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My friends went to Berlin...

February 10th, 2008

… and all I got was this tiny T-shirt.

Tiny Front Tiny Back

This once again shows that sizes “S”, “M”, “L”, “XL” are relative sizes, the absolute measures depending on the intended market. This T-shirt is supposedly size “M”. I generally fit in U,S. “M” and sometimes in Dutch “M”. However, this seems to be manufactured in France or Italy, where “M” seems to stand for “Midget”.

Never mind though, Elisabetta was very happy with it. :-)

Hurling excrement: Ubuntu

July 25th, 2007

This week’s turd goes to Ubuntu whose bleeding edge development version (the “Gutsy Gibbon”) contains a version of GNU coreutils from over a year old. C’mon guys! You don’t have to follow upstream minute-by-minute, but running one year and a major version number behind (5.97 vs. 6.9) is just ridiculous. My beef? The pre-6 releases do not contain the “base64” utility which I really need for some KVM related stuff.

Oh, and a fart in the direction of Fedora, which still ships zsh-4.2. Admitted, 4.3 is “unstable” but it’s running fine on most other distros (see Ubuntu? Some things do get synced with upstream), and at least the Unicode stuff is fixed.

I’m cranky.

Oh, sweet symmetry!

July 7th, 2007

Nothing to say, really, but dang, it’s 7-7-7 (whether you use the drain-bamaged US notation, EU, or ISO order), so I need to write something.

Today, I’ve been trying to beat Amanda into submission. No, she’s not my wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter or dog. It’s the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. It was probably “advanced” back in 1997 when hard disks were expensive and backing up to tape made sense. Nowadays, we back up to a big array of hard disks on an off-site server. Amanda, however, is still tape-oriented, so a certain amount of hackery is involved. Fortunately, the multi-changer and “file” tape type make this not too hard. We’ve actually got that part working. Splitting up large volumes so they can be backed up in a staggered fashion wasn’t too hard either. The trickiest part is getting Amanda to recognise and use exclude lists. I think I’ve got it now.

The /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf file contains:

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define dumptype hard-disk-tar {
    hard-disk-dump
    comment "Back up to hard disk instead of tape - using tar"
    program "GNUTAR"
    exclude list optional ".amanda.excludes"
}

And /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist contains:

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HOST  /var_www_html_steven             /var/www        {
        hard-disk-tar
        include "./html/steven"
    }

Obviously, tar will look for ”/var/www/.amanda.excludes”, not ”/var/www/html/steven”. My first idea was to add a line like ’exclude list “./html/steven/.amanda.excludes”’, but this article explains why that wouldn’t work (there’s already and exclude in the dumptype definition).

This leaves two options:

I chose the second approach:

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HOST  /var_www_html_steven             /var/www/html/steven        {
        hard-disk-tar
    }

Let’s wait for tomorrow’s run to see if it works…

[Update 8 July 2007]

It works!

Fatlabel - modify DOS volume labels on Linux/UNIX

June 6th, 2007

When inserting USB keys and memory cards on my Linux laptop they are automatically mounted and labeled with whatever name is on the (v)fat volume. I sometimes like to change that. Strangely enough, there is no standard utility for Linux/UNIX to change the volume name of a (v)fat partition.

Not that it’s difficult… I found a good explanation of how the (V)FAT boot sector is structured and managed to write a little perl script around it to manipulate the volume label.

Links:

Documentation is included. After installing, ”man fatlabel” should give you the dirt.

Suspend on Dell XPS M1210 (2.6.18-rc4 + Suspend2)

August 27th, 2006

Got a Dell XPS M1210, dual core 2.17GHz processor.

Compiled 2.6.18-rc4 with Suspend2 patches. Hibernate works fine, as well as suspend-to-ram… That is, as long as I don’t use the nVIDIA proprietary driver. With the “nv” driver it works fine, although the cursor does weird things.

It’s pretty clear that the nVIDIA driver is causing this. The issue is that nVIDIA drivers are unreliable when used on a laptop where suspending (and subsequent resuming) is quite an important feature.

Some (that would be nVIDIA) say the binary blob driver relies very closely on the ABI of the kernel and is thus very sensitive to bugs or subtle changes of the ABI from one kernel version to the other.

I say it’s a weak argument. This dependency can easily be circumvented by releasing proper open source drivers, or writing a more robust wrapper around the blob. Either that, or speed up the updates, guys! I currently have to choose between using TwinView and 3D acceleration on one hand, and the ability to suspend and resume on the other. It’s tough… :-(

SBLive! Mic recording solved.

August 18th, 2006

Found it! AC97 needs to be turned on. I missed in the graphical mixer due to preference settings.

Mind you, most SBLive! controls are still mysterious.

SBLive! Value + Alsa = no mic recording

August 16th, 2006

Urgh. Used to work, now it doesn’t. Hail to the penguin.

Microphone plugged into SBLive! card. Turn microphone on. Use Gnome audio mixer to turn mic on. Can hear my own voice amplified over the speakers. Now try to record using Rosegarden, Ardour, or Audacity. Foggedaboudit.

Possible answer? Another handy link: And maybe:

Anyway, here I was thinking that ALSA drivers are well-documented things. Turns out most of the cards are reverse-engineered, so even though the Alsa mixer controls have names, their meaning is not always clear…

Will try tomorrow.