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Burgers 2016

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Debian Planet Debian Travel Radio Planet FSFE Community Hacking
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Me and Ana travelled to Cambridge last weekend for the Debian UK BBQ. We travelled by train and it was a rather scenic journey. In the past, on long journeys, I’ve used APRS-IS to beacon my location and plot my route but I have recently obtained the GPS module for my Yaesu VX-8DE and I thought I’d give some real RF APRS a go this time.

While the APRS IGate coverage in the UK is a little disappointing, as is evidenced by the map, a few cool things did happen. I recieved a simplex APRS message from a radio amateur 2M0RRT with the text “test test IO86ML” (but unfortunately didn’t notice until we’d long passed by, sorry for not replying!) and quite a few of my packets, sent from a 5 watt handheld in Cambridge, were heard by the station M0BPQ-1 in North London (digipeated by MB7UM).

My APRS Position Reports for the Debian UK BBQ 2016

Some of you will know that since my trip to the IETF in Berlin, I’ve been without a working laptop (it got a bit smashed up on the plane). This also caused me to miss the reminder to renew the expiry on my old GPG key, which I have now retired. My new GPG key is not yet in the Debian keyring but can be found in the Tor Project keyring already. A request has already been filed to replace the key in the Debian keyring, and thanks to attendees at the BBQ, I have some nice shiny signatures on my new key. (I’ll get to returning those signatures as soon as I can.)

We’ve been making a lot of progress with Debian Live and the BBQ saw live- tasks being uploaded to the archive. This source package builds a number of metapackages, each of which configures a system to be used an a live CD for a different desktop environment. I would like for as much of the configuration that can be done within the image as possible to be done within the image, as this will help with reproducibility. A new upload for live-wrapper should be coming next week, and this version will allow these live-task-* packages to be used to build images for testing. I hope to have weekly builds for the live images running very soon.

As I’ve been without a computer for a while, I’m just getting back into things now, so expect that I’ll be slow to respond to communication for a while but I’ll also be making commits and uploads and trying to clear this backlog as quickly as I can (including my Tor Project backlog).

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