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Thu, 03 Dec 2009 When you just read the following sentence:
"usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer".
You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone. The online local newspaper has a comment that seems quite to the point to me:
"If as sysadmin you introduce Linux you'll be accounted for eventual failures,
while with softies people just accept the shortcomings and won't blame you." P.S.: Wienux got setup by inexerienced people having no prior exposure to Open Source. The project setup included a calculated failure from the start. Tue, 27 Oct 2009
HTC Magic 90 days Android usage
I love the fact that phones are ready to get a decent OS. I bought the phone for better connectivity and to get GPS goodness. 90 days later seems a good time to review the pros and cons:
Of course Android still seems like an alien sandboxed Linux, but I must say that the average usage capability of the mobile phone is very nicely enhanced. P.S. Using allmost daily also Google Talk, Ultimate Stopwatch & Timer, Finance, GPS Status and the ultra cool Google Sky Map. Wed, 21 Oct 2009planet.teilchen.at is a shiny new selected blog roll of prominent Particle Physics blogs. Reading it should keep you updated on progress at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as on new discoveries in High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Cosmology, advances in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), String Theory, Black Holes and many other hot physics topics. Most posts should be readable for scientifically interested public. Enjoy a daily read. www.teilchen.at is the Austrian outreach site of Austrian particle and nuclear physicists. Authors are leading austrian scientists. The site just got relaunched with new features including some socialweb goodies (planet, share links on the bottom, better readability, noframes, ..). Happy if you send corrections or suggestions to mattems@teilchen.at. Tue, 20 Oct 2009Vincent Sanders took notes during all our meetings at the Portland Linux Plumbers Conference: Debian Kernel Group Meeting. The condensed form has been posted today as Bits from the kernel team. In the case of feedback I'd highly recommend to bring the Debian Kernel Mailinglist into the loop. The meeting decisions were done by the team as entity. Responding to the deprecation of some external patches (Vserver, Xen Dom0): None of above patches have an upstream that supported the Lenny released version. Both have troublesome bugs in Lenny and thus are not in a condition one would expect from a stable release. If you want to help and have continued release of those beyond squeeze the answer is easy: Get them merged upstream. Openvz supports Lenny linux-2.6 version actively and promised to keep up with their work for Squeeze. It has been a very productive meeting with lots of problems^Witems discussed. Interesting tracks for better cooperation between distributions, heavy technical tracks and loud BOFS. Quite some work has already been picked up since (Bug scripts, 2.6.31 experimental uploads, DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=N support, package descriptions improvements, piuparts install fix, DFSG firmware clean, preempt, ..). So thanks a lot to Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader) for pushing the meeting, to Steve Langasek for setting it up on site and of course to everyone who contributed. Read aboves report for the full picture. :-) Tue, 24 Mar 2009Latest Tasmanian Devil Linux 2.6.29 adds quite a lot of new features: Kernelnewbies 2.6.29 Overview. Thanks a lot to the FTP Master Team for making possible the same day upload. Big thanks also for the regular testers of the rcX trunk snapshots. Mon, 09 Mar 2009
git: Throw away first X commits of a repository
Today got asked by a colleague, who wanted to throw away the early history of his repo. git allows you easily to rewrite the history start with: echo $FIRST_SHA >> .git/info/graft git filter-branch -f Then with interactive git rebase you can rewrite this important initial commit. Of course you have to define $FIRST_SHA and your repo shouldn't be dirty. Thu, 05 Feb 2009
initramfs-tools new Lenny features
initramfs-tools design principle is to ship a generic initramfs. The design explicitly allows lots of customization through hook and boot scripts. A previous post focused on the history of initramfs-tools. Several contributors enhanced initramfs-tools since the Debian Etch release so the non exclusive new feature list:
As bonus to some cleanup and docs update we have also seen a Ubuntu sync and are not too diverged. Fri, 19 Sep 2008
playlist sept. 2008
double *bounce* triple *bounce* Thanks to the Virtuzzo developers for forward porting the OpenVZ patch to 2.6.26. It uses a lot of the already merged namespace features (For interested peoples linux-next carries interesting sysfs patches). The openvz upstream merge statistic is impressive. The namespace solution allows low overhead, while still running multiple Linux distributions in individual containers on the same box. Control over the network vitalisation is gained as a resource management for CPU power, I/O bandwidth and disk space. Live migration including snapshotting is possible too. The Debian 2.6.26 Linux images will feature not only better Xen vitalisation support, kvm port to new archs, but also an opvenvz flavour. Please don't forget to install proper vzctl userspace support as the correct dependencies have not yet been added. Supported archs will start with both x86 and the ia64 archs. Tomorrows linux-2.6 Debian trunk snapshots will already build openvz. Thanks for your feedback. P.S.: 2.6.26 is the targeted kernel for Lenny, we hope to convince Debian installer people to pick it up soonest - 2.6.25 is a not so bad backup plan as release hasn't fully approved 2.6.26 before extensive unstable testing. Wed, 25 Jun 2008
Open Source Graphic Drivers - oops less often
If you haven't read yet: Linux Graphics, a Tale of Three Drivers. The hard data is based on reports thanks to kerneloops.org. It matches quite evenly our bug experience on the Debian Linux images. As already stated "Open Source Graphic Drivers - They don't kill kittens". The unnamed company claims no need for open drivers. Hardware vendors need not to forget that they don't get revenues from the drivers side. The conclusion is to buy hardware, where the vendor cares about Linux support. That means documents the hardware and enhances current free xorg with all needed goodies of enhanced power support and last but not least 3D acceleration support. Fri, 23 May 2008
"Open Source Graphic Drivers - They don't kill kittens"
People don't seem to get that once you load a 1MB binary blob into your kernel you are no longer running a free operating system. There is no way to fix it. No way to see what is going wrong. Fedora 9 is shipping the latest xorg Release. It features major improvements for the Intel and Radeon drivers. The well known randr features got pushed even more. Plus gaining better 2D and 3D effects and important power saving improvements. Thanks to all the xorg hackers! Big blame on a unnamed company that can't keep up with latest Linux (Xen gained paravirt_ops support in 2.6.24 - oh yeah but we are still on 2.6.18 state). To truly support Linux you'd have to first release your specs and then help existing xorg hackers. Even Via seem to have got the message lately after years of no transparence. Tue, 29 Jan 20082.6.24 has been uploaded on Saturday and passed NEW on Monday. It will be soonest available for all archs. If we don't get enough test coverage or things go bad 2.6.22 will be the fallback for Etch+half. The images install in Lenny/testing just fine. So please give it a spin. Known Issues are still missing VServer and Xen images, bnx2 + snd-cs46xx disabled due to firmware issue and ACPI userland still relying on old interfaces (for example #462305). For more adventurous souls the kernel buildserver will continue to track latest Linus git daily snapshot (enhanced ext4 should land soon). 2.6.24 will also soon be pushed to Testing. I repeat this is not the real Etch+half kernel yet as there will be some config changes for it, but it is pretty close. Thanks for your 2.6.24-rc7 feedback. Fri, 11 Jan 20082.6.24-rc7 is available on 5 architectures (amd64, i386, powerpc, s390, sparc). Please add the following line to your Lenny or Sid box sources.list and report back: deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel trunk main This is not yet the real Etch + 1/2 kernel, but comes pretty close. According to our initial testing and user feedback 2.6.24 promises to be a great release. It will help Etch to have proper hardware support for newer hardware, has better power efficiency due to tickless kernel, enhanced wireless card support, the CFS scheduler and much more... It is a Debian novelty to provide an supported optional Linux kernel upgrade for a stable release. This is not the final as due to incompatible user interface the Etch build will have the old firewire stack. Once aboves land in Sid and got broader coverage will announce the Etch snapshots. So please give it a shot on your Testing/Unstable boxes. Mon, 26 Nov 2007
Sony VGC Ubuntu Install
playlist nov. 2007
See you in Flex for Miss Kittin. Fri, 28 Sep 2007 Apparently Scott James Remnant in his article on version control systems confuses arch and git. One can only speculate that his short git usage stems from the pre 1.0 days, where you had to use higher level tools (called porcelain) to happily work on git. A funny anecdote is that Scott back in his dpkg hacking year promoted arch heavily. Ubuntu^Wbzr propaganda spreads speed gains as big bonus of the last major releases. In order to be able to do that you have to start with a terrible baseline. Testing bzr on middle sized repos is no fun at all. The bzr pain inside launchpad must be beyond imagination. Nowadays it is much easier to hack on mdadm than on lvm2. The reason is that later project uses rusty cvs. With git it is really easy to contribute back. Either you mail the patches or publish your repository. git will help you along on each way. The other very big bonus of git is the big community around git. It is a community excited around building and delivering the best version control system. The git development does regular surveys on git usages and incorporates back the wishlists. The most "funny" way to use git is to run it as cvsserver. You may believe me or not i have seen git cvsserver emulation usage in the wild. Tue, 28 Aug 2007
YAPC::Europe 2007
Random notes on effective bugs cleanup on a bigger scale: The usb modem works out of the box with current Linux 2.6.23-rc2 (why would you use older ;-). usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8 usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice option 2-2:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0 option 2-2:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1For lazy guys wvdial drei the wvdial.conf for 3 connectivity (hint - fix pin): [Dialer drei] Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 SetVolume = 0 Dial Command = ATDT Init1 = ATZ ;Init2 = AT+CPIN=1234 Init3 = ATE1V1&D2&C1S0=0+IFC=2,2 Init4 = AT+IPR=115200 Init5 = ATE1 Phone = *99# Stupid Mode = 1 Init8 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","drei.at","0.0.0.0",0,0 Dial Attempts = 2 Username = xx Password = xx Current mood very happy. :) Aboves means connectivity almost everywhere in Austria due to A1 network fallback. Thu, 02 Aug 2007xorg and openoffice.org started with a cleanup of their bug reports. It is really great that compared to 2-3 years ago major cores of the Debian OS in unstable are quite in sync with upstream. Thus it is easy to forward to upstream the interesting part of bugs. The linux-2.6 bugs count reached that weekend almost 850 open bugs. Seeing that it gets unmanageable I'll decided to get it down to a target of 100 bugs. I'll blog from time to time about the progress. The process consists of pinging quite some bug reports against old Linux images and closing a huge swap of duplicate or no longer relevant bug reports. I expect the signal to noise ratio getting better once the bug count gets denser. The current side effect was to forward 1 patch upstream and to get 2 easy low hanging fruits fixed in latest linux-2.6 trunk. Thanks to enabling CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IO_TRACE trunk gains support for the blktrace(8). blktrace does direct IO block layer tracing - see also blktrace guide. Fri, 20 Apr 2007
Fun with Legend Annotations in Graphs
E\sT\N \f{Symbol}t\0 f
Once you start typing such strings blindly, you know that you have been generating lots of graphs with xmgrace. :)LaTeX equivalent would be E_T \tau fTue, 10 Apr 2007
Happy switch from bzr to git
* Push command - Defaults on the non-obvious old sftp protocol. Worked with rsync on some very ancient version. * Repo format - Changes on every major upgrade. * Patchlevel - Probably for svn compat reason the chosen default patchlevel is -p0 not -p1. Latest initramfs-tools repo is available at: Thanks to tailor it is now possible to move from different version control systems. For git as target repository it is recommended to use latest upstream either directly via darcs or at least install the unstable version. The etch version throws strange python backtraces. Wed, 14 Mar 2007
ext[23] online resizing
nancy:/root# egrep usr /proc/mounts /dev/mapper/nancy_vg1-usr /usr ext3 rw,noatime,nodiratime,data=ordered 0 0Now let's extend a bit that logical volume: nancy:/root# lvextend -L+700M /dev/nancy_vg1/usr Extending logical volume usr to 4.68 GB Logical volume usr successfully resizedNext easy step is to invoke resize2fs nancy:/root# resize2fs /dev/nancy_vg1/usr resize2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006) Filesystem at /dev/nancy_vg1/usr is mounted on /usr; on-line resizing required old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1 Performing an on-line resize of /dev/nancy_vg1/usr to 1227776 (4k) blocks. The filesystem on /dev/nancy_vg1/usr is now 1227776 blocks long.Update: Mika of course already blogged about ext3 online resizing. Bug #400797 is a very good reason not to use ext2resize. I remember a post from Theodore Tso on it's bad code quality. Don't trust it. Tue, 13 Mar 2007
Yeah i've danced all night in Florence on Ellen Allien sounds, explains why she shows up twice - great djane. :) Meike, thanks for this funny "meme". By the way out of lazy web how did you fix the blosxom timezone toppost trouble? (urggs got title year wrong) update: *doing* *doing* *doing* everywhere ;) Mon, 08 Jan 2007
Unbreakable IBM
linux-2.6 2.6.18 status
Early Userspace Fun
network state monitoring
ip monitor allTue, 18 Jul 2006
Set your email per git repo
git repo-config user.email bla@foo.orgMon, 17 Jul 2006
Git server setup
grep git /etc/inetd.conf # git server git stream tcp nowait root /usr/bin/git-daemon git-daemon --inetd --syslog --export-all --base-path=/var/cache/gitAdd the git service: grep git /etc/services git 9418/tcp # gitNow add your users in /var/cache/git/$user and give them write rights. For the fancy web interface you need those settings: cat /etc/gitweb.conf # path to git projects (Latest gitweb has branches for mod_perl usage for now this is enough: egrep git /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ssl ScriptAlias /git /usr/lib/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgiSmall sample project list: mattems%2Fklibc%2F.git maximilian+attemsMon, 03 Jul 2006
git cheat sheet
# clone the last revision localy git clone /path/.git # clone repo from remote pc git clone git+ssh://user@host/path/.git # create your own branch git branch <username> # set your email and name which will show up in the commits git repo-config user.email "user@host.org" git repo-config user.name "firstname name" # show latest changes git log git log <file> git show git show <commitid> # check which branch currently is active git branch # create and use a test branch git checkout -b test <hackcodehackcompilehackcompile> # commit either all or some parts related to the files # please don't forget to add an meningfull desc # the first line is the subject, all below the body git commit -a git commit file # merge your test branch once your happy back to your branch git checkout username git pull . test # undo all local modification as they b0rk git checkout -f # push your changes to the repo all can have access to git push git+ssh://user@host/path/.git branch # eventually delete the test branch git branch -D test # tag the current revision git revert <commit-id> # change commit message to last edit # (yes that's the only one you can change others are protected) git commit --amend # delete last commit git reset HEAD^ # cherry-pick a change from one local branch to another local branch. git checkout <first local branch> git log path/to/changed/file git checkout <second local branch> git cherry-pick <sha1 refspec from the previous 'git log' output> # merging others changes git fetch git+ssh//user@host/path/.git mater:incoming git log mater..incoming git checkout mater git pull . bob-incomingThu, 25 May 2006
Kexec allows quickboot
kexec -l -t bzImage --command-line="ro root=/dev/sda1" \ --initrd="/boot/initrd.img-2.6.16-1-686" /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1-686 kexec -eMon, 22 May 2006
Grazer Linuxtage 2006
302 moved
wine 16bit app needing a printer
wine LEGACY.exe Invoking /usr/lib/wine/wine.bin LEGACY.EXE ... err:dc:CreateDCW no driver found for L"" err:dc:CreateDCW no driver found for L"" Wine exited with a successful statusGoogling i found lots of strange similar reports, but no clean way to get out of that trouble, nor any hint in .wine/*.reg. Be sure to have cupsys installed, add: sudo apt-get install cups-pdfConfigure this file printer and be happy. :) Wed, 15 Mar 2006
Ethtool - query or set your ethernet
$ sudo ethtool -i $iface driver: tg3 version: 3.47 firmware-version: bus-info: 0000:40:00.0Following command shows your NIC statistics: $ sudo ethtool -S $ifaceIf your nic shows some aging signs, your may want to be sure: $ sudo ethtool -t $iface The test extra info: nvram test (online) 0 link test (online) 0 register test (offline) 0 memory test (offline) 0 loopback test (offline) 0 interrupt test (offline) 0A friend had the crazy wish to have an 10MBs connection: sudo ethtool -s $iface speed 10which he could also have had while loading the 8139too media modul param: insmod 8139too media=0x01Disable TCP/UDP checksums ethtool -K $iface tx offTue, 14 Mar 2006
LUKS crypto partition
cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2 WARNING! ======== This will overwrite data on /dev/sda2 irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES Enter LUKS passphrase: Verify passphrase: Command successful.Create mapping between logical and physical partition cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 sda2 Enter LUKS passphrase: key slot 0 unlocked. Command successful.Now you create your filesystem on top and voila your using an encrypted partition: mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/sda2Sun, 26 Feb 2006
gdth unmainted scsi driver
boot from usb disc
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt find / -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt echo "(hd1) /dev/sdb" >> /mnt/boot/grub/device.map perl -pi -e s/sda1/sdb1/ /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst perl -pi -e s/sda1/sdb1/ /mnt/etc/fstab grub-install --install-dir /mnt /dev/sdbWed, 18 Jan 2006
C Programming
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