Corrispondente primaverile del Linux Day, il Linux Presentation Day è un evento europeo nel corso del quale i gruppi locali di utenti Linux e Software Libero si mettono a disposizione del pubblico per far conoscere il loro mondo, rispondere a domande, mostrare opportunità poco conosciute e — perché no? — divertirsi assieme.

Alcuni gruppi di utenti linux delle province di Varese e Como saranno a disposizione quel sabato pomeriggio, il 30 aprile, dalle 14:30 alle 19 a Tradate, presso il FaberLab in Viale Europa 4/a.

L'evento, a ingresso libero, non è rivolto a professionisti dell'informatica, ma al grande pubblico, e non prevede un programma prefissato di talk formali, ma spazi liberi dove conversare liberamente e senza vincoli di scalette di vari argomenti a seconda degli interessi specifici dei partecipanti.

@Gruppo Linux Como

Ne approfitto per fare gli auguri a @Fabio . E intanto segnalo un possibile baco (o misconfigurazione). Sul promemoria dei compleanni vedo:

Compleanni questa settimana:
Fabio 11 PM Lunedì 29 Febbraio

[oggi]Non dovrebbe essere 00 AM Martedì 1 Marzo?

(e mi chiedo anche come si formatti il testo in Friendika... e perche' mi mette gli acapi dove non ci sono )

Questa sera ore 21.20 ritrovo in sede per una serata su "Treddi", l'orsett-- la stampante 3D costruita da zero dal GL-Como.
Il nostro buon meccanico @Davide De Prisco ci aggiornerà sullo stato del progetto e si discuterà di come proseguirlo.
Prima tappa: plotter 2D!

Nella foto, Treddi in una foto d'epoca

Yesterday I've finally donated to become a Conservancy Supporter.

The reasons to donate have already been explained many times both on Planet Debian and elsewhere; a few weeks ago I wrote a post (in Italian) on the Ninux community blog to spread the word about it.

So, why I haven't donated earlier?

Trying to donate via PayPal from Italy (and, it seems, from Europe in general) requires a PayPal account, which I don't have and don't want to have, so I contacted them to ask for bank transfer instructions.
The first instructions I received were too complex for my online-only bank account, so I asked my bank for help, there was an exchange of emails, further simpler instructions from their bank, a small donation to test everything and time passed.

Finally, the good news: it is possible to donate to Conservancy from Italy (and probably from elsewhere in EU) using a SEPA transfer with minimal commissions and usually available from the home banking websites, so that it doesn't require significantly more effort than using paypal.
You can contact Conservancy via e-mail to get the relevant payment data.

(Conservancy has an account in EUR which is then used to pay for expenses in EUR, so no currency conversion commission are involved.)

Nel caso a qualcuno potesse interessare, un bigino sul funzionamento dei vari tipi di alimentatori:

global.tdk.com/news_center/pub…

( from: righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb… )

The default behaviour of ssh in debian testing has changed a bit: now it uses ECDSA and shows SHA256 fingerprints by default instead of using RSA and showing MD5 fingerprints.

Of course, most listings of host fingerprints still only show MD5 fingerprints for an RSA key.

This is a way to ask a server for its keys and print their fingerprints, allowing some crosscheck.

$ ssh-keyscan -t rsa,ecdsa $SERVER > keys.pub && ssh-keygen -lf keys.pub -E md5
$ # check the results against the published listing
$ ssh-keygen -lf keys.pub

I can think of an attack on this: somebody could intercept the communication, send you the right RSA pubkey and their own ECDSA, and then redirect the communication toward their own host.

Relevant links:

permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linu…
bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2011/0…
enricozini.org/2008/tips/ssh-h…

(Post title courtesy of @Enrico Zini )

I've decided I don't want to keep an ssh key on my traveling laptop, but I still need to be able to authenticate to a number of hosts (and expecially gpg repositories). I also have an OpenPGP smartcard (from the FSFE). A plan is starting to form.

There are a number of guides available, but many of those are obsolete; the following pages are from this decade:

• Using GnuPG (2.1) for SSH authentication
• Using GnuPG for SSH authentication (from the same author, using GnuPG 2.0, includess still current notes on using a smartcard)
• How to use authentication subkeys in gpg for SSH public key authentication
• SSH authentication with your PGP key

I've had some success from outside X, now I need to find out where I should disable ssh-agent from starting every time a start an X session, so that gpg-agent can take its place.

@Gruppo Linux Como @LIFO #gnupg

Quest'anno all'ESC c'è stato un lieve maltempo (eufemismo), ma questa ne è stata la conseguenza :)

Alla fine dell'arcobaleno c'era un pentolone, e credo che a quell'ora fosse già pieno di gnocchi.

twitter.com/martinkrafft/statu…

Tipo un @Fabio a caso....

To be sure not to waste time during a ksp to meet people with whom I have already exchanged fingerprints, I decided to do a quick check of the list.

I had already downloaded a recent wotsap db to ~/.wotsapdb;

$ wotsap $MY_KEY > signatures.txt

I've then edited the file, keeping just the signature sections:

This key is signed by, excluding cross-signatures:
[...]
This key is cross-signed with:
[...]
Keys signed by this key, excluding cross-signatures:
[...]

And then grepped the keys in the kps file in that list (maybe doing the reverse would have been better, whatever)

$ for K in `grep "^pub" ksp-dc15.txt | cut -c 15-22 ` ; do grep $K signatures.txt ; done

The first characters on each line tells you if it is a cross signature (X,X), if you have signed the key (-,X) or if they have signed your key (X,-), so that you can mark them on the ksp list as "ignore", "ask if there were problems with your fingerprint / ID", "ask whether they have received your signatures" as relevant.

I only had a few results, so the next step was done by hand.

Let us image I have a reason to print a text file that is 2965 lines long, is encoded in utf-8 (so a2ps and enscript don't work) and I don't want to destroy a whole forest for it.

I've started by using xelatex to get a nicely typeset A5 page with my file in a monospaced font: partecipants.tex

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[left=1cm,right=1cm,top=0.8cm,bottom=1cm,foot=0.2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{listings}

\lstset{ %
  basicstyle=\ttfamily\scriptsize,
  frame=none,
  keepspaces=true,
}

\begin{document}
\lstinputlisting{ksp-dc15.txt}
\end{document}

This gets compiled into partecipants.pdf with

$ xelatex partecipants.tex

And resulted in 44 pages, 4 less than the 48 needed by a2ps, and printable on just 11 A4 sheets.

I wanted it to be easily manageable while walking around, taking notes into it while standing, so I decided to arrange it in booklet form:

$ pdfbook partecipants.pdf

The result, partecipants-book.pdf was printed (two sided, of course) folded and stitched in the middle.

I could have arranged it into signatures, but this would have required an additional sheet to bring the number of pages to a multiple of 16.

I know that there are electronic alternatives around, and I've also considered just carrying around the file and adding notes (to a copy?) with vim, but I'd trust a paper copy more.

Yesterday, both the FSF and Conservancy announced that Canonical, Ltd. changed their Intellectual property rights policy in such a way that they no longer violate the GPL as it used to.

There are a number of personal comments on the matter by people involved in the case: Bradley M. Kuhn, Matthew Garrett and Jonathan Riddell; the TL;DR is that now the situation is fine from a legal point of view, and it has been solved in a shorter time than usual (just two years! speaking of lowered expectations...), but Canonical is still applying restrictions to non-GPL code that are out of place from a Free Software respecting entity.

This made me wonder about the hordes of tiny ubuntu derivatives out there, which are probably too small to attract attention and risk consequences, but are probably not in compliance with Canonical's policies. Should they rebase themselves on Debian, giving their trust to a community who believes in Free Software instead of a company with different priorities?

Should they start contributing upstream to Debian, and turn themselves into Debian Pure Blends? YES, but this is a different and wider matter :)

Not worn for obvious reasons, but my first pair of split drawers, with a pattern inspired by a number of start-of-century manuals found on archive.org, but adapted to a more modern method.

These were made from an old bedsheet (and they show it, including bleach stains on the side not seen on the pictures), and I have to enlarge them a bit, but they are already wearable.

Detailed instructions to draft the pattern will be available... when ready (probably before the next debian stable release, probably) :)

Lately I have been sewing a bit and since "daguerrotype or it didn't happen", this is a picture of me wearing mostly underwear :)

“Systemd è arrivato, è tra noi e tra noi resterà (almeno per un po’): apprezzato e criticato, di sicuro non ignorato.”

Condividiamo i saperi e prepariamo l’artiglieria pesante. Riusciremo, finalmente, a farci un’idea precisa dell’impatto di questo cambiamento epocale?

Accorrete numerosi, sistemisti GNU/Linux e casalinghe di Breccia!
E’ gradita la presenza di tutti, sostenitori e detrattori.

Relatore: Christopher R. Gabriel

Giovedì 11 giugno 2015, ore 21.20

Eccoci dopo il #SabatoAScuola all'Istituto Sant'Elia di Cantù.

Le altre foto sono nell'album.

Un gran numero di studenti hanno deciso di saltare le lezioni e passare la mattina ascoltando le nostre presentazioni: l'auditorium era pieno.
Grande successo ha riscosso la "tastiera a frutta" di Jacopo, che si vede nella foto qui sopra.

A fine evento chi aveva domande o curiosità si è avvicinato al tavolo, qualcuno già con idee interessanti per progetti da realizzare con arduino.

Qui ci sono i codici dei progetti che abbiamo mostrato:

• Data transfer via mqtt and visualization via ipython

gli altri a seguire...

E' stata un'esperienza interessante che speriamo di ripetere in altre scuole.

Ringraziamo il preside e i professori del Sant'Elia che ci hanno voluto coinvolgere

Sabato 11 aprile dalle 14 alle 20 il LIFO si incontrerà presso FaberLab di Tradate per un pomeriggio a tema libero.

Argomenti che di sicuro verranno trattati comprendono progetti basati su Arduino e schede simili e la prosecuzione dei collegamenti dell'isola lombarda di Ninux.

A couple of days ago this appeared in my system logs

Mar 31 23:59:59  kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

my first reaction of course was "great! they gave us one second more of sleep! MY PRECIOUSSSS", but then I realized that yes, this year there was supposed to be a leap second, but it should have been in June, not in March.

Other people I know noticed the message, but nobody knew anything else about it, and duckduckgoing didn't find anything, so I'm asking the lazyweb: does anybody know what happened?

Update: it seems that this has been traced to a single layer1 ntp server.

Con la presente si indice la riunione ufficiale del GL-Como per la data del 26 febbraio 2015 in prima convocazione alle ore 21.30 e nel caso non dovessero esser presenti il 50%+1 degli aventi diritto al voto in seconda convocazione per il 26 febbraio 2015 alle ore 21.45 e in questo caso senza necessita’ di raggiungimento del tetto minimo.

Ricordo che gli aventi diritto al voto son tutti coloro in ordine col pagamento della tessera annuale che per l’anno 2014 risultano 24 persone.

Ordine del giorno:

• resoconto anno 2014
• presentazione bilancio
• nuovi progetti per 2015
• votazioni per eleggere i presidente ed il vice presidente
• varie ed eventuali

Anche quest'anno si terrà la DUCC-IT, Debian Ubuntu Community Conference Italia: quarta edizione che si terrà a Milano Lambrate sabato 23 e domenica 24 maggio presso il TIM WCAP Accelerator di via Rombon 52.

È aperta la call for paper e chi vuole aiutare nell'organizzazione è il benvenuto, ma soprattutto partecipate: è un'ottima occasione per incontrare un po' tutto il mondo del Software Libero in Italia.

Tutte le info sul sito ufficiale: ducc.it/

@Debian @LIFO @Gruppo Linux Como