Pallinux: Olly Olly Oxen Free!

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Pallinux: Artwork by Fabio "Pixel" Colinelli

Pallinux: Artwork by Fabio “Pixel” Colinelli

In a world far away, in the dark Land of Digitos only populated by machines and computers, the evil Mister Woo was ruling over all. Over time, this terrible dictator was becoming a horrendous fire-eyed giant, walking the whole day by vibrating the heavy steps into his Kingdom, leaving behind him a trail of smoke and terror. Mr. Woo always wore a long, shabby and dirty top hat that had once been white, so old and ragged that he could not even keep it up straight on his head.

Throughout the Land of Digitos, the inhabitants – computers – were scattered, each…

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Creativity, Innovation and the “Included Middle” logic

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The pressure of the post-modernism is establishing its bases on our general lack of ability to overcome a number of dualisms that have become ingrained in the modern way of thinking[1]. This is mainly due to the strong influence of past centuries’ scientific “Reductionism”, which postulated that any system – to be understood – had to be reduced to its minimum component elements.

However, a so defined system is a “closed” system, which does not interact with the surrounding environment and it can exist (not always) only in a reality-isolated laboratory. The logic of “Complexity”, instead, takes into account the “open” systems and all the interconnections and influences of the system itself with the world around it, in every physical, social, psychological and symbolic aspect…

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Big Data: ask the right questions

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A healthy diet should be enjoyable as well as providing a good balance of nutrients. Dietary advice should provide alternatives so that everyone can achieve a diet which is both healthy and enjoyable. The emphasis is on balance and quantity rather than advising complete avoidance of any particular food. Read more about prodentim.

A healthy diet will include moderate amounts of milk and dairy products, meat, fish or meat/milk alternatives, together with limited amounts of foods containing fat or sugar.

In October 2005 the government issued guidance on eating well (the ‘Eat Well Plate’)[1]. This was updated in 2018 (‘The Eatwell Guide’)[2]:

  • Base meals on starchy foods.
  • Eat lots of fruit and vegetables.
  • Eat more fish, including a portion of oily fish each week.
  • Choose unsaturated oils and use in small amounts.
  • Cut down on saturated fat and sugar.
  • Eat less salt – no more than 6 g a day.
  • Be active and maintain a healthy weight.
  • Drink plenty of water.
  • Don’t skip breakfast.

Government guidance reflects best practice, but is of course only valid at the time of publication. A subsequent study has pointed out that most available data are from European and North American populations where nutrition excess is more likely, so their applicability to other populations is unclear[3]. This prospective cohort study enrolled over 135,000 people aged 35-70 years and without cardiovascular disease, from 18 countries in different geographical regions. Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality, with those eating the most carbohydrates proportionally having a 28% greater risk than those eating the least, although no difference was seen in the risk of cardiovascular disease or cardiovascular disease mortality. Conversely, intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with a lower risk of total mortality, while a higher saturated fat intake was associated with lower risk of stroke.

The following general advice should be given to patients.

Eat a variety of different foods

No single food provides all the nutrients required for the body to stay healthy.

Eat the right amount to be a healthy weight[4]

Women tend to need less energy than men and older adults tend to need less energy than adolescents and young adults.

Regular aerobic exercise is a very important part of weight control.

Eating breakfast every day can help people control their weight, probably just by decreasing hunger for unhealthy foods later in the day.

Eat starch, fibre and wholegrain foods[5]

Eat plenty of foods rich in starch and fibre – eg, bread, cereals, rice, pasta and potatoes, which also contain fibre, calcium, iron and B vitamins.

Wholegrain foods contain more fibre and other nutrients than white or refined starchy foods and include wholemeal and wholegrain bread, pitta and chapati, wholewheat pasta and brown rice, and wholegrain breakfast cereals.

Wholegrain cereal foods are particularly rich in insoluble fibre, which helps to prevent constipation.

Soluble fibre in fruit, pulses (beans, lentils and chickpeas) and vegetables can help to reduce the amount of cholesterol in the blood.

Increasing fibre reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes and colorectal cancer[6].

How to have a successful OpenStack project

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It’s no secret that OpenStack is becoming the de-facto standard for private cloud and a way for telecom operators to differentiate against big names such as Amazon or Google.
OpenStack has already been adopted in some specific projects, but the wide adoption in enterprises is starting now, mostly because people simply find it difficult to understand. VMWare is still something to compare to, but OpenStack and cloud is different. While cloud implies virtualization, virtualization is not cloud. You can click here for Cloud Communications Strategy Consultants in Torrance to help you anytime regarding any kind of cloud security issues.

gpaterno_ebook_webCloud is a huge shift in your organization and will change forever your way of working in the IT projects, improving your IT dramatically and cutting down costs.

In order to get the best of OpenStack, you need to understand deeply how cloud works. Moreover, you need to understand the whole picture beyond the software itself to provide new levels of agility, flexibility, and cost savings in your business.

Giuseppe Paterno’, leading European consultant and recently awarded by HP, wrote OpenStack Explained to guide you through the OpenStack technology and reveal his secret ingredient to have a successful project. You can download the ebook for a small donation to provide emergency and reconstruction aid for Nepal. Your donation is certified by ZEWO , the Swiss federal agency that ensures that funds go to a real charity project.

… but hurry up, the ebook is in a limited edition and it ends on July 2015.

Donate & Download here: https://life-changer.helvetas.ch/openstack

Handling identities in distributed Linux cloud instances

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I’ve many distributed Linux instances across several clouds, be them global, such as Amazon or Digital Ocean, or regional clouds such as TeutoStack or Enter.

Probably many of you are facing the same issue: having a consistent UNIX identity across all multiple instances. While in an ideal world LDAP would be a perfect choice, letting LDAP open to the wild Internet is not a great idea.

So, how to solve this issue, while being secure? The trick is to use the new NSS module for SecurePass.

While SecurePass has been traditionally used into the operating system just as a two factor authentication, the new beta release is capable of holding “extended attributes”, i.e. arbitrary information for each user profile.

We will use SecurePass to authenticate users and store Unix information with this new capability. In detail, we will:

  • Use PAM to authenticate the user via RADIUS
  • Use the new NSS module for SecurePass to have a consistent UID/GID/….

 SecurePass and extended attributes

The next generation of SecurePass (currently in beta) is capable of storing arbitrary data for each profile. This is called “Extended Attributes” (or xattrs) and -as you can imagine- is organized as key/value pair.

You will need the SecurePass tools to be able to modify users’ extended attributes. The new releases of Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Vivid Vervet have a package for it, just:

# apt-get install securepass-tools

ERRATA CORRIGE: securepass-tools hasn’t been uploaded to Debian yet, Alessio is working hard to make the package available in time for Jessie though.

For other distributions or previous releases, there’s a python package (PIP) available. Make sure that you have pycurl installed and then:

# pip install securepass-tools

While SecurePass tools allow local configuration file, we highly recommend for this tutorial to create a global /etc/securepass.conf, so that it will be useful for the NSS module. The configuration file looks like:

[default]
app_id = xxxxx
app_secret = xxxx
endpoint = https://beta.secure-pass.net/

Where app_id and app_secrets are valid API keys to access SecurePass beta.

Through the command line, we will be able to set UID, GID and all the required Unix attributes for each user:

# sp-user-xattrs user@domain.net set posixuid 1000

While posixuid is the bare minimum attribute to have a Unix login, the following attributes are valid:

  • posixuid → UID of the user
  • posixgid → GID of the user
  • posixhomedir → Home directory
  • posixshell → Desired shell
  • posixgecos → Gecos (defaults to username)

Install and Configure NSS SecurePass

In a similar way to the tools, Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Vivid Vervet have native package for SecurePass:

# apt-get install libnss-securepass

For previous releases of Debian and Ubuntu can still run the NSS module, as well as CentOS and RHEL. Download the sources from:

https://github.com/garlsecurity/nss_securepass

Then:

./configure
make
make install (Debian/Ubuntu Only)

For CentOS/RHEL/Fedora you will need to copy files in the right place:

/usr/bin/install -c -o root -g root libnss_sp.so.2 /usr/lib64/libnss_sp.so.2
ln -sf libnss_sp.so.2 /usr/lib64/libnss_sp.so

The /etc/securepass.conf configuration file should be extended to hold defaults for NSS by creating an [nss] section as follows:

[nss]
realm = company.net
default_gid = 100
default_home = "/home"
default_shell = "/bin/bash"

This will create defaults in case values other than posixuid are not being used. We need to configure the Name Service Switch (NSS) to use SecurePass. We will change the /etc/nsswitch.conf by adding “sp” to the passwd entry as follows:

$ grep sp /etc/nsswitch.conf
 passwd:     files sp

Double check that NSS is picking up our new SecurePass configuration by querying the passwd entries as follows:

$ getent passwd user
 user:x:1000:100:My User:/home/user:/bin/bash
$ id user
 uid=1000(user)  gid=100(users) groups=100(users)

Using this setup by itself wouldn’t allow users to login to a system because the password is missing. We will use SecurePass’ authentication to access the remote machine.

Configure PAM for SecurePass

On Debian/Ubuntu, install the RADIUS PAM module with:

# apt-get install libpam-radius-auth

If you are using CentOS or RHEL, you need to have the EPEL repository configured. In order to activate EPEL, follow the instructions on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

Be aware that this has not being tested with SE-Linux enabled (check off or permissive).

On CentOS/RHEL, install the RADIUS PAM module with:

# yum -y install pam_radius

Note: as per the time of writing, EPEL 7 is still in beta and does not contain the Radius PAM module. A request has been filed through RedHat’s Bugzilla to include this package also in EPEL 7

Configure SecurePass with your RADIUS device. We only need to set the public IP Address of the server, a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), and the secret password for the radius authentication. In case of the server being under NAT, specify the public IP address that will be translated into it. After completion we get a small recap of the already created device. For the sake of example, we use “secret” as our secret password.

Configure the RADIUS PAM module accordingly, i.e. open /etc/pam_radius.conf and add the following lines:

radius1.secure-pass.net secret 3
radius2.secure-pass.net secret 3

Of course the “secret” is the same we have set up on the SecurePass administration interface. Beyond this point we need to configure the PAM to correct manage the authentication.

In CentOS, open the configuration file /etc/pam.d/password-auth-ac; in Debian/Ubuntu open the /etc/pam.d/common-auth configuration and make sure that pam_radius_auth.so is in the list.

auth required   pam_env.so
auth sufficient pam_radius_auth.so try_first_pass
auth sufficient pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass
auth requisite  pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet
auth required   pam_deny.so

Conclusions

Handling many distributed Linux poses several challenges, from software updates to identity management and central logging.  In a cloud scenario, it is not always applicable to use traditional enterprise solutions, but new tools might become very handy.

To freely subscribe to securepass beta, join SecurePass on: http://www.secure-pass.net/open
And then send an e-mail to info@garl.ch requesting beta access.

Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

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This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list.

Ciao!

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing.

Let’s see what’s cooking for Jessie then.

Frameworks and libraries

Support for many new media formats and codecs.

The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav’s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates.

libebur128

libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback.

libltc

libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode.

libva

libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland.

Pure Data

A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon’s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil’s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language.

JACK and LADI

LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks.

The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

  • ladish provides the backend;
  • laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system’s whole configuration (including JACK);
  • gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore only Jessie’s jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine with it.

Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA

Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.
A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made available during the Jessie development cycle:

LV2 Toolkit

LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy to use C++ classes. The original work for this was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools.

Vee One Suite

The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and consists of three components:

  • drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
  • samplv1: polyphonic sampler
  • synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer

All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too.

x42-plugins and zam-plugins

LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing.

Fomp

Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen.

Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

  • ab2gate: 1.1.7
  • calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
  • eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
  • NASPRO: 0.5.1

We’ve packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen’s new stereo LADSPA plugins bundle.

A major upgrade of frei0r, namely the standard collection for the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in Jessie.

New multimedia applications

Advene

Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application.

Ardour3

The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make its very first appearance in Debian Jessie.

Cantata

Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon.

Csound

Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features.

din

DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be extended and customized with Tcl scripts too.

dvd-slideshow

dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is provided and available in `/usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/’. and in formats as PDF, with the sodapdf online pdf editor which help editing all these documents.

dvdwizard

DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too.

flowblade

Flowblade is a video editor – like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts.

forked-daapd

Forked-daapd switched to a new, active upstream again dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86!

harvid

HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour.

Groove Basin

Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs, download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs, favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs.

HandBrake

HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly supported codecs.

jack-midi-clock

New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus.

laborejo

Laborejo, Esperanto for “Workshop”, is used to craft music through notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool collection to inspire and help music composers.

mpv

mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements have been added. Note that, although there are still some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and configuration).

smtube

SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes YouTube’s videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers very, very happy.

sonic-visualiser

Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.

SoundScapeRenderer

SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms, ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to higher-order ambisonics.

Videotrans

videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs.

XBMC

XBMC has been partially rebranded as XBMC from Debian to make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian’s Policy. The latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian a good choice for HTPC-s.

zita-bls1

Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen

zita-mu1

Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen

zita-njbridge

Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made by Fons Adriaensen

radium-compressor

Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application.

Multimedia Tasks

With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks.
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks. If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current, existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you.

Upgraded applications and libraries

  • Aeolus: 0.9.0
  • Aliki: 0.3.0
  • Ams: 2.1.1
  • amsynth: 1.4.2
  • Audacious: 3.5.2
  • Audacity: 2.0.5
  • Audio File Library: 0.3.6
  • Blender: 2.72b
  • Bristol: 0.60.11f
  • C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
  • Cecilia: 5.0.9
  • cmus: 2.5.0
  • DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
  • DRC: 3.2.1
  • EasyTag: 2.2.2
  • ebumeter: 0.2.0
  • faustworks: 0.5
  • ffDiaporama: 1.5
  • ffms: 2.20
  • gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
  • Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
  • IDJC: 0.8.14
  • jack-tools: 20131226
  • LiVES: 2.2.6
  • mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
  • Mixxx: 1.11.0
  • mp3fs: 0.91
  • MusE: 2.1.2
  • Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
  • PHASEX: 0.14.97
  • QjackCtl: 0.3.12
  • Qtractor: 0.6.3
  • rtaudio: 4.1.1
  • Rosegarden: 14.02
  • rtmidi: 2.1.0
  • SoundTouch: 1.8.0
  • stk: 4.4.4
  • streamtuner2: 2.1.3
  • SuperCollider: 3.6.6
  • Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
  • TerminatorX: 3.90
  • tsdecrypt: 10.0
  • Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
  • VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
  • XCFA: 4.3.8
  • xwax: 1.5
  • xjadeo: 0.8.0
  • x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
  • zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3

What’s not going to be in Jessie

With the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were abandoned upstream:

  • beast
  • flumotion
  • jack-rack
  • jokosher
  • lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
  • phat
  • plotmm
  • specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo – fork of specimen)
  • zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We’ve also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively maintained upstream.

Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more information see avconv’s manual page and documentation, and mpv’s encoding documentation.

Broken functionalities

rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment.

Activity statistics

More information about team’s activity are available.

Where to reach us

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion.
We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Cheers!

Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

Be right back soon

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A healthy diet should be enjoyable as well as providing a good balance of nutrients. Dietary advice should provide alternatives so that everyone can achieve a diet which is both healthy and enjoyable. The emphasis is on balance and quantity rather than advising complete avoidance of any particular food. Visit https://www.firstpost.com/health/prodentim-reviews-does-it-actually-improve-oral-health-10899351.html.

A healthy diet will include moderate amounts of milk and dairy products, meat, fish or meat/milk alternatives, together with limited amounts of foods containing fat or sugar.

In October 2005 the government issued guidance on eating well (the ‘Eat Well Plate’)[1]. This was updated in 2018 (‘The Eatwell Guide’)[2]:

  • Base meals on starchy foods.
  • Eat lots of fruit and vegetables.
  • Eat more fish, including a portion of oily fish each week.
  • Choose unsaturated oils and use in small amounts.
  • Cut down on saturated fat and sugar.
  • Eat less salt – no more than 6 g a day.
  • Be active and maintain a healthy weight.
  • Drink plenty of water.
  • Don’t skip breakfast.

Government guidance reflects best practice, but is of course only valid at the time of publication. A subsequent study has pointed out that most available data are from European and North American populations where nutrition excess is more likely, so their applicability to other populations is unclear[3]. This prospective cohort study enrolled over 135,000 people aged 35-70 years and without cardiovascular disease, from 18 countries in different geographical regions. Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality, with those eating the most carbohydrates proportionally having a 28% greater risk than those eating the least, although no difference was seen in the risk of cardiovascular disease or cardiovascular disease mortality. Conversely, intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with a lower risk of total mortality, while a higher saturated fat intake was associated with lower risk of stroke.

The following general advice should be given to patients.

Eat a variety of different foods

No single food provides all the nutrients required for the body to stay healthy.

Eat the right amount to be a healthy weight[4]

Women tend to need less energy than men and older adults tend to need less energy than adolescents and young adults.

Regular aerobic exercise is a very important part of weight control.

Eating breakfast every day can help people control their weight, probably just by decreasing hunger for unhealthy foods later in the day.

Eat starch, fibre and wholegrain foods[5]

Eat plenty of foods rich in starch and fibre – eg, bread, cereals, rice, pasta and potatoes, which also contain fibre, calcium, iron and B vitamins.

Wholegrain foods contain more fibre and other nutrients than white or refined starchy foods and include wholemeal and wholegrain bread, pitta and chapati, wholewheat pasta and brown rice, and wholegrain breakfast cereals.

Wholegrain cereal foods are particularly rich in insoluble fibre, which helps to prevent constipation.

Soluble fibre in fruit, pulses (beans, lentils and chickpeas) and vegetables can help to reduce the amount of cholesterol in the blood.

Increasing fibre reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes and colorectal cancer[6].

LADI Tools: first stable release is out!

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During the last month I worked as upstream maintainer of LADI Tools and now I’m happy to introduce the first stable release! So, to answer the usual question “What’s new?”, here is a short description of the changes introduced (taken from the NEWS file included in the release tarball):

Laditools 1.0 «Lady “O”»

Apart from wladi and g15ladi, most of ladi* tools have been renamed:

  • ladicontrol -> ladi-control-center
  • ladilog -> ladi-system-log
  • laditray -> ladi-system-tray

Moreover, a new component has joined the LADI Tools suite: ladi-player. LADI Player is a convenient, graphical VLC-style application providing an all-in-one control interface to start, stop and monitor JACK as well as the session handler. It also provides basic controls for managing studios.

Goodbye PyGTK!

All the code was ported to GTK+ 3 and the new GObject Introspection mechanism.

Code refactoring and cleanup

The code has been reorganized in order to allow the use of Python objects by 3rd party applications.

To start writing code using the classes provided by laditools, simply do the following:

from laditools import *

Two-in-one solution for LADI System Tray

Formerly laditray was an implementation of GtkStatusIcon to put a nice right-clickable icon into the system tray to allow users access JACK controls easy way. It’s been mostly rewritten and now it shows an AppIndicator icon (if the library is available), or fall back to the Freedesktop.org’s old-fashioned System Tray Protocol Spec-compliant icon.

Project’s new homepage

The project’s homepage is now hosted by Launchpad.net, the code is hosted by repo.or.cz and it’s available here for browsing.
Please use the following links to contact the development team:

New up-to-date packages will hit both Debian and Ubuntu soon!

Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

1 Reply

This brief announcement was published in the debian-devel-announce mailing list and I repeat it here for your information.

Hi!

Since there has been a lot happening in the Debian Multimedia world during the Squeeze release, so we figured we should give you an update on that.

Who are we?

In the dark old ages, there were two teams involved in multimedia: the Debian Multimedia and Debian Multimedia Packages teams. Please note that neither of them is related to debian-multimedia.org (which is maintained by Christian Marillat, and is known to break current ffmpeg-based applications like mplayer and vlc in Debian Squeeze.). During late 2008, both teams were merged into one, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, to avoid effort fragmentation. Since then, there has been a lot of work done:

Consumer Multimedia in Debian

Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia.

Squeeze will feature:

  • FFmpeg 0.5.2, finally uncrippled thanks to zack! No mp3/h264 encoder, though. (still in NEW).
  • mplayer 1.0rc3, finally with mencoder enabled.
  • VLC 1.1.3
  • VDPAU hardware acceleration in ffmpeg/mplayer (but feedback is welcome!)
  • Guayadeque 0.2.5
  • gmusicbrowser 1.0.2

Squeeze will not feature:

  • FFmpeg 0.6 (But already available in experimental)
  • Hardware acceleration with VA-API (packages also in experimental, for support on Intel hardware).

Producer Multimedia in Debian

Producer multimedia is software for producing multimedia. Squeeze will
feature:

End user applications:

  • Ardour 2.8.11
  • Audacity 1.3.12
  • Composite 0.006
  • Csound 5.12. The QuteCsound frontend is also available.
  • FluidSynth 1.1.1
  • Hydrogen 0.9.4.1
  • Internet DJ Console 0.8.3
  • Jokosher 0.11.5
  • LiVES 1.3.4
  • mhWaveEdit 1.4.20
  • morituri 0.1.1
  • QTractor 0.4.6
  • Rosegarden 10.04.2
  • SooperLooper 1.6.14
  • Traverso 0.49.1
  • X Jack Video Monitor 0.4.13
  • Yoshimi 0.058.1

Platforms and technologies:

  • JACK versions 0.118 and 1.9.6 (aka, jackd1 and jackd2). You can choose to install any of them (but only one at a time).
  • LV2 plugins are supported. Ardour has support for them, and there are a bunch of them provided in Debian.
  • LADSPA plugins are still supported.
  • DSSI updated to 1.0.0, many plugins are available.
  • FireWire sound devices are supported with libffado, and is supported by JACK.

Squeeze will not feature:

  • JACK session support.
  • Ardour 3 (it’s not out yet, so it did not make it in time for squeeze).
  • SuperCollider. There is a package in the works, but did not make it to Squeeze.
  • Toonloop: This live stop-motion animation editor has been packaged only recently.
  • NASPRO: Convenient library to implement LV2 dynamic manifest plugins. It’s available in Sid.
  • Mixxx: 1.7 series had RC bugs, and 1.8 was too late for squeeze.

Debian Multimedia Blend

There is also an effort to start a Debian Multimedia Blend to give a better overview about what multimedia applications are available in Debian. There is a short list for a quick overview as well as a long package list separated in sections to give a more detailed overview (including translations, screenshots, popularity of package etc). You are invited to help improving the tasks either directly in SVN or by sending patches to Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> or debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org (see below). Note that not all of the packages listed in the tasks pages are maintained by the Debian Multimedia team, since they are aimed at producing useful package sets instead of showing only our own packages.

For those who want to squash some bugs in multimedia packages there is also the bugs page generated by the Blends tools, or our team bug page.

Other activity

The team has seen a lot of growth since the merger. Of the current 52 members of the Alioth team, 20 were added during 2009 and 18 in 2010, many of whom are involved in upstream development as well as the debian packaging. The number of packages has also grown, with 112 of the current 205 git repositories in our team area having its first commit during 2010.

Where to reach us

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org, should you have any questions. We have also decided to repurpose the old debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org address for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Interested developers/packagers can also join us at the first address. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Regards,

Alessio Treglia on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers