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I returned to work yesterday, after a fairly relaxing week off, to find an Eee PC 900 and an OpenStreetMap high‐visibility vest on or under my desk.

I haven’t touched the Eee, yet, except to charge the battery. Rest assured that I will be replacing the operating system, likely with Debian GNU/Linux. I noticed some packages relating to Eee PCs in Sid, which is promising.

I wore the high‐vis vest on my way home. The vest features an OpenStreetMap logo with the host part of the URI (www.openstreetmap.org) above and “SURVEYOR” below. There’s a picture on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Visibility for me on the road, and visibility for OpenStreetMap.

Debian’s predictable random number generator bug in OpenSSL saw me regenerating SSH and TLS keys. I almost always have to look up how to use openssl for certificate generation, so I improved my tiny personal certificate authority setup with a makefile, similar to the one used in this howto by Jeremy Mates.

Debian has a lot of packages in its repositories, “it comes with over 18733 packages” according to the Debian web site as I write this, so when you add third party repositories a flexible package management tool that can sort, filter and categorise the packages can be helpful. Thankfully, aptitude does a pretty decent job of it.

Axel Beckert shows how to group packages by origin in aptitude by adding “pattern(~O)” to the default groups. I find this handy, but also got hit by the problem of virtual packages not being displayed. After a bit of a read and a play, I came up with:

Aptitude::UI {
  Default-Grouping "filter(missing),status,section(subdir,passthrough),pattern(~O, !~O => other),section(topdir),priority";
};

Anything that doesn’t have an origin gets put into a hierarchy called “other”. At least that’s what I think, and it looks like it does! Next to find out how to display the suite (stable, testing, etc) for each package version.

Update: Grouping by archive shows, for example, a package in both testing and unstable under both groups, but does not indicate which versions of the package are in each archive. A satisfactory solution is to add “%t” to the package display format as follows:

Package-Display-Format "%c%a%M%S %p %Z %t %15v %15V";

The main package view shows the archives that contain the preferred (I presume) version of the package. Slightly more useful, when versions are expanded, the archive will be shown for each available version of the package:

i A  --\ apt                stable          0.6.46.4-0.1 0.6.46.4-0.1
i A  0.6.46.4-0.1           stable
p A  0.7.6                  testing

South Cheshire GNU/Linux Users met in Macclesfield last night, and I went for the first time. Getting there was pretty painless: Macclesfield station is probably the furthest in that direction that I can get a direct train to from Levenshulme, and the venue, The Society Rooms, is easy to find.

The turn out was good, I think I counted twelve, and someone said it was probably a record. Normally they get about three or four people. To accommodate us we had to commandeer some extra furniture, comfy furniture. The Society Rooms is quite nice considering it’s a Wetherspoons pub (I’m used to the ones in Manchester).

We started off by introducing ourselves: There were people from quite varying backgrounds, including step‐ father and son who were just getting into GNU/Linux. I wasn’t the only person wearing a Debian shirt either. Stranger things have happened (no pink elephants involved here).

Topics covered included various UNIX‐like operating systems, virtualisation, the broken MS OOXML specification, network cards that silently corrupt traffic. It was well worth going, and I hope to make it to future meetings.