Monthly Archives: October 2015

FFmpeg and Kodi arrived to jessie-backports!

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FFmpeg Kodi Debian JessieDebian has switched to FFmpeg in testing in July but the work on the package did not stop at that point. After careful testing we can now provide official packages for Jessie users through jessie-backports. See installation instructions here. FFmpeg becoming available in jessie-backports also enabled us to provide Kodi from Debian in the same official repository.

Thanks to everyone in the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, especially Andreas Cadhalpun who is also upstream developer at the FFmpeg project, Reinhard Tartler who maintained FFmpeg then Libav then FFmpeg again in Debian for long years and everyone else I could not name here but helped making this possible!

Kernel oops collector is back in Debian!

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oops-debian The Linux Kernel Oops website collects kernel errors from all over the World helping kernel developers finding issues occurring in the wild but they cannot help if no one sends reports to them.

The Kerneloops client used to be part of Debian releases but it has been removed from the archive due to not working with the new collector site.

When I started observing oopses on my machine I first thought of submitting a bug against the linux package in  BTS, but looking at the numerous bugs opened already I looked for a more automated solution which would also help others. Reviving the kerneloops package involved switching it to the new submission URL, fixing a few memory allocation bugs in C (this is the first package I found using Valgrind by default for running tests) and ensuring that upstream was still active.  The last step took the most of the time but finally Anton Arapov kindly accepted my patches and everything was set for the new upload.

The package is now available from unstable and if you feel so (especially if you experience oopses) please give it a try and report any problems you find. I’m also happy to receive success stories about oopses fixed after discovering and collecting them with the client. 🙂

Debian success stories: Automated signature verification

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Debian was not generally seen as a bleeding-edge distribution, but it offered a perfect combination of stability and up-to-date software in our field when we chose the platform for our signature verification project. Having an active Debian Developer in the team also helped ensuring that packages which we use were in good shape when the freeze, then the release came and we can still rely on Jessie images with only a few extra packages to run our software stack.

Not having to worry about the platform, we could concentrate on the core project and I’m proud to announce that our start-up‘s algorithm won this year’s Signature Verification Competition for Online Skilled Forgeries (SigWIComp2015) . The more detailed story can be read already in the English business news and is also on index.hu, a leading Hungarian news site. We are also working on a solution for categorizing users based on cursor/finger movements for targeting content, offers and ads better. This is also covered in the articles.

László – a signature comparable in quality to the reference signatures

The verification task was not easy. The reference signatures were recorded at very low resolution and frequency and the forgers did a very good job in forging them creating a true challenge for everyone competing. At first glance it is hard to imagine that there is usable information in such small amount of recorded data, but our software is already better than me, for example in telling the difference between genuine and forged signatures. It feels like when the chess program beats the programmer again and again. 🙂

I would like to thank you all, who helped making Debian an awesome universal operating system and hope we can keep making every release better and better!