While reading the Planet Debian discussions about whether Canonical is evil because it doesn't have all its employees working on Debian all the time -- my last gig was working on X servers, which is absolutely incidental to Debian. Since then, I've done a heck of a lot more Debian work (both incidental and direct) than I did at my last job. I don't think we've actually decresed anyone's Debian time.

Michael Banck wonders about the Ubuntu development model. Two things I can provide constructive answers to are:

• NMUs: no, we don't have maintainership as such. However, we do have unofficial areas -- for example, myself and Fabio take care of X, I do most of the stuff relating to ppp and also discover1 (including the data list), et al. Doing pppoe without a PPPoE setup has been interesting, but oh well.
• Debian: for most all of us, Debian was an after-work thing anyway (or, at least, a small part of work). Nothing's changed here; the only thing that's changed for me is that I haven't gotten around to setting up a chroot yet (only got DSL bumped up to unlimited recently), so I don't have a Debian machine to build on: I get all my uploads sponsored right now.

Bluetooth support in Ubuntu is also pretty flawless. Put this line in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~jdub/warty/ ./
and run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-bluetooth bluez-utils gnome-phone-manager
and you have working Bluetooth support. Brilliant!

The IBM ThinkPad X40, as I've mentioned before, is 1.47kg (less if you get the 4-cell, rather than the 8-cell, battery) of pure love. I couldn't imagine owning another laptop. But, there's something immensely cool about it -- other than its size, its weight, its build quality, its features. It's that, with one boot option and one package, I have working support for ACPI suspend-to-RAM (and proper resuming), DRI, wireless LAN, Bluetooth (more on that in a soon-to-be-written entry), PCMCIA, VGA out, Ethernet, USB, sound, and just about everything else. I don't know if the internal modem works -- but I'll find out tomorrow -- and the SD slot doesn't work, because the SD consortium have only just released the relevant specs, apparently. Other that, we're talking about flawless out-of-the-box support. Other distributions will need to apply the latest patch from acpi.sf.net to their kernel to feel the full love, I suspect.

Two steps ... holy god.

Chris comments on KDE moving to Subversion rather than CVS -- however, don't underestimate the inertia once KDE has moved to Subversion; it'll be incredibly difficult to convince KDE to move again.

... in which our hero performs an install without a CD-ROM drive, seeded almost entirely from /var/cache/apt/archives.

I last installed my desktop ages ago, and since then I've dist-upgraded almost every package that's installed. Installing my X40 has been fun: our bandwidth is incredibly limited by transfer, so instead of grabbing an ISO (not like it has a CD-ROM drive anyway), I decided to attempt a netboot install from /var/cache/apt/archives.

First, I set up apt-move to move /var/cache/apt/archives to a mirror directory, and to mirror something replicating the standard Ubuntu archive. Secondly, I set up dhcpd3 to netboot the contents of pxeboot.tar.gz (found on http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/warty/main/daily-installer-i386), to the trusty laptop.

Now, here comes the fun. Once this was done, I needed to wget the main/debian-installer/binary-i386 Packages{,.gz,.bz2} file, and manually drop the sums/sizes into the Release file, which needed to be altered to specify the right component/suite. Once this file was there, a small for script got every single udeb specified in the d-i Packages file, and dropped it into the pool structure. Once all these things were satisfied, I was on my way to a netboot install, with minimal bandwidth consumed; thanks to Colin Watson for patiently putting up with my stupid questions.