debian.dev-zero.nl

Not available in Debian as of yet, but deserving an audience in the Debian world nonetheless, is SOGo, a fork of the OpenGroupware.org application. To quote the SOGo website:

SOGo is groupware server with a focus on scalability and open standards.

SOGo provides a rich AJAX-based Web interface and supports multiple native clients through the use of standard protocols such as CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV.

It is under very active development, and the upstream developers themselves provide the means to build Debian packages. SOGo is built on the SOPE framework. SOPE is split up in a number of packages, each providing a specific functionality, like database connectivity, LDAP connectivity, iCal parsing, and so on. Both SOPE and SOGo (version 1.0.4) are available in lenny-custom, as usual for both i386 and amd64 architectures. SOGo depends on libmemcached3 (>= 0.33), which is available in lenny-backports, as you can read in my previous post.

As I said before, the basis for these packages was provided by the upstream developers. The only addition I made, are the MySQL and SQLite connectors in SOPE, which were not built and packaged by default. I guess the people at Inverse (who develop SOGo) think we all use PostgreSQL

And now for the bad news…

First of all, I have not tested these packages, beyond the fact that they are installable. I just haven’t had the time yet. Furthermore, SOGo is quite complex as an application, and setting it up properly, especially in combination with mobile synchronization through Funambol, should not be taken lightly. Fortunately, SOGo is pretty well documented. Have a look at the website for more information. SOGo is not bug-free, but the developers are working hard to fix known issues, and they are quite responsive on the mailing list.

If you decide to give my packages a go, I would be delighted to hear about your experiences. You can leave comments on this blog.

In preparation for the build of SOGo packages, to be hosted here,  I backported memcached 1.4.1-1 and libmemcached 0.34-1 from Unstable. Both are available in lenny-backports, for i386 as well as amd64.

A word of caution: libmemcached was built with this particular version of memcached, because it has a build-dependency on a version >= 1.4.1. However, libmemcached does not depend on memcached, it merely recommends it. It is therefore perfectly possible, to install this version of libmemcached alongside an older version of memcached, for example v1.2.2 from Lenny. This may lead to unexpected results.

Since July 20th, a backport of Dovecot 1.2 has been living on debian.dev-zero.nl. In September, Dovecot 1.2 migrated to testing, and on October 1st, it appeared on Backports.org (Bpo). As my backport is already outdated, and I don’t see a point in backporting the same packages as the Bpo people, Dovecot is hereby removed. Please use Bpo.

Today, the archive was updated with new versions of a few multimedia-packages:

• Ffmpeg 0.5+svn20090706-2. A backport from Unstable, only WITH libx264 support and a few more codecs enabled, that are normally disabled in Debian (in lenny-custom)
• Libass 0.9.7-3. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
• Liboil 0.3.16-1. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
• Liblivemedia 2008.07.25-2. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
• Schroedinger 1.0.7-2. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)

The goal of this exercise was, to build recent VLC packages with libx264 support. However, building VLC on Lenny provides a challenge, because the build fails with this error:

configure: error: Buggy GNU/libc (version 2.5 – 2.7) present. VLC would crash; there is no viable work-around for this. Check with your distribution vendor on how to update the glibc run-time. Alternatively, build with –disable-nls –disable-mozilla and be sure to not use LibVLC from other applications/wrappers.

Indeed, the installed version of libc6 is 2.7-18. Unstable contains 2.9-26 at the moment of writing.

I guess I willt try to follow the instructions from the error message and build VLC with –disable-nls –disable-mozilla. Fortunately, there are no packages in Debian that depend on LibVLC.

For now, all packages are available for amd64 only.

Update September 21st, 23:08:

VLC packages are now also available.  My changelog entry is as follows:

vlc (1.0.1-2~tzz50+1) unstable; urgency=low

* Packaged for Lenny
* Enabled libx264 support:
- debian/control: build-depends: libx264-dev, added
- debian/vlc-nox.install: added usr/lib/vlc/codec/libx264_plugin.so
* Disabled NLS support:
- debian/rules: –disable-nls
- debian/vlc-data.instal: removed usr/share/locale
* Disabled Mozilla plugin:
- debian/rules: –disable-mozilla
- debian/control: removed the mozilla-plugin-vlc package and deleted all references to it
* Disabled pulseaudio support, because it requires a (too) recent version:
- debian/rules: –disable-pulse
- removed build-dep on libpulse-dev
- removed vlc-plugin-pulse package from debian/control

So, libx264 support was added, Native Language Support and the Mozilla plugin were disabled because of compilation problems. Furthermore, the PulseAudio output plugin was disabled, because apparently, VLC needs a newer PulseAudio library than the one available in Lenny. Backporting PulseAudio 0.9.17 from Unstable is certainly an option, but unfortunately, that package has several build-dependencies, that are unfulfillable in Lenny, requiring more backports. So this time, I chose the easy way out and disabled Pulse altogether. I’m sorry if that makes my VLC build unusable for you. For everyone else: I hope you enjoy it.

Update September 22nd:

All packages now available for i386, too.

Yesterday, the latest Suhosin extension for PHP (version 0.9.29) was packaged and uploaded to Unstable. I built the extension to work with the PHP 5.3 backport for Lenny, that is available from this repository in lenny-experimental, so you can find php5-suhosin (version 0.9.29-1~tzz50+1) there as well.

Packages are available for i386 and amd64.

Iceweasel 3.5 is now available from lenny-experimental. It is a backport with no modifications from Debian Experimental. In order to get this built and installed, a few other backports were needed so, these are available too.  These are:

• Xulrunner 1.9.1 (in lenny-experimental)
• Libnspr4 (in lenny-backports)
• Libsqlite3 (in lenny-backports)

A note of relative importance:

The source package of Xulrunner 1.9.1 build-depends on Libnspr4-dev >= 4.8. This version is not available in Lenny, hence the  backport. However, the binary package xulrunner-1.9.1 depends on Libnspr4 >> 4.7.1-1. Since Lenny ships with version 4.7.1-4 at the time of writing, installation of Xulrunner 1.9.1 does not require the backport. These versions are ‘hard coded’ in Xulrunner’s debian/control. However, this could possibly cause problems, if Xulrunner uses features from Libnspr 4.8, that are not available in 4.7. You are advised to install libnspr4-0d 4.8-1 from lenny-backports to avoid problems. I still have to investigate if this is actually a bug.

Right now, only amd64 binaries are available.

In March 2009, PHP 5.3 entered Debian Experimental, but until recently, there was no Suhosin patch for PHP 5.3. As of version 5.3.0-3, which was uploaded to experimental on August 25th, the Suhosin patch was enabled again, so I backported this version to Lenny.

As with every version that has ever been available from debian.dev-zero. nl, a patch was added, that disables the safe mode check for a possible fifth argument of the mail() function. This means that even in safe mode, extra parameters can be passed to the MTA. Please be aware of the security implications this might have. Other than that, no changes were made.

Please see this post for information on how to use these packages. As of now, PHP 5.3 is available for amd64 only. Packages for i386 will follow shortly.

Update September 17th:

i386 packages are now available.

Thanks to this excellent article, I was able to build Exim packages with DKIM support. This means that there is now a package called exim4-daemon-custom (version 4.69-11) in lenny-custom, which is the same as exim4-daemon-heavy from Debian, except for the DKIM support. It can be used as a drop-in replacement.  The base for this package was the current version in Testing.

Exim4-daemon-custom is available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Today, a backport of libclamunrar6 from (non-free) unstable (version 0.95.2-1) was added to lenny-backports. This package provides unrar support for ClamAV (both clamscan and clamd) and it works with the version of ClamAV from Debian Volatile.

This makes the custom version of clamav and related packages, that has been in lenny-custom for a while, redundant, so they have been removed from the repository.

libclamunrar6 is available for amd64 and i386 architectures.