Posts on Blog of Julian Andres Klode

Recently a person reported a bug in APT saying that TLS is failing on FIPS systems with MD5 errors, and suggested we call ERR_clear_error() around TLS operations.

Problem statement Currently if you have an automatically installed package A (= 1) where A (= 1) Depends B (= 1) A (= 2) Depends B (= 2) and you upgrade B from 1 to 2; then you can: Remove A (= 1) Upgrade A to version 2 If A was installed by a chain initi…

As I was shopping groceries I had a shocking realization: The active dependencies of packages in a solver actually form a trie (a dependency A|B - “A or B” - of a package X is considered active if we marked X for install).

As you may recall from previous posts and elsewhere I have been busy writing a new solver for APT.

In my previous blog, I explored The New APT 3.0 solver.

APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the –solver 3.0 option.

APT currently knows about three types of upgrades: upgrade without new packages (apt-get upgrade) upgrade with new packages (apt upgrade) upgrade with new packages and deletions (apt{,-get} {dist,full}-upgrade) All of these upgrade types are necessary to…

This is the story of the currently progressing changes to secure boot on Ubuntu and the history of how we got to where we are. taking a step back: how does secure boot on Ubuntu work?

Z3 is a theorem prover developed at Microsoft research and available as a dynamically linked C++ library in Debian-based distributions.

This is an edited copy of an email I sent to provide guidance to users of apt-key as to how to handle things in a post apt-key world.

APT 2.2.0 marks the freeze of the 2.1 development series and the start of the 2.2 stable series.

Yesterday I got a fresh new Pixel 4a, to replace my dying OnePlus 6.

Sporting a beautiful 10.1" 1920x1200 display, the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook or Duet Chromebook, is one of the latest Chromebooks released, and one of the few slate-style tablets, and it’s only about 300 EUR (300 USD).

Ubuntu “Focal Fossa” 20.04 was released two days ago, so I took the opportunity yesterday and this morning to upgrade my VPS from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

After brewing in experimental for a while, and getting a first outing in the Ubuntu 19.10 release; both as 1.9, APT 2.0 is now landing in unstable. 1.10 would be a boring, weird number, eh?

If you have ever used aptitude a bit more extensively on the command-line, you’ll probably have come across its patterns.

In the previous post about setting up a email server, I explained how I setup a forwarder using Postfix.

This week, I’ve been working on rolling out mail services on my server.

(What follows is an excerpt from my master’s thesis, almost all of section 2.1, quickly introducing Go to people familiar with CS) Go is an imperative programming language for concurrent programming created at and mainly developed by Google, initially mos…

As of today, I migrated various services from shared hosting on uberspace.de to a VPS hosted by hetzner.

So, I’ve been using ikiwiki for my website since 2011.

I’m back to blogging, after shutting down my wordpress.com hosted blog in spring.

2017 is ending.

I just uploaded APT 1.6 alpha 1, introducing a very scary thing: Seccomp sandboxing for methods, the programs downloading files from the internet and decompressing or compressing stuff.

APT 1.5 is out, after almost 3 months the release of 1.5 alpha 1, and almost six months since the release of 1.4 on April 1st.

In DebConf17 there was a talk about The Update Framework, short TUF.

In the past two days, I moved my main web site jak-linux.org (and jak-software.de) from a very old contract at STRATO over to something else: The domains are registered with INWX and the hosting is handled by uberspace.de.

We just released the first beta of APT 1.4 to Debian unstable (beta here means that we don’t know any other big stuff to add to it, but are still open to further extensions).

I’m proud (yes, really) to announce DNS66, my host/ad blocker for Android 5.0 and newer.

Abstract I introduce TrieHash an algorithm for constructing perfect hash functions from tries.

Today, I wrote sicherboot, a tool to integrate systemd-boot into a Linux distribution in an entirely new way: With secure boot support.

Did that ever happen to you: You run apt update, it fetches a Release file, then starts fetching DEP-11 metadata, then any pdiff index stuff, and then applies them; all after another?

Ever since it’s creation back in the dark ages, APT shipped with it’s own build system consisting of autoconf and a bunch of makefiles.

I recently found out that I have access to a 1 TB cloud storage drive by 1&1, so I decided to start taking off-site backups of my $HOME (well, backups at all, previously I only mirrored the latest version from my SSD to an HDD).

The APT 1.2.7 release is out now.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Caesar’s assassination APT will see a new release, turning of support for SHA-1 checksums in Debian unstable and in Ubuntu xenial, the upcoming LTS release.

Not only do I keep incrementing version numbers faster than ever before, APT also keeps getting faster.

APT’s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow.

I started transitioning from 1024D to 4096R.

I spent the weekend using almost exclusively my Chromebook 13, on a single charge Saturday and Sunday.

Today, I received my Acer Chromebook 13, in the glorious FullHD variant with 4GB RAM.

Today I not only submitted my bachelor thesis to the printing company, I also released a new version of hardlink, my file deduplication tool. hardlink 0.3 now features support for xattr support, contributed by Tom Keel at Intel.

Today, we worked, with the help of ioerror on IRC, on reducing the attack surface in our fetcher methods.

Since some time, those crappy Fritz!

Today, I decided to set my X230 back to UEFI-only boot, after having changed that for a bios upgrade recently (to fix a resume bug).

Today I made an important change to the python-apt code: It is now native Python 3 code (but also works under Python 2).

I released python-apt 0.9.

This week, a few hours after Lenovo announced the X240, I bought an X230.

The script apt-show-versions is developed by another Debian Developer called Christoph Martin in Perl.

Writing recursive descent parsers is easy, especially in Python (just like everything is easy in Python).