October 2017 – Guy Rutenberg

Installing Firefox Quantum on Debian Stretch

Debian only provides the ESR (Extended Support Release) line of Firefox. As a result, currently, the latest version of Firefox available for Debian Stretch is Firefox 52, which is pretty old. Lately, Firefox 57, also known as Quantum, was released as Beta. It provides many improvements over older Firefox releases, including both security and performance.

Begin by downloading the latest beta (for Firefox 57) and extract it to your home directory:


$ wget -O firefox-beta.tar.bz2 "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-beta-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US"
$ tar -C ~/.local/ -xvf firefox-beta.tar.bz2

This installs Firefox to your current user. Because Firefox is installed in a user-specific location (and without root-priveleges), Firefox will also auto-update when new versions are released.

If you prefer using the stable version of firefox, simply replace the first step by


$ wget -O firefox-stable.tar.bz2 "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US"

Next, we take care of desktop integration. Put the following in ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-beta.desktop:


[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Firefox Beta
Exec=/home/guyru/.local/firefox/firefox %u
X-MultipleArgs=false
Icon=firefox-esr
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;

Duply credential error when using Amazon S3

Duply is a convenient wrapper around duplicity, a tool for encrypted incremental backups I’ve used for the last couple of years. Recently, after a recent upgrade, my Amazon S3 backups failed, reporting the following error:

    'Check your credentials' % (len(names), str(names)))
NoAuthHandlerFound: No handler was ready to authenticate. 1 handlers were checked. ['HmacAuthV1Handler'] Check your credentials

Boto, the backend duplicity relies on for the Amazon S3 backend, requires to pass authentication parameters through the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables. As different backends require different variables, duply used to make that transparent, one would just set TARGET_USER and TARGET_PASS and duply would take care of the rest. However, duply 1.10 broke compatibility and requires you to set the variables yourself. Hence, the fix is to replace the TARGET_* variables with exported AWS_* variables:

# TARGET_USER='XXXXXXXXXXXX'
# TARGET_PASS='XXXXXXXXXXXX'
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='XXXXXXXXXXXX'
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='XXXXXXXXXXXX'

Patching an Existing Debian Package

This tutorial walks you through patching an existing Debian package. It is useful if you want to create a .deb of a package after fixing some bug or modifying the source in any other way. We will hugin as our example.

We start by fetching the source package

$ apt-get source hugin
$ cd hugin-2017.0.0+dfsg

We will need a tool named quilt to make the process easier.

# apt install quilt

Before using quilt we want to make it aware of the debian/patches directory which holds the patches. Adding the following lines to ~/.quiltrc will make quilt search up the directory tree the debian/patches directory.

d=. ; while [ ! -d $d/debian -a `readlink -e $d` != / ]; do d=$d/..; done
if [ -d $d/debian ] && [ -z $QUILT_PATCHES ]; then
        # if in Debian packaging tree with unset $QUILT_PATCHES
        QUILT_PATCHES="debian/patches"
        QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--reject-format=unified"
        QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index --color=auto"
        QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index"
        QUILT_COLORS="diff_hdr=1;32:diff_add=1;34:diff_rem=1;31:diff_hunk=1;33:diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33"
        if ! [ -d $d/debian/patches ]; then mkdir $d/debian/patches; fi
fi

Now starts the actual patching process. The patches are applies in series, and our new patch should be the last one. We start by applying any existing patches, and then creating a new patch

$ quilt push -a
$ quilt new 44_setlocale.patch

I chose the 44_ prefix because hugin already has a patch named 43_fallbackhelp.patch and the convention is naming patches so the names reflect the order they are applied. Next we specify to quilt which files we modify and then we edit them.

$ quilt add src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp
$ vim src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp

Alternatively, instead of editing the files manually, quilt import can be used to import an existing patch.

Each patch comes with its own metadata to let other people know who wrote it and what it does. Use

$ quilt header --dep3 -e

to edit this metadata. For example:

Description: Call setlocale()
This fixes a bug in wxExecute, see https://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/16206
The patch has been submitted to upstream, https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hugin-ptx/FCi7ykPDZ5E/3w8E5U1SCQAJ
Author: Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>
Last-Update: 2017-10-04
---
This patch header follows DEP-3: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/
See [DEP-3](http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/) for more details about the different fields.

After we finish editing we finalize the patch, and unapply all the patches

$ quilt refresh
$ quilt pop -a

Now, you can continue to build the deb from source as usual. We use debchange to create a new version, and debuild to build the package. After the package is build it can be installed using debi

$ DEBEMAIL="Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>" debchange --nmu
$ debuild -us -uc -i -I -j7

Sources:

UsingQuilt