Did you know that Debian's gitlab instance, salsa.debian.org: has ~15.500 users, 79.000 projects, 750 groups, 31.000 forks, 14.600 issues, and 64.000 merge requests? We are active!

I normally wait for a device to be promoted from testing but I just want to start tinkering with the PineTab2 now that the WiFi driver is available.

pmOS is my OS of choice because of pmbootstrap.

Unfortunately, the documentation is not at all clear on how one installs the OS on testing devices: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PineTab_2_(pine64-pinetab2)

I tried tinkering with pmbootstrap trying to figure out how to write the deviceinfo and APKBUILD files and failing miserably as the pmbootstrap build command kept failing.

But silly me, at the bottom of this Wiki page is a link to an MR: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/4208

All the work is done for me! So just for future reference, the steps are as follows:

• Change current directory into the pmaports git directory (cd ~/.local/var/pmbootstrap/cache_git/pmaports)
• Add the contributor's repo as a remote (git remote add Danct12 https://gitlab.com/Danct12/pmaports.git)
• Checkout the contributor's relevant branch (git checkout Danct12/pintab2)
• Proceed with the pmbootstrap init as usual and now the desired device appears in the possible selection since all the relevant configuration files are now present: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Pmbootstrap#Initialization
• Finally, proceed with any nuanced installation details: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PineTab_2_(pine64-pinetab2)#Installation
• pmbootstrap status will not like that you're not on an official branch so I assume that's expected for testing devices (it didn't like it when the git directory was unclean during my tinkering failures)

SCaLE, the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America, will take place for the 21st time on March 14-17, 2024 in Pasadena, CA, USA. Dima Kogan and other Debian enthusiasts will be representing Debian with a booth again. Use the "DEB50" promo code to get a discount. Come by and say hi! https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x/exhibitors?page=1

The 64-bit time_t transition is now in progress in unstable, preparing Debian to deal with the "Year 2038 Problem". https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2024/02/msg00005.html #debian

Updated Debian 12: 12.5 released https://www.debian.org/News/2024/20240210

Call for Debian projects and mentors for the Google Summer of Code 2024. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2024/01/msg00001.html

The release team were advised part way through release that there was the possibility of file system corruption with Debian kernel package: linux-image-6.1.0-14*. Once aware of the issue, we took immediate measures to halt the release of Debian 12.3 with several announcements sent out to mailing lists and social media channels advising users to exercise caution with upgrades while we worked to address and fix the issues. The mirror network has been updated in full to reflect the changes in 12.4, which we now proudly present. Thank you to everyone. #debian #debianrelease

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2023 July 19

Explanation: Birds don't fly this high. Airplanes don't go this fast. The Statue of Liberty weighs less. No species other than human can even comprehend what is going on, nor could any human just a millennium ago. The launch of a rocket bound for space is an event that inspires awe and challenges description. Pictured here last week, the Indian Space Research Organization's LVM3 rocket blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island, India. From a standing start, the 600,000+ kilogram rocket ship lifted the massive Chandrayaan-3 off the Earth. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is scheduled to reach the Moon in late August and land a robotic rover near the lunar South Pole. Rockets bound for space are now launched from somewhere on Earth every few days.

There are 645 tags in the Debtags vocabulary, with 102370 known packages to tag. Of these, 18093 were tagged by humans and 84277 were tagged by robots. #ReleasingDebianBullseye

CD testing is a great way to contribute to the release and get stuck into Debian. liz in Brisbane, AU has just filed her first ever bug report testing a live image! https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCd #ReleasingDebianBullseye

The release of Debian 11 "bullseye" is underway! #ReleasingDebianBullseye

FTP-masters have moved "buster" to the oldstable alias in preparation for promoting testing to "bullseye" #ReleasingDebianBullseye

The bullseye version of the Debian Installer is being moved into its new home. The installer has a long history, you can read some of it at https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/blob/master/doc/history.txt #ReleasingDebianBullseye