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Yesterday I replaced my personal debian archive at https://www.littletux.net/debian (which used a simple, flat structure) with a pool based archive. The archive is handled by debpool, a debian archive management tool which is quite simple to set up. It is available from the Debian experimental archive. The main advantages from this tool are that I can use the standard dupload tool to upload packages to the archive, and that it allows to manage packages for various distributions like stable and unstable. To access the archive, it is sufficient to add lines like deb https://littletux.homelinux.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb-src https://littletux.homelinux.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list. Note that www.littletux.net does not work.

Yesterday, I spontaneously decided to replace the XFree86 X server with the new X.org X server on my desktop computer. A simple “apt-get install xserver-xorg discover1 mdetect xresprobe” was sufficient to migrate the server. I already heard that migration is quite simple and problem-free, so I was strained what would happen after I restarted the X server. I was excited that the server indeed started up and displayed the window manager, so at least the basic setup worked. I only had to make two additional refinements:

• I replaced the “nv” driver with the “nvidia” driver. This involved re-installing the nvidia driver, because the installation I used for XFree86 did not work anymore.
• I removed resolutions which I do not want to use; the one which was used as default caused the monitor to run at 60 Hz or similar.

Of course, I also tried some of the new features, especially transparency. To enable these features, the “Composite” extension must be activated with an entry like Section "Extensions"   Option "Composite" "true" EndSection in the xorg.conf configuration file. However, for NVidia cards, this has the effect that the “glx” extension can not be used anymore. This can be changed by adding “Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"” to the “Device” section in the xorg.conf file. Then, applications which use glx (like glxgears) work again. I then activated transparency in the KDE control center. However, the “nvidia” driver seems to be really unstable when activating this feature, the X server crashed several times. So I switched back to the “nv” driver, which seems to be more stable. In either case, moving transparent windows was very slow, and also adding “Option "RenderAccel" "true"” as sometimes suggested did not help. For now, I deactivated the transparency feature again, but I look forward to this being more stable, because it looks really cool!

Unfortunately, LinuxTag, Europes largest Linux event, moves to Wiesbaden next year. The last three years it was in Karlsruhe, the town where I live. So I could simply walk to the event in about five minutes. I also visited it before, when it still was in Stuttgart, which is about 80 km from Karlsruhe. The presentations were always truly interesting and gave me new input. Lets see if I will make it to Wiesbaden next year; its about 150 km from Karlsruhe which is still not that far.

While I introduced myself into python lately, I was also looking for a useful tool to create documentation from python sources. Although doxygen claims to be suitable for python, I did not get any useful results from it (at least not out-of-the-box). I was also not satisfied with epydoc, since it fetches the documentation for all super classes, which is quite a lot for Qt derived classes. Finally, I found synopsis, which created very good results without requiring much configuration. The Debian package was orphaned, and the latest version in the Debian archive was 0.5.0 while the latest upstream version is 0.8.0, so I decided to adopt it. A preliminary package is now available at https://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/synopsis/, the RFS was sent and I hope to find a sponsor soon 🙂