Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague

Last weekend I was at FOSSCamp. Since I live in Prague I wanted to go to Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) each day, but unfortunately I had some exams, so I only went on Wednesday and Friday.

On Wednesday I first met Lars Wirzenius:


we agreed to go to pub in the evening. Then I did a little work, there was quite a nice view from the window (Prague castle on the horizon):



and I went to the #ubuntu-devel-summit IRC channel and pinged Scott Kitterman, whom I new from the Debian Python Modules Team (DPMT), but didn't know how he looks like. We met and once I knew Scott, it was easy to get around, so he introduced me to Steve Langasek (pronounced Langášek). We agreed to go to pub as well. Steve lives in Portland, OR, where I spent the summer 2005 and Scott is from Baltimore where I spent the summer 2006.
Then I also met Riku Voipio, Martin Böhm, Christian Reis (whom I asked if it's possible to support Debian unstable on Ubuntu Personal Package Archives and he said that it will probably happen, so that's really cool -- I also offered my help with this) and others, so in the end, there were 14 of us going to the pub, so I chose again the same pub as with the FOSSCamp people and it seems it tasted good again:




Notice the svíčková na smetaně above, my favourite meal. Good choice Scott. :)





Ok, that was on Wednesday. On Friday I arrived at around 3pm, looked at the schedule table and noticed that Matthias Klose should be at UDS too, so I started IRC and pinged him. Fortunately, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, whom I know from DPMT as well, replied first so we met, it was cool and he showed where Matthias is. I am very glad I met him, so we discussed python-central and python-support packages and why we have them both, also with Scott later on.

When I was waiting for Matthias, I sat next to Nicolas Valcárcel, started my laptop and begun looking at some SymPy bugs and Nicolas noticed that and said -- "You are developing SymPy?", I said "Yes.", flattered. And he showed me a bug with plotting and Compiz, so we immediately reported that to pyglet.

In the evening people continued to some kind of a party, but unfortunately, I was already going to some other pub.

Overall, even though I was there for only two afternoons, it was just awesome and I utterly enjoyed meeting all the people I knew from mailinglists and IRC.

Installing a printer in Debian

I finally bought a new toner to my old Minolta 1250e that I didn't use for a few years (because I was lazy to fix it) and I was surprised how easy it is to install it these days:

1. plugged the USB cable from the printer to my laptop
2. wajig install cupsys foomatic-db-engine
3. sudo ln -s /usr/bin/foomatic-ppdfile /usr/lib/cups/driver
4. On http://localhost:631/ I added the new printer in cupsys, it showed my printer over USB, I selected it and then I chose the correct PPD.

And everything just works. The only nontrivial part is the step 3, that was suggested in /usr/share/doc/foomatic-db-engine/USAGE.gz:

If the printers of the Foomatic database do not appear, check whether the
link to foomatic-ppdfile is in /usr/lib/cups/driver:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 25 Apr 19 18:13 foomatic -> /usr/bin/foomatic-ppdfile

If not, create it manually.

Without it, I didn't see the right PPD in the step 4. Maybe it'd be a nice idea to do this automatically (either when installing foomatic-db-engine or cupsys), or am I missing something?

As to the PPDs, one can get all printer IDs by:

$ foomatic-ppdfile -A

and the PPD for my printer by

$ foomatic-ppdfile -p Minolta-PagePro_1250E

However, it's not necessary in the above howto.

FOSSCamp, Friday

Since I live in Prague, it's basically compulsory to go to FOSSCamp. Yesterday I went with Lucas to some pubs + sightseeing, today we went in a larger group to this pub:

and we had a couple of good Czech meals with Plzeň beer:




Seems it tasted good:

snapshot.debian.net saved me again

On one computer I am taking care of, I suddenly started getting:

$ ps2pdf fa_808.ps fa_808.pdf
/usr/bin/ps2pdfwr: line 45: exec: gs: not found

What's wrong?

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
ls: cannot access /usr/bin/gs: No such file or directory
$ wajig find-file /usr/bin/gs
ghostscript: /usr/bin/gs
$ wajig list ghostscript
ii  ghostscript                                             8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret
ii  ghostscript-x                                           8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret

That is really weird, the file /usr/bin/gs is simply missing, even though I have the ghostscript package installed. Ok, let's reinstall it:

$ wajig reinstall ghostscript
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libwine-capi libstdc++5 libopenal0a xgnokii libglut3 libcapi20-3
  libggi-target-x lib64gfortran2 libsvg1 lib64gomp1 libggi2 libgii1
  libgii1-target-x libxine1-gnome cups-pdf lib64objc2
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  akregator gs kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy kappfinder karm
  kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources kdepim-wizards
  kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer kmplayer-common
  kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgnutls26 libgs8 libilmbase6 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
  libopenexr6
Suggested packages:
  kdeaddons-doc-html ntpdate ntp-simple perl-suid egroupware ffmpeg xawtv
  gnutls-bin
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  digikam kde-amusements kde-core kdeaddons kdebase kdebase-kio-plugins kdepim
  kmail kmailcvt kmplayer-plugin knights konq-plugins konqueror
  konqueror-nsplugins korn smb4k
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gs libgnutls26 libilmbase6 libopenexr6
The following packages will be upgraded:
  akregator ghostscript kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy
  kappfinder karm kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data
  kdelibs4c2a kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources
  kdepim-wizards kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer
  kmplayer-common kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgs8 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
36 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 16 to remove and 683 not upgraded.
Need to get 53.1MB of archives.
After this operation, 42.9MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Oops, unstable is broken at the moment. Ok, what now? Well, snapshot.debian.net comes to rescue again. Find "ghostcript", version "8.61.dfsg.1-1" and here we are:

$ wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2008/03/02/debian/pool/main/g/ghostscript/ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb
$ wajig install ./ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb

And all is fine now:

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
/usr/bin/gs