Become a sponsor of GRASS Community Sprint 2013 !

The GRASS GIS team will organize a GRASS Developer and Power User Meeting, aka 'GRASS Community Sprint' from 2-7 Feb, 2013 [1]. The Community Sprint is a get-together for members and supporters of GRASS and related OSGeo projects to make decisions and tackle larger problems. For this meeting, we welcome people committed to improving the GRASS GIS project and the interfaces to QGIS, GDAL, PostGIS, R statistics, Sextante, gvSIG, OGC Services (esp. WPS) and more. This includes developers, documenters, bug reporters, translators and others.

The outcomes of past editions include wxGUI bugfixing, GRASS 7 time series and 4D data management, translations, implementation of new modules and lots of bughunting, testing, and bugfixing. For interoperability, the new QGIS-Sextante-GRASS interface was completely overhauled and updated. Developers also had discussions on broad topics like GRASS GIS usage on mobile devices, creation of a visual guide to GRASS GIS usage and much more. See [2,3] for details.

The third GRASS Community Sprint is a great occasion for you to support the development of GRASS. With your contribution you will enable more developers to meet. The Community Sprint is an important opportunity for the GRASS developers to discuss and collaboratively resolve bugs, plan the direction for the project and work on new features. Developers and contributors are donating their valuable time, so it would be great if in-kind funding can be made available from within the community to cover out-of-pocket expenses. 

All of the work that takes place at the community sprint will be directly contributed back into the GRASS project to the benefit of everyone who uses it. It is also possible to (symbolically) sponsor specific tasks in which you may be interested in.

This year the Italian OSGeo Local Chapter (GFOSS.it [4]) is in charge of gathering all the donations. Donations should be addressed to:

"Associazione Italiana per l'Informazione Geografica Libera"

Details of bank account:

IBAN: IT32J0335901600100000015079

BIC: BCITITMX 

BANCA PROSSIMA S.P.A. Via Verdi Ang. Via Manzoni - 20121 Milano

Any further question about donations should be addressed to Luca Delucchi <lucadeluge at gmail.com>

On behalf of the GRASS Community I would like to thank you in advance and to wish you happy new year.

Best regards

Margherita Di Leo

for the GRASS PSC

[1] http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Genova_2013

[2] http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2012

[3] http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2011

[4] http://www.gfoss.it/drupal/

Bug in Debian stable in the upgrade process, how to solve it.

I'm happy with my debian stable, but still a bug can happen, and the worst bug is that which happens in the upgrade process, so that you are unable to upgrade your system and the bug will remain there forever - say, like a diamond, a bug in stable in the upgrade process is forever..

..unless you have a friend like David Paleino or you found this post.

The problem:

The problem raised at a certain point when, trying to apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, I got:

=====

[CUT]

insserv: Starting smfpd depends on rc.local and therefore on system facility `$all' which can not be true!

[CUT]

=====

and the Network Manager process was killed. Huh?

The solution:

Edit /etc/init.d/smfpd (a golden rule is to make a backup before). Copy and paste this one in place of your old one:

=====

#!/bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO

# Provides:          smfpd

# Required-Start:    $syslog

# Required-Stop:     $syslog

# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5

# Default-Stop:      0 1 6

# Short-Description: Xerox Unified Linux Driver LPT Support daemon

# Description:       Enable support for LPT port service

### END INIT INFO

# smfpd is a parallel port handling daemon. It needs root privileges

# to use iopl(2), inb(2) and outb(2) system calls.

#

# smfpd uses inet domain socket, this script should be run

# after network initialization.

#

# This script is a part of Unified Linux Driver package.

# If your MFP device is not connected to LPT port, you can safely

# disable execution of this script - uncomment 'exit 0' at the next line.

# exit 0

SMFPD=/usr/sbin/smfpd

test -x $SMFPD || exit 5

PATH=/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin

SMFPD=smfpd

PROCESS_PID=`ps ax | grep "[0-9]:[0-9][0-9] $SMFPD" | awk '{print $1}'`

case "$1" in

check)

if test -z "$PROCESS_PID"; then

echo "Process is not running"

else

echo "Process $SMFPD[$PROCESS_PID] is running"

fi

;;

start)

if test -z "$PROCESS_PID"; then

echo -n "Starting smfpd daemon ... "

$SMFPD

echo "done"

$0 check

else

echo "Process $SMFPD[$PROCESS_PID] is already running"

fi

;;

stop)

if test -n "$PROCESS_PID"; then

echo -n "Stopping smfpd daemon ... "

kill -TERM $PROCESS_PID

echo "done"

else

echo "Process is not running"

fi

;;

restart)

$0 stop

sleep 1

$0 start

;;

*)

echo "Usage: $0 {check|start|stop|restart}"

exit 1

;;

esac

exit 0

=====

Actually, the section you need to add is the one starting at ###BEGIN and ending at ###END, in which the dependencies are listed. If you are not sure, just copy and paste everything..

Then, run apt-get -f install.

et voila! Solved. 

The explanation:

The problem raised during the transition from "classic sysvinit" to "sysvinit + insserv". Insserv was missing the information regarding the smfpd dependency, so it assumed to need $all, but other stuff was missing smfpd, hence -> LOOP!