E-mail arrived a couple of days ago from Will E. from School District #33 in British Columbia, Canada:
Also thank you for all of the work you have put into your package archive. (we use your archive here in our school district on almost 1000 Kubuntu workstations and servers)
Wow, thank you! These e-mails are really motivational and encouraging!
If you were affected by the winbind issues in Samba 3.4.0, you’ll be happy to know Samba 3.4.1 is available for Hardy and Jaunty from my PPA.
Yesterday I learned Drobe, THE site for Risc OS and Acorn news was closing as its news service, thus remaining in archive-only mode. I have never used Risc OS or an Acorn and there is none in my classic computers collection but it is still sad news.
But I digress.
I cannot remember how but somehow, via Drobe, I discovered Risc OS had an Internet browser called NetSurf and it was available for Linux now. I backported the latest version (2.1) for Hardy and Jaunty.
Rendering-wise, it’s not too good. Plugins did not work for me and I’d say JavaScript is not working either. But there are some interesting points: NetSurf has its own rendering engine, split in several libraries:
Everything is MIT licensed.
Summary: NetSurf 2.1, libnsgif, libnsbmp, libparserutils and libhubbub are now available for Hardy and Jaunty from my PPA
The open source sniffer and network analyzer Wireshark 1.2.1 is now available for Jaunty. It is not possible to build it for Hardy without severely crippling it or risking bad behavior due to limitations in the stock kernel in Hardy (2.6.24).
At work we are using the GStreamer backend to Phonon to play video from an RTSP source transparently. Turns out they fixed a lot of bugs and a nasty memory leak (more than 8 MB leaked every time you opened an RTSP media source!) in GStreamer 0.10.24, so I backported/packaged it for Ubuntu Jaunty. No Hardy backports this time, though, too much work and we are not deploying on Hardy.
GStreamer summary: libnice 0.0.9, GObject introspection 0.6.5, GStreamer Core 0.10.24.3, GStreamer plugins base 0.10.24.3, GStreamer plugins Farsight 0.10.12, GStreamer plugins ffmpeg 0.10.8.2, GStreamer plugins good 0.10.16, Python GStreamer bindings 0.10.16.3, GStreamer plugins bad 0.10.14, GNonLin 0.13, Farsight2 0.0.14, GStreamer DBUS service 0.1.17. I also rebuilt the latest versions GStreamer pitfdll plugins, GStreamer mpegmux, mpegdemux, mp3 and GStreamer plugins ugly against GStreamer 0.10.24.3.
While I was waiting for all the GStreamer stuff to build, I also packaged NVidia driver 190.32 for Jaunty (and the nvidia-settings utility).
I tried to backport PackageKit 0.4.9 or 0.5.2 to Jaunty because KPackageKit 0.4 is broken (it won’t uninstall packages when it finds a “Conflicts” in a Debian package you are going to install; apt-get and aptitude do this fine). In the end it was too dangerous: after backporting and packaging a lot of stuff, I ended up in udev 147 being incompatible with Jaunty’s default kernel (2.6.28) due to a missing type definition (__u32). I could have fixed this in udev but I was feeling too much in the bleeding edge: I had backported PolicyKit 0.9.4, udev 143, debhelper 7.3.15 and usbutils 0.82. Too many too dangerous changes and now the udev fix? I’d rather not.
Although I removed by backports of packagekit, policykit, udev, debhelper and usbutils (they were up less than 12 hours), so much work had its bright side: I noticed xulrunner 1.9.1 was broken in Karmic due to missing NSPR pkg-config info. The new version required sqlite 3.6.16 and NSPR 4.8 and they are now available for Jaunty, too.
Peter B., a happy user of my PPA, asked for Subversion >= 1.6.3 (it fixes a nasty bug) and told me he started using my packages because he needed a newer rsync on Hardy. Well Pieter, you got it: Subversion 1.6.5 and rsync 3.0.6 are now available for Hardy and Jaunty.
From now on, I’m going to blog about the packages I backport/package.
Firefox 3.5.3 for Ubuntu Hardy and Jaunty is available from my PPA (and XUL Runner 1.9.1.3 too). It’s a backport from Karmic.
Doxygen 1.6.1 is also available for Hardy and Jaunty. Backported from Debian Unstable because it’s not yet in Karmic.
OpenSceneGraph 2.9.5 is finally available for Hardy and includes my fix for osg::Timer. It had been there for Jaunty for months but for the last months I’ve been working mostly on my Jaunty laptop so I didn’t need this backport.
Valgrind 3.5.0 is also available for Hardy and Jaunty. It’s a backport from Debian Unstable and I have added the Ubuntu-specific bits (i. e. built with -fno-stack-protector)
And finally, asciidoc 8.4.5, for Hardy and Jaunty too. This version has not arrived into Debian or Ubuntu Karmic yet, so I took the packaging for 8.4.4 and adapted it for 8.4.5.
PPA means “personal package archive” and it’s exactly what the name says: a repository of .deb packages for some Ubuntu version(s).
It’s a very convenient way to make packages available to other people: you submit the source package and a pool of virtual machines build the packages for different architectures (i386, amd64 and lpia; the ones supported by Ubuntu).
Canonical launched PPAs in the summer of 2007 in beta. I can’t remember when I joined the program but I immediately loved it: it made very easy for me to make packages available for several machines in several different locations. Easier than carrying a USB pendrive.
My PPA has had packages for virtually every version since Dapper but due to disk-space restrictions, I had to remove everything but Hardy and Jaunty.
What can you find in my PPA? A lot of stuff, really. What people tend to thank me the most for? Recent (meaning “usually the latest one”) versions of Firefox, git, Samba, CMake, Boost, Qt, glib and gtk, Wt, Valgrind, Pango, Doxygen, GStreamer, asciidoc, KDevelop4, QtCreator, the NVidia graphics driver, OpenVPN, Subversion, VLC and some other packages (even Open Cobol 🙂 ).
Generally, the same packages are available in the same version for all the distributions I’m “supporting” (keep in mind this is a best-effort repository: I can’t and won’t offer any warranty!). From time to time, it’s just too difficult to backport something (it requires too many dependencies to be backported too) or there are technical limtations (for instance, recent versions of VLC won’t build on kernel 2.6.24, which is the default kernel on Hardy, so the latest VLC for Hardy in my PPA is 0.9.4 -Hardy came with 0.8.6-)