Speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona

Last month I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Barcelona, Spain to attend the OpenStack Ocata Summit where I was able to speak about the work we've been doing integrating Ironic into OpenStack-Ansible.

(Video link: https://youtu.be/taAtFJ7_4qE)

I really enjoyed the experience, and very much enjoyed co-presenting with Andy McCrae - a great guy and an very clever and hard-working developer. If I ever make it to the UK (and see more than the inside of LHR), I'm sure going to go visit!

And here's a few happy snaps from Barcelona - lovely place, wish I could've stayed more than 6 days :-)

Fixing broken Debian packages

In my job we make use of Vidyo for videoconferencing, but today I ran into an issue after re-imaging my Ubuntu 16.04 desktop.

The latest version of vidyodesktop requires libqt4-gui, which doesn't exist in Ubuntu anymore. This always seems to be a problem with non-free software targeting multiple versions of multiple operating systems.

You can work around the issue, doing something like:

sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libqt4-gui VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb

but then you get the dreaded unmet dependencies roadblock which prevents you from future package manager updates and operations. i.e.

You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
 vidyodesktop : Depends: libqt4-gui (>= 4.8.1) but it is not installable
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

It's a known problem, and it's been well documented. The suggested solution was to modify the VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb package, but I didn't want to do that (because when the next version comes out, it will need to be handraulicly fixed too - and that's an ongoing burden I'm not prepared to live with). So I went looking for another solution - and found Debian's equivs package (and thanks to tonyb for pointing me in the right direction!)

So what we want to do is to create a dummy Debian package that will satisfy the libqt4-gui requirement.  So first off, let's uninstall vidyodesktop, and install equivs:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get install equivs

Next, let's make a fake package:

mkdir -p ~/src/fake-libqt4-gui
cd  ~/src/fake-libqt4-gui
cat << EOF > fake-libqt4-gui
Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: libqt4-gui
Version: 1:100
Maintainer: Michael Davies <michael@the-davies.net>
Architecture: all
Description: fake libqt4-gui to keep vidyodesktop happy

EOF

And now, let's build and install the dummy package:

equivs-build fake-libqt4-gui

sudo dpkg -i libqt4-gui_100_all.deb

And now vidyodesktop installs cleanly!

sudo dpkg -i VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb

Planet Linux Australia... rebooted

Recently Linux Australia needed to move its infrastructure to a different place, and so we took the opportunity to build a fresh new instance of the Planet Linux Australia blog aggregator.

It made me realise how crusty the old site had become, how many things I had planned to do which I had left undone, and how I hadn't applied simple concepts such as Infrastructure as Code which have become accepted best-practices in the time since I originally set this up.

Of course things have changed in this time.  People blog less now, so I've also taken the opportunity to remove what appear to be dead blogs from the aggregator.   If you have a blog of interest to the Linux Australia community, you can ask to be added via emailing planet at linux dot org dot au. All you need is a valid Atom or RSS feed.

The other thing that is that the blog aggregator software we use hasn't seen an update since 2011. It started out as PlanetPlanet, then moved on to Venus, and so I've taken a fork to hopefully improve this some more when I find my round tuit. Fortunately I don't still need to run it under python 2.4 which is getting a little long in the tooth.

Finally, the config for Planet Linux Australia is up on github.  Just like the venus code itself, pull requests welcome.  Share and Enjoy :-)