"A shipment to a German distributor was accidently mislabel with "MP3" (The Openmoko can't play MP3's unless modified). That was enough for the German customs to seize it according to European piracy protection laws."

-- http://info.openmoko.se/Home/mp3

"The Linux-based phone, OpenMoko is currently in a patent dispute with Sisvel, as known as Società Italiana per lo Sviluppo dell'Elettronica."

-- http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/OpenMoko-MPEG

Enabling all codecs by default is not a good idea. Think security vulnerabilities in ffmpeg:

http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2000
http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1781

That isn't enough. In bash you can use DEBUG traps to override any command:

lindi@sauna:~$ function f() {
> echo executing evil sudo...
> }
lindi@sauna:~$ trap f DEBUG
lindi@sauna:~$ sudo iptraf
executing evil sudo...
[sudo] password for lindi:

Syscall "emulation" is a very interesting idea since it will spare us from the archive rebuild and will let the user to just reboot to switch kernels without having to touch userland.

However, last time I tried this I couldn't get gnu screen run. I guess some terminal magic is not implemented in the syscall emulation properly? Can you run gnu screen?

My desktop uses nfs as its root filesystem so it is easy to measure how much data it will need to read on boot by measuring network traffic. A complete reboot with "shutdown -r now" generated only 44 megabytes of traffic (including both read/written data and ethernet overhead) so there is clearly no need to read a GB. The system runs debian gnu/linux 3.0 with linux 2.6.18-4-486.

"bash -x foo.sh" produces nice execution trace of a shell script. To debug perl and python I thus have wrapper scripts "perl-x":

PERLDB_OPTS="NonStop=1 AutoTrace=1 frame=2" exec perl -dS $@

and "python-x":

for i in /usr/lib/python*; do if [ -e $i/trace.py ]; then python $i/trace.py --trace --ignore-dir $i "$@" exit 0; fi; done

While these usually produce a lot of output it is usually easier to grep them than to start adding debug prints to the scripts (which may even be in read-only /usr).

society Foo is NOT free. it significantly restricts the actions of MURDERERS, RAPISTS and CHILD MOLESTERS. thus it is clearly not free. laws are not nothing more than anti freedom licensing, and has significantly diminished all our freedoms. society Bar is a truly free place. it allows anyone to beat anyone else over the head with a cast iron pipe for no reason other than they enjoy doing it. laws that stop people doing what they enjoy is a huge step backwards, IMHO.