Articles regarding Debian

Developing Android applications on Debian

I have just recently bought the HTC Hero phone with the Android operating system. In my life I have had a whole lot of PDAs from Apple Newton MessagePads to Psions to WinCE (unbelievable that Microsoft's crap stinks like on the first day even after ten years of evolution) to Zaurus to - now - Android. Although I was sceptical I must admit that I'm loving most everything that Google does so it's the perfect choice. And although Android is not entirely free Google at least offers the SDK for nuts. And although I had no clear intention of developing a certain application I was missing I still wanted to try at least a "Hello World". So this article is supposed to get you started with Android application development using Debian.

Switching from Lilo to Grub

Debian Sarge by default uses the Grub boot loader. Whether to use Lilo or Grub is a matter of taste. Actually they do not look much different when booting the system. But Grub has a tiny built in shell that allows you to boot certain partitions even if your boot configuration is broken. If you had used Lilo and made a mistake in your lilo.conf you would need to get a rescue disk.

These are the necessary changes to switch from Lilo to Grub...

Becoming a Debian developer

You are contributing to the Debian distribution already and consider becoming an official Debian developer? I'm sponsoring a lot of packages (I once was the third most diligent sponsor) and there almost always comes a time that I get asked: "Actually I would like to become a Debian Developer (DD) myself. What do you think? Do you help me?" I hate that question! ;) Let me explain why.

Using pbuilder to build Debian packages

pbuilder is a tool to use debootstrap for automatic package building in a clean environment. Confused already? debootstrap is a tool to create an encapsulated Debian environment inside a Debian installation. Imagine you run Sid (the "unstable" branch of Debian) and want to build a package for the stable branch Sarge. Then you can use debootstrap to install Sarge below a directory in your file system. When it's done you use chroot to get there and presto you are in a Sarge environment.

Co-maintaining a Debian package with Git and git-buildpackage

Although I'm still not entirely comfortable with Git for revision control I partly use it to maintain my Debian packages. Mainly because hg-buildpackage has been abandoned and git-buildpackage is actively maintained. This article deals with co-maintaining a Debian package with Git and git-buildpackage.

Creating desktop files

Your Debian package should contain a .desktop file if it's a graphical/X11/GUI application. It makes the application available to at least KDE and Gnome without stuffing everything into the ugly Debian submenu.

Christoph's Debian package sponsoring guidelines

I would like to help any developers to get their software into Debian. So I'm offer sponsorship for your packages. I created this page to give you a bit of information about how I think sponsoring can be easy for both of us.

Manage your Debian packages with Subversion and pbuilder

If you are maintaining Debian packages then you probably know the problem that you have a number of upstream versions and revisions flying around your file system. There is a nice way to handle different revisions through the SubVersion repository system: svn-buildpackage from Eduard Bloch. To make things truly perfect you can even use the pbuilder but then it becomes a mess of different man pages and command line options. I have gone through that so you won't have to.

Creating a WebDAV-accessible SubVersion repository using Apache

Creating a Subversion repository through HTTP using the WebDAV protocol isn't that hard. But remembering the necessary steps is.

Syndicate content