The Mandelbear's Musings

My attempt at CARE's Live Below The Line -- eating for $1.50/person -- was something of a failure yesterday: they served pizza at work after the all-hands meeting, and dinner was the crock-pot pot roast that wasn't ready in time for dinner Sunday. (Though when I ran the numbers on the pot roast it came out to about $1/serving, and I had $.50 worth of cottage cheese in the morning, so what I actually spent was $1.50... :)

I'll do better today. I miss my coffee.

I did more work on the netbook, deleting its now-useless recovery partition (1.4GB!), and quite a bit of music work in the evening. That included the last bits of editing from last month's rehearsal, and working out the chords on one song. As of now there's only one song that needs any formatting work at all.

One of the things that happened at yesterday's all-hands meeting was getting a patent bonus, for US Patent #8,006,094. Trustworthy timestamps and certifiable clocks using logs linked by cryptographic hashes. This is number 23.

It doesn't mean I'm in favor of software patents. Far from it.

A couple of interesting links. Take a look at the charts in "It's the Inequality, Stupid". And on a lighter note, Zombies: The Safer Terrorists.

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released. Read more at www.debian.org.

I use too many different computers. At any given time I might be on one of three machines at home, or one of two at work. Managing things like browsers, email clients, and IM clients, all of which get upset if I'm using the same account from two different places, is a bit of a chore. IM is the worst; the others are at least manageable.

All of those machines know whether I'm typing at them or not. In many cases, based on the time of day, they might have a pretty good idea of where I am when I'm not typing. It would be really good if there were some kind of service, independent of IM, that could manage my presence, kill off extraneous IM and email clients if necessary, and let people know the best way to contact me.

It could probably be done with Jabber, a private XMPP server, and a batch of specialized clients. Anyone out there know of something like that? Preferably for Debian or Ubuntu.

Upgrading the workstations, and possibly the fileserver, to Lenny (Debian Testing) is starting to look attractive. It's running 2.6.22, which is the one I need to support my Seagate SATA-II drives, and it has Audacity 1.3.4, which is the latest and matches the version in UbuntuStudio.

It's usually safe to upgrade the fileserver, since it's inside the firewall. The only reason to hold off is that every once in a while you get a major upheaval and something breaks, usually in one of my local scripts; when that happens it's handy to have the previous version around somewhere. I'll probably wait a couple of months. There's no reason not to upgrade the workstations now.

I'll keep UbuntuStudio around, too, especially since 64Studio is still based on Etch, so the kernels aren't up to date.

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages.

Snide comments about "rising from the dead" are not appropriate, but this might be a good day to upgrade your server or even to reanimate some ancient Windows box.

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and Advanced Micro Devices servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, say Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller says.

Finally dragged my recording box (node name Harmony, currently a 1.8GHz AMD Sempron with 1GB of RAM) into the office, added a gigabit ethernet card, a Radeon graphics card (surplussed from work) and a 160GB disk, and upgraded the OS to Debian Etch. Took about two mornings and an evening's worth of work altogether, much of it spent trouble-shooting a sound problem that turned out to be caused by my userID not being in the audio group. Noted.

The current version of X is pretty cool -- no questions; it recognizes your graphics card and monitor and just runs. Works great unless you're on a KVM switch, in which case if you're not looking at it when it boots, it can't see your monitor and drops back to 640x480. Minor, and I can fix it if I want to. If I'm going to be dragging it back and forth between the office and the "studio", I probably won't want to.

Anyway, I'm now back to a machine in the office that's fast enough to mix and edit audio on, and without spending any money on it. This is good.

Iceweasel and Gnuzilla, the trademark-restriction-free versions of a well-known browser and browser suite, are now in Debian unstable. Downloadable tarballs are here.

(From this post in debian, which is also where I ganked the cute picture. The icon came from the Wikipedia article.)

Last night in a fit of boredom I upgraded my Debian Etch system (a major upgrade that included the modular X11R7 from x.org), then brought the machine down to play with my newly-downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and DeMuDi 1.3rc1 install disks. It's been a while since I logged in.

The first annoyance was that neither Ubuntu nor DeMuDi recognized my old-but-far-from-obsolete 3dfx video card. They both came up at 800x600, with no obvious way to change the screen resolution -- certainly Ubuntu's control panel didn't give me any other choices. Feh. But that's fixable, one way (drag over the config files from the Etch partition) or another (upgrade the card, which I've been meaning to do anyway).

Update: On closer examination it seems that DeMuDi, at least, recognized my video card just fine. So I'm guessing that what it didn't recognize is the capabilities of my monitor. That would probably be because my cheap KVM switch is blocking the newfangled monitor information signal path.

The second annoyance was that DeMuDi (Ubuntu as well, I think) still has Audacity 1.2 instead of the newer and sexier, but still beta, 1.3. Fixable again, since I've gotten 1.3 to build from source. I'll probably still wait until 1.3 is out of beta and supported in Debian.

The third, and more serious, annoyance was that somewhere in the sequence of upgrades the C preprocessor called by xrdb started putting a space after macro expansions. This is fine for C, but it's not a good thing when you're using macros to construct X geometries and font specs, as I was. GAAK! As it turns out, I had dealt with this a couple of weeks ago at work. I just didn't remember how, so I spent several hours removing most of the macros (which I won't miss, since they mostly parametrize things I've long since made permanent decisions about, like whether I want Emacs on the left or right side of the screen). But it's annoying.

Finally got to bed a little before midnight, with a once-again-mostly-working X configuration in my Etch partition. Grumbly bear, but at least things are reasonably stable again.

I'm most of the way through the process of upgrading my (work) mac laptop to Tiger, which I had to do because it's needed for a demo on Monday. It's a lot like watching a snail crawl across your screen, with only a little dramatic tension added by the knowledge that, if it falls off, it will explode messily and get little bits of snail pulp all over your hard drive.

Right now I'm installing "xcode", which is what they call the development package. It's been telling me "Time remaining: less than 1 minute" for about 10 minutes now.

It's times like this that remind me why I use Debian as my desktop OS.

update: 14:31 ... and why does it take a fscking reboot and a fscking hour to install X11?? And how do I know it's not leaving little bits of snail pulp all over while it's doing it??? And why did I have to agree to their stupid licence for the fourth time in order to install software that's under the MIT license????

For a variety of reasons, including a coworker's wish to try the latest version of the SableVM Java virtual machine, and my own desire to try some of the shiny new packages mentioned in DWN, I set out yesterday morning to install Debian's testing distribution, code-named Etch.

My first attempt involved copying my running stable (Sarge) partition into the partition that had held my previous working partition, RedHat 7.3, until I blew it away. I then chroot'ed into it, mounted /proc in the approved manner, edited /etc/apt/sources.list, and attempted to upgrade. It croaked somewhere around upgrading the kernel. I'm guessing that it has something to do with the switch from devfs to udev for managing devices.

My second attempt involved blowing the partition away again and running debootstrap. That actually got as far as installing a kernel, but grub (the bootloader) wouldn't install. Again probably a /dev issue. And when I tried editing my main grub menu, that didn't work either. No joy anywhere. I could probably have recovered, but by then my coworker had done a successful install from the daily snapshot of the installer.

The clincher was discovering that I had messed something up in my Sarge partition -- probably moved a config file that I meant to copy, or something equally stupid. Nothing for it at that point but to borrow the installer disk and do it right. Should have started out that way...

I'm used to smooth installs with the current Debian installer, but this one was just plain magic. Perhaps because of the switch from XFree86 to X.org, I was only asked one question about the display at initial configuration time: what resolutions I wanted. That's it. The whole nightmare of probing, guessing modelines, and finally giving up and trying to upgrade an older config file that sort of worked, was gone. It just plain worked. The rest of the configuration questions appeared to be unchanged from Sarge.

For those unfamiliar with the Debian installer, it works in two phases. The first phase configures your language, timezone, and network, and walks you through the process of partitioning and formatting your disk (if you need it). Then it unpacks and installs a very minimal system from the CD, asks you where to install the bootloader, and reboots.

The second phase asks you another series of questions to set up usernames, passwords, email, and -- probably the most important -- where you're going to get your packages from. It then lets you select one or more broad "tasks" from a checklist: this is where you pick things like "workstation" and "web server". Then it starts downloading packages. It's amazing how fast you can suck down hundreds of megabytes of packages over a 100MHz ethernet from a local mirror. Finally, each package gets its chance to ask you whatever configuration questions it has; that's where things like the display size get configured. Then they all get installed without any further fuss.

Note that unlike desktop-oriented distributions like RedHat, all the configuration is done with text menus. If you're setting up a server, you don't have to install any of the GUI packages -- a full-featured Debian web server fits in less than 500MB. You can do it in even less if you're more selective.

An hour or so after I started I was happily and productively logged in, having installed my favorite editor (emacs) and window manager (ctwm), and copied the relevant parts of /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and the ssh host keys. The one oddity in the whole process was that ssh wasn't installed by default as it used to be, and wouldn't install unless shadow passwords were enabled. (I normally disable them because we use NIS -- the old Sun Yellow Pages -- and it doesn't play nice with the shadows.) I'm not going to worry about it.

Next step is to install it on my workstation at home.