First ARB-approved application available for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted on 2011/01/31 by Stéphane Graber

After months of reviewing the process and going through applications, the ARB approved its first application, Stefano Rivera’s suspended-sentence.


It’s now available in the Software Center for all Ubuntu 10.10 users who have the extra repository enabled.

Description: Point-and-click adventure game set on a space ship
You wake up to find yourself alone on a broken spaceship headed to a Penal Colony.
The ship seems to want you to fix it, but first you need to get out of the room.

It's an adventure game, you know how this works.
Suspended Sentence was a PyWeek.org entry, a game written in a week.

Website: http://suspended-sentence.org

We’re expecting quite a few more applications to show up on extras.ubuntu.com very soon. Hopefully the process should be a lot faster for the next few applications as we’ve now solved most issues and questions with that first one.

Posted in Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | 7 Comments

Pastebinit 1.2 released !

Posted on 2011/01/30 by Stéphane Graber

So, 10 months after the last release, I’m proud to announce that release 1.2 of the command line pastebin client is out !

For these who just want to grab the branch or tarballs, that’s on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/pastebinit

For Natty users, you’ll just have to wait for pastebinit to hit Debian and then be synced, shouldn’t take long.

Here’s a quick overview of the new features:

  • Size limit support
  • Distro-specific default pastebin
  • Pastebinit now respects the FHS
  • Quick a few more supported pastebins (see list below)
  • A LOT of bugfix (over 20 bugs fixed, remaining bugs are mostly wishlist)
  • Updated manpage
  • Test scripts to quickly check that all pastebins work
  • Updated translations (28 supported locales)

Here’s the list of currently supported pastebins:

stgraber@castiana:~/data/code/pastebinit$ ./pastebinit -l
Supported pastebins:
- sprunge.us
- pastie.org
- paste.ubuntu.org.cn
- fpaste.org
- pb.daviey.com
- slexy.org
- paste.ubuntu.com
- paste.kde.org
- stikked.com
- p.defau.lt
- paste.debian.net
- cxg.de
- paste2.org
- yourpaste.net
- pastebin.com

Pastebinit automatic testing
Yay for automated testing !

Thanks to everyone who helped with this release:

  • Dave Walker
  • Jan Urbanski
  • Nitesh Mistry
  • Rolf Leggewie
  • Soren Hansen
Posted in pastebinit, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 5 Comments

Help translate pastebinit

Posted on 2011/01/24 by Stéphane Graber

pastebinit is one of my pet projects. It’s a command line pastebin client that let you easily send any command output or file to a pastebin. It’s packaged and available in quite a few distributions.

Pastebinit started at the end of 2006 with support only for pastebin.com. Over the time, a lot of other pastebin websites have been added to end up supporting over 15 different pastebins.

I recently went through all the bugs on Launchpad, fixed most of them and I think pastebinit is now in pretty good shape. I plan on releasing version 1.2 on Friday if no major issue is found by then.

That leaves between now and Friday to have it properly translated in as many languages as possible. So please go to https://translations.launchpad.net/pastebinit and make sure your language will be included in the next release !

Posted in pastebinit, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 3 Comments

Sandbox changes name to become Arkose

Posted on 2011/01/09 by Stéphane Graber

Sandbox started as a quick hack I wrote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL back in October.

Since then it evolved quite a bit, getting a decent user interface and even a nautilus plugin.

Only thing that really was missing before making it an “official” project is a “real” name.
After thinking about it for a while (trust me, I’m really bad at finding names), I finally ended up browsing sand-related pages on Wikipedia and chose to go ahead with “Arkose”.

Arkose (pronounced /ˈɑrkoʊz/) is a detrital sedimentary rock, specifically a type of sandstone containing at least 25% feldspar.

Arkose

I really liked “sandbox” as a name though, but it was a bit of a pain to Google for, apt-cache was returning multiple results too and finding relevant dent/tweet was a really difficult. So instead, I’ll mostly be using “Arkose – desktop sandboxing”. The name itself being a lot less common and “desktop sandboxing” is already giving very good Google results.

I finally created a Launchpad project and moved the branch to it. I’m expecting packages to hit the archive over the next few days.

PPA is available at: https://launchpad.net/~arkose-devel/+archive/stable

Posted in Arkose, LXC, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu, Sandbox | Tagged | 3 Comments

Getting ready for IPV6

Posted on 2010/12/31 by Stéphane Graber

I’ve been regularly playing with IPV6 since mid-2006 when I first opened an account at SixXS ang got my first IPV6 tunnel up and running. Sadly at that point, there wasn’t much Point of Presence for tunnels, not even mentioning the state of native IPV6 networks…

Relatively recently my dedicated server provider started offering native IPV6 connectivity in their Nuremberg-based datacenter. They offer a /64 per server which should be plenty enough for most users and allows for stateless configuration of a single network. Unfortunately in my case, I’m running OpenVZ, LXC and KVM on that box, meaning multiple distinct networks with bridging and firewalls.

As I also wanted IPV6 connectivity for my home network and would rather have a single provider for both, I started looking at the current state of tunnel brokers to end up choosing Hurricane Electric who offer free IPV6 tunnels and one /48 network per subnet which is exactly what I needed. They have Point of Presence pretty much all around the world which means very low latency IPV6 for all my networks.
They also happen to be one of the two upstream providers of the ISP we use at the office.

So I started configuring my Vyatta (Debian-based router distribution) routers to handle the IPV6 tunnel, send Router Advertisement to all my networks (radvd), relay DHCPv6 to my DHCP server and firewall incoming traffic.
That was surprisingly easy, taking only a few minutes, copy/pasting the configuration provided by the tunnel broker and setting up the firewall rules.

I then made sure all my main services are working properly with IPV6, for now that includes, DNS servers, Web servers, Mail servers and shell access. Backported Natty’s isc-dhcp-server to 10.04 LTS and moved my DHCP to using it and created a minimal configuration to get stateless DHCPv6 to announce my NTP and DNS servers.
I also updated my public DNS to include AAAA records for all services that have dual-stack support and got my registar to add IPV6 glue records to my domain.

I’ve now been running that setup for a week or so for my home network, dedicated server and office network. Running wireshark for a few hours showed that almost half of my connections are IPV6 (mostly on my own networks).

I’ve been surprised to see how well Ubuntu Natty’s NetworkManager copes with IPV6 network. In my case, it successfully noticed the “other-config” flag in the router advertisement and started dhclient to grab the DNS and NTP configuration from the DHCPv6 server.

So I now have a working environment to developer the next generation LTSP-Cluster which is supposed to have complete IPV6 support from the first release.

Let’s hope we’ll see more IPV6 deployment in 2011.
Happy new year everyone !

Posted in LTSP, LXC, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment