four steps to reproducible Debian installs
[ link: private-essential-debs | tags: debian desktop apt dpkg | updated: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:43:23 ]
For ever now some friends and I have been talking about making essential packages, which would pull in all the tools that we often use on Debian. So here goes...
With the power of the equivs package, this is actually a very short procedure.
wmiirc-lua debianization
[ link: wmiirc-lua-debianization | tags: lua wmii desktop wmiirc-lua debian | updated: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:42:51 ]
I just fixed the install scripts for wmiirc-lua. It is now possible to install wmiirc-lua in system directories and run from there. There is also a Wmii-lua session for the display managers (kdm, gdm, etc).
The new and improved way to install wmiirc-lua is to get libixp and wmii from hg and then...
sudo apt-get install lua5.1 liblua5.1-0-dev liblua5.1-posix0 git-core
git clone git://repo.or.cz/wmiirc-lua.git/
cd wmiirc-lua
git checkout debian
make deb
sudo debi
install-wmiirc-lua
... restart X, and select Wmii-lua as your login session.
debugging with -dbg libraries
[ link: debugging-wtih-dbg-deb | tags: debian devel debug | updated: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:32:22 ]
I am having a problem getting openssl to verify a signature that I generated from a smartcard. I decided to step through the
openssl code to see what it's actually doing when I call RSA_verify()... but I didn't feel like rebuilding openssl.
qemu eats up /dev/shm
[ link: qmeu-shm | tags: qemu linux debian | updated: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:52:22 ]
I've been using qemu (with kqemu) to run my client's windows software, which talks to the linux driver/daemon that I am working on. Having multiple qemu instances really chews into the shared memory... and the amount available depend on how /dev/shm is mounted.
# df /dev/shm
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
none 2.0G 713M 1.4G 35% /dev/shm
On Debian you can control this via /etc/default/tmpfs SHM_SIZE variable....
SHM_SIZE=2048m
That's 2 gigs total that I can give to all the VMs.
ipw2200 not working
[ link: ipw2200-firmware | tags: linux debian | updated: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:36:29 ]
Err! I recently nuked and paved over my X41, with debian/lenny. When I wanted to use the wireless I was greeted by:
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:02.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 23
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:04:02.0 disabled
It turns out that I have not done any wireless twiddling recently and forgotten that I had to get the firmware before things started working again.
unpopular debian packages on my system
[ link: unpopular-packages | tags: debian apt dpkg | updated: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:27:02 ]
Using the ept-cache utility advertised on joey's blog I was able to have a look at some packages on my site that are likely not on your system.
To get packages of inverse popularity which you have installed run:
ept-cache search -t clean -s t- | less
Of interest are the following.
pxeboot and nfsroot with debian
[ link: nfsroot-on-debian | tags: pxe nfs boot linux debian | updated: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 11:30:04 ]
I have two boxes (i386 and amd64) in the lab that I use for testing of drivers I work on. Recently another Maxtor
hard disk died on me, and I decided to get network booting working. I already have a file server from
which I host my $HOME directories and do all backups from. It sounded like a win.
I've never done this before, so it took me a few hours to get the first host going, the second took 10 minutes plus the amount of time to build the kernel for it.
Below, I describe steps I took to get pxe-enabled hardware to boot a debian image, from a debian DHCP, TFTP and NFS servers.
etc snapshots with git
[ link: etc-snapshots-with-git | tags: git linux debian | updated: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:57:05 ]
I got this idea from a blog posting a few months back. I think the guy was using darcs. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the reference to link to him.
Anyway, here is how you can track your /etc directory with git, and have apt update it
automatically each time a package is installed.
glGo on ubuntu/dapper amd64
[ link: glGo-on-dapper-amd64 | tags: go linux debian | updated: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:02:30 ]
I started playing go. I tried cgoban and gtkgo. Both crashed a lot. Then I tried glGo... it's much better.
apt-get pdiffs
[ link: apt-get-pdiffs | tags: debian | updated: Fri, 04 May 2007 11:19:46 ]
Debian/unstable apt-get has this feature called pdiff files (or pdiffs). It downloads only the diffs between the previous day's Packages and Sources indexes, which claims to improve downloads for regular use.
When you don't update often you will find that your updates could take 30 minutes, plus.
You can disable use of pdiff files by running:
apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs=false