Since I own a N900, and every now and then, I need a package that is not available from Nokia’s, or other community-driven repositories, I decided to host the packages that I build myself on this website. To get the packages, add this to your sources.list:

deb http://debian.dev-zero.nl/debian/ fremantle main

At this time, two packages are available here:

• libncursesw5, copied from repository.maemo.org, because it is only in the SDK repository and it is a dependency of Zsh
• zsh 4.3.12, ported from Debian unstable, built using the Maemo SDK

If any more packages are added in the future, I will write about it on this blog.

Update 5 Sep 2011:

The package ‘libncursesw5′ was removed from the repository, because it is available in downloads.maemo.nokia.com, one of the repositories that is configured on a Maemo 5 device by default.

In my daily work, quite often I come across situations, where I have to post-process files, that are uploaded to a certain place. For example, a third party regularly uploads video files to one of our servers, and when they do, I have to make sure they are transcoded to a different audio and video format. Enter ‘incron’. It allows you, in a crontab kind of way to define commands, that have to be executed when certain files or directories change.

I have an incron-tab entry, that looks like this:

/home/vod/videofiles IN_MOVED_TO /usr/local/bin/process_upload $#

/home/vod/videofiles is a directory, and when a file is moved into that directory (which is done by the uploading party, through the FTP server) and subsequently the inotify event ‘IN_MOVED_TO‘ is triggered, the process_upload script is fired, with the name of the file (specified as ‘$#‘) as its first argument. Couldn’t be simpler.

Take a look at incron’s web page for more use cases, examples and documentation.

After some googling, I found this blog posting, that explains how to record audio from the ‘monitor’ source of a Pulseaudio device. Just what I needed! So I wrote the script below. It uses Gstreamer for the recording, but some ideas for other tools are included as well.

#!/bin/zsh
# A script to record audio from a pulseaudio monitor device
# Needed packages:
# - pulseaudio-utils (for pactl and -if wanted- parec)
# - gstreamer0.10-tools (for gst-launch-0.10)
# - gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse (for lame mp3 encoder)
# - gstreamer0.10-plugins-good (for wavenc)
# - lame (for lame, if wanted)
#
# Ideas from
# http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2009/04/19/recording-from-pulseaudio/

FORMAT=mp3
OUT=$1
d=

while getopts wa i
do
 case "$i"
 in
  w)
   FORMAT=wav
   ;;
  a)
   d=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
   ;;
 esac
done

shift "$(($OPTIND - 1))"

if [ "$d" != "" ]
then
 OUT="/tmp/$d.$FORMAT"
fi

if [ "$OUT" = "" ]
then
 echo "Usage: `basename $0` [-w] <filename>" >&2
 echo "       `basename $0` -a" >&2
 echo "Options:" >&2
 echo " -w               use wav encoding instead of mp3" >&2
 echo " -a               auto-filename, /tmp/<timestamp>.(mp3|wav)" >&2
 exit 1
fi

monitor=$(pactl list | grep -m 1 'Monitor Source' | awk '{print $3}')
if [ "$monitor" = "" ]
then
 echo "Error: no monitor device found" >&2
 exit 1
fi

echo "Using monitor: $monitor"
echo "Recording to : $OUT"
echo "File format  : $FORMAT"

encoder="lame vbr=4 vbr-quality=2"
if [ "$FORMAT" = "wav" ]
then
 encoder="wavenc"
fi

# Some ideas for use of other tools instead of Gstreamer:
#   parec -d "$monitor" | sox -t raw -r 44100 -sLb 16 -c 2 - $OUT.wav
#   parec -d "$monitor" | sox -t raw -r 44100 -sLb 16 -c 2 - $OUT.wav silence 1 0.50 0.1% 1 2.0 0.1% : newfile : restart
#   parec -d "$monitor" | lame -rh - $OUT
gst-launch-0.10 pulsesrc device=$monitor ! queue ! audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! audioconvert ! $encoder ! filesink location=$OUT

I hope it will be of use to anyone.

Debian.dev-zero.nl has carried a Debian package for DCC since it was founded, but it hasn’t been updated in quite a while. The version that was in the archive (1.3.102) dated from February 2009. The latest version, that was released on November 9, 2010 is 1.3.134, and this version was packaged and uploaded to lenny-custom today.

As usual, both i386 and amd64 packages are available. A small warning: the packages have not been  tested extensively, but I run them in production, so any problems that arise, I will fix.

Enough reason for a new backport, so as of now, this version (5.3.3-7tzz1~bpo50) is available on debian.dev-zero.nl, in lenny-custom. It is i386-only at the moment, amd64 will follow soon.

My own changelog additions are:

php5 (5.3.3-7tzz1) unstable; urgency=low

* Packaged for Lenny
* Added a patch to allow the 5th argument of mail() in safe mode
  (001-safe_mode_mail_arg5_ok.patch)
* Change build-dep on automake from 1.11 to automake (>= 1.10) |
  automake1.11 | automake1.10

-- Martijn Grendelman <m@rtijn.net>  Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:35:51 +0100

I am sure, that this version will enter Lenny-backports when it hits Testing, but until then, a Lenny build is available from debian.dev-zero.nl. As usual, both i386 and amd64 are here.

Please note that this package was built against libdb4.8 from Lenny-backports, so you can not install this package without access to the backports repository.

Update January 7, 2011: exim4 4.72-3~bpo50+1 has entered backports.debian.org yesterday, so the exim4 packages have been removed from debian.dev-zero.nl

• zaptel-modules-2.6.26-1-amd64
• zaptel-modules-2.6.26-1-686
• cciss-vol-status
• debian-sipo-keyring
• apache2 and everything related, they are available on backports.debian.org now
• libapr1, libapr1-dbg, libapr1-dev, they are available on backports.debian.org now
• libaprutil1 and everything related, they are available on backports.debian.org now

Many other outdated packages (mostly VLC and other multimedia-stuff) will remain in the archive, but will not be updated anymore. Since I have upgraded my workstation to Squeeze, I haven’t got any way to test the packages before I upload them. Other packages may receive updates.

As usual, the PHP packages are available in lenny-custom, for both amd64 and i386.

As usual, both amd64 and i386 are available.

For more information on secure session renegotiation in OpenSSL, see  its documentation.

Packages are available for i386 and am64, as usual.