Thanks to vimperator, I’ve been liberated from non-vi keybindings in firefox!
In Debian, it’s just a quick
apt-get install iceweasel-vimperator
away!
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I don’t get lolcats. or lotcatz. whatever. People keep sending me links to them. People keeping making them. They show up in my RSS feeds with frightening frequency. I have to admit, however, that these were pretty funny: http://blog.rominet.net/2008/05/debianopenssl-debacle.html. Mmmm…antropi…. Also, did you know that apparently there can be improper lolcat grammar!? Man, I wish I had known about this before! nmudiff is a program to email an NMU diff to the Debian Bug Tracking System. I often make quick little changes to debian packages to fix bugs or typos, and it’s always been a bit of a pain to generate a patch to send to the maintainer. nmudiff uses debdiff (another very useful command I just learned about) to generate the patch, and email it to the bug tracking system with the appropriate tags. I previously posted that I had problems getting my wireless device working with the new 2.6.24 kernel, running into a kernel oops in the process. In kernels prior to 2.6.24 I used the bcm43xx driver, and let NetworkManager handle connecting to wireless networks. I’ve since had some time to play around with 2.6.24 a bit more, and I’m happy to say wireless is working now! Here’s what I did: The linux-kbuild-2.6.24 package was finally available in Debian today. (Small aside: why does it always take a few days after the release of the linux-image packages before the linux-kbuild package is available?) I need to use the proprietary nvidia drivers on my machines, so I have to wait for the kbuild backage before I can compile and install the nvidia driver for the new kernel. Anyway…after a short ’sudo m-a a-i -l 2.6.24-1-amd64 nvidia’, I could reboot into the shiny new kernel! New kernels always seem faster, so I was getting excited after booting up. After logging in though, I couldn’t connect to my wireless network. I had previously been using the bcm43xx driver, and looking through the changelog, I discovered it had been deprecated in favor of the new b43 / b43legacy drivers. Ok, no problem, just load the new module…wait for network-manager to pick it up…wait for it…wait…wait…Screw it. Edit /etc/network/interfaces, uncomment the stuff for the wireless device, and then ‘ifup eth2′. Kernel oops. Well that sucks. Back to 2.6.23 I go. Incidentally, it’s not just this oops in 2.6.24 that has me disappointed. Everything since 2.6.18 has been a bit risky. It used to be that upgrading a kernel within the same major.minor release was a relatively safe thing to do. I actively use two different kernels on my machine at home: I still occasionally get lockups, forcing a hard reboot. Maybe this is my fault, I am running the proprietary nvidia driver, and I do use suspend to ram quite a bit, even though it thinks my hardware isn’t supported. Maybe too much is changing too fast between kernel releases, not allowing userspace to keep up? Not sure, all I know is I’m doing much more rebooting in my Linux machine than I used to. Somehow when reading through the Linux 2.6.17 changelog last week I came across a few articles discussing the kexec feature of recent Linux kernels. It’s pretty neat, you can boot directly into another kernel image without having to go through a hardware / BIOS reboot. There’s a Debian package called kexec-tools which gives you the ability to load these kernel images into memory and to boot into them. I found kexec a bit cumbersome to use, especially since all the kernels I care about booting into are the stock Debian kernels, and they all ship with ramdisk images that need to be used properly to boot. Using kexec by itself also requires that you have to manually bring the machine into a rebootable state first, or hack up some system scripts. You shouldn’t just boot into a new kernel directly without shutting down devices, unmounting file systems, etc. So to scratch this itch, I wrote kexec-chooser. It’s a small Python script that will allow you to easily warm-reboot into any of the stock Debian kernels installed on your system. It’ll probably work with custom kernels as well, but I haven’t tested that yet Downloads and more information can be found on the kexec-chooser page. Ok, well maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but partly true Linus Torvalds has just been accepted as a Debian Developer, which means that, “Debian will have the advantage of being the distribution with the most official Linux kernel.” World domination is one step closer….muahahahahahaaaaaaa… (seen on Planet Debian) At least that’s the way it feels! I just realized that my laptop supports 1600×1200 resolution! And I’ve been running it at 1024×768 all this time! So after fighting with the fglrx drivers for Debian, I can finally surf the web and read e-mails without having to scroll left and right all the time! Setting up fglrx was less than painless to put it mildly. For future reference, I had to do something like this: aptitude install fglrx-kernel-src
cd /usr/src
tar jxf fglrx.tar.bz2
cd modules/fglrx
export KVERS=2.6.16-1-686
export KSRC=/usr/src/linux-headers-${KVERS}
debian/rules binary_modules
I would have hoped that Oh, and other thing. ATI: it isn’t cool to lock up the machine just because your driver doesn’t support 16 bit colour. I had set my default colour depth to 16bpp previously in an effort to get higher resolution with the radeon driver, but when I started using the fglrx driver things would just lock up. For some reason the idea came into my head to try to apply Lennart Poettering’s avahi patch to distcc today. Success! I’ve packaged up the result for Debian (with some small changes) and put it here on my site (check out the Software section). |
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Copyright © 2010 chris' random ramblings - All Rights Reserved
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