who works hard for this as something he believes in: this is no scam. The Helios Project (from before his own charity merged with another known as Reglue) is also still an SPI project as far as I know

Ken is currently holding a fund raising drive to replace his vehicle used for the Reglue project on Indiegogo. This is probably most of interest to US readers who may be able to treat this as charitable donation - the things he's offering in return for donations are most readily shipped within the US and Canada.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Rescuing a Windows 10 failed install using GParted Live on CD

Windows 10 is here, for better or worse. As the family sysadmin, I've been tasked to update the Windows machines: ultimately, failure modes are not well documented and I needed Free software and several hours to recover a vital machine.

The "free upgrade for users of prior Windows versions" is a limited time offer for a year from launch. Microsoft do not offer licence keys for the upgrade: once a machine has updated to Windows 10 and authenticated on the 'Net, then a machine can be re-installed and will be regarded by Microsoft as pre-authorised. Users don't get the key at any point.

Although Microsoft have pushed the fact that this can be done through Windows Update, there is the option to use Microsoft's Media Creation tool to do the upgrade directly on the Windows machine concerned. This would be necessary to get the machine to upgrade and register before a full clean install of Windows 10 from media.

This Media Creation Tool failed for me on three machines with "Unable to access System reserved partition'

All the machines have SSDs from various makers: a colleague suggested that resizing the partition might enable the upgrade to continue.  Of the machines that failed, all were running Windows 7 - two were running using BIOS, one using UEFI boot on a machine with no Legacy/CSM mode.

Using GParted live .iso  - itself based on Debian Live - allowed me to resize the System partition from 100MiB to 200MiB by moving the Windows partition but  Windows became unbootable.

In two cases, I was able to boot from DVD Windows installation media and make Windows bootable again at which point the Microsoft Media Creation Tool could be used to install Windows 10

The UEFI boot machine proved more problematic: I had to create a Windows 7 System Repair disk and repair Windows booting before Windows 10 could proceed.

My Windows-using colleaague had used only Windows-based recovery disks: using Linux tools allowed me to repair Windows installations I couldn't boot

Poetry for Debconf15 poetry night

Debian's reached the age of 22
I wish I could be there with you
In Heidelberg, fair German city
To share, in person, this my ditty

Rhonda's worked hard - the work is done
With poems now begins the fun
While others play cards or hack new code
Or dream of running down the road

Free software, arguments, warmth, good cheer
Too soon all over 'til next year
 All of the best are there / on 'Net
Here's hope that it's the best Debconf yet

Bye SPARC - for now

So it looks as if it's the end for the Debian SPARC port that is primarily 32 bit, for now at least. Too little available modern hardware, too few porters and an upstream hardware provider emotionally tied to significant licensing and support agreements.

If 64 bit SPARC hardware were more available, I'd be interested again. SPARC has given me two of my favourite moments in Debian. I helped a colleague to duplicate existing software and move architecture from Intel to SPARC mainly by copying across the list of packages. 

It also allowed me in ?? 1999 / 2000 ?? to take a SPARC 20 to London Olympia to a Linux Expo where one of the principal sponsors was Sun. They laughed on their stand when I set up older hardware with minimal memory but were not so amused when I demonstrated Debian, full X Window environment and KDE successfully.