Some years ago Debian forked the Firefox web browser because of copyright issues regarding the Firefox logo.  There were a few other reasons, but that was the main one.  That’s changed, officially as of March of 2010 (mozilla-central – changeset – 39109:99d80bc3f18b), but apparently the actual license changed prior to that.  The logo is still under trademark, but it is free speech now.

A few scenarios exist:

1. Iceweasel goes away.  In this scenario an agreement on Debian modifying Firefox is made, and Firefox replaces Iceweasel.
2. Iceweasel continues as is.  In this scenario the other issues don’t budge, and the status quo is maintained.
3. Iceweasel and Firefox coexist.  In this scenario there isn’t agreement on the issues, but Debian decides to maintain an official Firefox package without changes anyway.

It’s more likely that either of the first two happen than the third, as it would still require extra work in packaging and bug management for the third to occur, and it wouldn’t have that much benefit.  One of the maintainers of Iceweasel (glandium.org: Mind Blowing News) seems pretty sure that Firefox will return, but time will tell.

While they’re at it, I wish that they would find a solution to the libPNG mess.

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And then I upgraded my kernel+mdadm last night; it broke. I was puzzled:

Do some reading and some more reading. Do some poking around to see where things stand. No dice. fdisk -l was showing a /dev/dm-0 device. Never seen that before. More digging. Hmm, dmraid -r is listing my drives. Why? Try removing them… dmsetup remove_all Still no good.

So tonight I dive back into the fray. Eventually decide to see exactly what the output of dmraid -r is indicating about those drives. Turns out that back when I originally created the array (several computers ago at this point) I was using a software BIOS RAID…with dmraid. The metadata was still there, and for whatever reason after all these years (two releases of debian had passed!) it suddenly starts reading that metadata again and usurping control of my drives.

So… dmraid -r -E to nuke the unneeded and mischievous metadata. Back in business.

TLDR: If your non-dmraid, mdadm RAID is suddenly borked, check to see if it’s got some crufty dmraid metadata stuck on there. If so, erase it.

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Well I won’t find out, possibly for years to come.  I play Valve’s games under  Linux (unsupported) via WINE.  WINE’s DirectX support is pretty solid through DirectX 8 and I can play Team Fortress 2, Portal, Counter-Strike: Source, HL2 + Episodes, etc.  They run just fine on my system and I have fun.

As of Left4Dead, Valve has dropped DirectX 8 support.  I look at the game on the WINE AppDB and the word is it runs fine, but slow as a dog.  So I don’t buy it.

This is an example of sales prevention.  Valve already chooses not to support Linux as a gaming platform; their choice.  But now they are cutting off the ability to play their new games via WINE.  Also their choice, but a choice which means that I won’t be giving them my money until I read on the WINE AppDB that things have improved.

And for the record I’ve bought pretty much every Valve game since Half-Life.  I would love to continue to do so.

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