Debian

At long last, I've finally updated Debian From Scratch (DFS). For those of you not familiar with DFS, it's a single, full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel. The DFS ISO images also contain a small Debian mirror subset that lets you use cdebootstrap, along with the other utilities on the CD, to perform a manual, "Gentoo-like" installation. It also serves as an excellent rescue CD, with a full compliment of filesystem tools, backup/restore software, and a development environment complete enough to build your own kernels.

DFS also refers to dfsbuild, the tool that generates DFS images. dfsbuild is available as a Debian package. dfsbuild is designed to make it trivial to build your own custom DFS images. You can have your own set of Debian packages on your images, your own kernels, etc. Unlike many other systems, you can go from the example dfs.cfg to a customized DFS build in just a few minutes, even if you've never used dfsbuild before.

Version 0.99.0 is a from-scratch rewrite and port to Haskell. You can read the full list of new features in the announcement, but the biggest is that it now supports standard Debian initramfs kernels in addition to ones that have enough drivers statically linked to be able to read the CD-ROM.

You can also download my DFS images or browse the docs online.

From the netmaze package tracking page:

Suramya Tomar has written a very nice tutorial on installing Debian from my Debian From Scratch images (or from DFS images you build yourself). Nice and thorough work.

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a fairly unique organization. It was originally created to be the legal entity that holds Debian's assets and can receive donations for it, though today it also has several other member projects. SPI is New York corporation, and a 501(c)3 not-for-profit.

I call it "homeless" because, like Debian, SPI has no physical home. There is no SPI office. Discussions about SPI are held online. Even the SPI board meetings and annual meetings are held online. This is a confusing concept to many people, but it makes perfect sense to us geeks. We have board members from the USA, Canada, UK, and Germany, at least. SPI maintains PO boxes for receiving mail, and that's about as close as it gets to a real physical presence.

I've been on SPI's board of directors for the last two years, and have been the SPI president since July. Sometimes this is a surreal experience.

Over its 8-year lifetime, SPI has had quite a few problems. A few years ago, SPI's board had trouble meeting because so many members didn't bother showing up that quorum wasn't met. At one point, SPI was without both a president and a treasurer because both of them seemed to suddenly lose all interest in SPI, or returning e-mails. As you might imagine, most of my time on the board has been occupied, in one way or another, with trying to clean up things from the past while still keeping the present held together.

One main cause of this, and a problem still today, is lack of interest. Most of Debian's developers are content to just ignore SPI, prefering to code instead of worry about getting stuff from the PO box to the bank, preparing tax returns, and all the other annoying things that go along with running a non-profit. So we don't have many volunteers to do these things. That means the people that do volunteer burn out. And, to date, there hasn't been enough support to obtain paid help.

I'm sure this isn't a problem unique to SPI. I suspect that many non-profit organizations have had trouble finding people to handle all the details of running the organization. Our church, for instance, sometimes has trouble finding enough people to work on maintaining the building.

I wonder if being "homeless" hurts us, because it's easier to give up on a task when there's nobody looking at you in the face wondering why it's not done.

So, I'd like to end with two questions:

How do you think SPI could get more people interested in helping out? Or do you think that we have a different problem entirely?

Newsforge has a nice article about Debian From Scratch, my Debian install-it-yourself CD, rescue CD, and CD builder package. I must say, Bruce Byfield's instructions are more complete than my own documentation for it.

I now use DFS for most of my new Debian installations. Best of all, porting it to new archs is trivial.

Debian's Haskell packages have been stuck out of testing for some time. I learned that they're going in today, though, finally! There are also several other packages that this will push into testing, including my own MissingH.