Mythtv settings bitrot
Note to self, second in an ongoing series started last year.

If MythTV, after an otherwise innocuous kernel upgrade complete with an upgrade of the required ivtv driver, fails to show live tv even though ivtv itself works, check the settings and make sure the second tuner on the pvr500 card doesn't point to nowhere. Still not sure how a kernel upgrade could affect the setting inside the MySQL db, but what can you say.

On the other hand, the upgrade of MythTV itself from 0.19 to 0.20 was seamless. Oh well.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link

Building ivtv kernel modules under Kubuntu
Note to self: following the next kernel upgrade, when wondering how to rebuild the ivtv modules needed for MythTV, just remember that apt-get install linux-headers-686 really helps: it then really reduces to cd driver; make; make install. Thanks to this page for the reminder.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link

More on relative popularity of Debian by arch
Following Marco's lead with data from Italy, we now have Swedish data from Tollef as well as UK data thanks to Steve. Getting more data should alleviate some of the concerns regarding specific biases as our coverage of users increases, as does our coverage in time as Steve's data covers two months.

The next question then is whether the data reveals any pattern, or confirms or denies what we saw so far. The logical step is to compare this across architectures and countries. Following Cleveland and Tufte, we prefer a chart to a table. Below is a dotplot which shows download percentage by architecture, with grouping by country (with code and data for the chart).

This suggests that Sweden and Italy are more alike than different, indicating that maybe neither is all that unique. The UK has many more downloads for what appear to be less used architectures in IT and SE. That is good news inasmuch as it shows that there seem to be some users for just about every architecture. However, it would be nice to get data from maybe one or two more 'big' hosts to corrobate these findings further.

Lastly, some concerns were raised about various biases from local mirrors, web caches, multiple installs and what have you. These are fair questions as they all affect how Debian is obtained, installed and updated. But for as long as we don't know why that should be different across architectures, this is not a concern for the question at hand. The concerns reflect uncertaintly about the absolute level of users, but barring additonal information (or hypotheses), they do not affect the distribution of users across architectures which is what this exercise is about in the first place.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link

Relative popularity of Debian by arch for February 2005
Marco provided February usage data for ftp.it.debian.org. This is still the only host for which we have public data, if someone has pointers for the us, uk, fr, de, jp, ... hosts, please come forward with it. More data is better.

Saving Marco's data to a text file that is read and transformed by a few lines of R yields a nice table with relative usage percentages (taking out the 'all' non-binary architecture) as well as a cumulative sum of relative usage:

edd@chibud:/tmp> R --slave < it.feb.R
        files.downloaded  percent cumulpct
i386             1762483  96.6123  96.6123
powerpc            34420   1.8868  98.4991
ia64               18224   0.9990  99.4980
hppa                5985   0.3281  99.8261
sparc               1293   0.0709  99.8970
m68k                 987   0.0541  99.9511
alpha                824   0.0452  99.9963
arm                   45   0.0025  99.9987
mips                  14   0.0008  99.9995
mipsel                 6   0.0003  99.9998
s390                   3   0.0002 100.0000
total            1824284 100.0000       NA

In other words, the top seven architectures cover 99.996 percent of downloads whereas the remaining four combined are a relatively scant 0.004 percent, or about one in twenty five thousand.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link

Email is back
Just for the record, email started to be processed again by the @debian.org domain as of late on November 24, 2003. It seems that most of mail from last weekend has now arrived. But just in case -- if you emailed me recently and I have not replied, please bear with me. And/or resend it.

Three cheers for the hard-working Debian admins.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link

No mail via @debian.org
As you may have heard, Debian had a few machines compromised around Nov 20, 2003.

The compromised machines are being rebuilt. In the meantime, accounts as well as backend services are frozen. This affects my email connectivity as just about every past or present email address I have gets re-routed through debian.org. If you contacted me since November 21, 2003, and are waiting for a reply, please be patient. Services are expected to be restored by around the 26th of November. I should be able to reply by the end of the week. Hopefully.

In the meantime, there are two shortcuts. One is my email at work. The other is my account with the address firstname underscore lastname at that big internet portal with the yodel jingle dot com account. That account is still pretty spamfree, hence the caution about the concrete form.

That being said, my thanks go to all the hard working Debian admins for taking care of the infrastructure.

/computers/linux/debian/misc | permanent link