gregoa's blog

we have an old red hat computer at the office, and I've been thinking about migrating it to Debian for a long time.
today I took another old machine (PII-200, 96 MB RAM, 2x2 GB HD on some adaptec SCSI controller, winbond NIC, IDE CD-ROM) and installed Debian. some notes:

• downloaded the sarge net-install iso.
• in the meantime I grabbed a keyboard and a monitor, booted and went to the BIOS - oops, no CD-ROM in the boot options (well, the box ist from 1996 ...).
• the Debian CD-ROM really didn't boot.
• downloaded Debian floppies.
• reset. "boot failure".
• still no success after re-writing the boot disks; neither with tom's rtbt floppy.
• then I found sbm.bin on the Debian CD - a floppy image with a funny boot loader.
• yeah, I could boot with the floppy and tell it to use the Debian net-install CD-ROM!
• "expert26 $funny_kernel_&_boot_options" - "too many parameters".
• "expert26".
• I tried LVM for the first time. funny.
• no network for apt - huh? well plugging the ethernet cable into the correct socket helped.
• writing the boot loader (no grub because of LVM) - installation of lilo threw errors. I continued the installation nevertheless.
• reboot. well ... no bootable device.
• tried some things. no success.
• then - ähemm - I re-enabled booting from hard disk in BIOS; & - it worked. good to know that LVM (from debian-install) & lilo work.
• aptitude install less joe ssh
• locales, .bash*, ...

now I just have to plan the further steps (replacing the old red hat box, running both, changing the network/masquerading stuff, ..., ?) - but I can do all this from home via ssh ;-)

update: one week later the old red hat box died (I guess it was the PSU - at least something smelled not really fresh) - it was really good to already have a Debian box on cold standby :-)
btw: spamassassin (with a well trained bayes db) rocks! — 2006-05-01

there are people who keep asking what floopy drives could be useful for nowadays. one (additional) answer is: automatic debian installation (IOW: preseeding the debian-installer and putting the config on a floppy).

• on friday & saturday I worked on some perl packages: adopting orphaned packages (libclass-factory-perl, libclass-inner-perl, libstring-koremutake-perl), new upstream versions (libfont-ttf-perl) & an upstream bug (libi18n-charset-perl).
• today I took a look at the RC bug list & sent patches to some bugreports (#356888, #354945, #355395, #352210, and #356842).

libmail-gnupg-perl, libmarc-perl, libmarc-record-perl, and libnet-amazon-perl (packaged by me for the Debian Perl Group) were accepted by the ftpmasters and moved from the new queue to incoming this night.
libnet-z3950-perl is still in the new queue.

short report on the state of Toastfreeware's Debian packages:

• fullquottel went into unstable approximately one week ago (& received it's first bugreport).
• mimetic was rejected yesterday (but only due to inappropriate binary package names).
• mailtextbody depends on mimetic, therefore it is still in the new queue.

some days ago guinan seemed to have died. today I merged her data & parts of her hardware with david's playground machine and reanimated her hereby.

in fact this is guinan's third host body but AFAICS she doesn't mind ;-)

after becoming a member of the Debian Perl Group on thursday I uploaded five modules to the group's svn repository today.
eloy took them just a few hours later and uploaded them to the new queue. - thanks!

chronicles of the suffering of an old server:

• came home from work.
• started my workstation.
• realized I had no connection to guinan (playground server & web/apt proxy & file server).
• turned on the monitor: nothing.
• did a hard reset.
• guinan booted, everything seemed to work.
• the syslog didn't show anything interesting.
• some minutes later guinan froze again.
• hard reset again, & I chose memtest86+ from grub.
• during the 7^th test strange charcaters showed up in the time column. no reaction to key presses.
• turned the power off. opened the chassis. took out the RAMs. broke the socket of the first RAM slot (only at the side).
• turned the power on. much fan sound, no picture, no network.
• changed the monitor. changed the graphics card. changed the PCI slot for the graphics card. nothing.
• booting with or without RAM, with or without graphics card just produces fan noises, HD noises, nothing more. no beeps e.g.
• closed the chassis, moved guinan back in position, turned her off.

hints welcome.

today hendrik announced new versions of his *obex* packages on the debian-mentors list. I grabbed & installed them; & — hooray! the stuff works with my nokia communicator 9500. finally I'm able to up-/download files under debian (with obextool using obexftp via the usb connection).

related non-news: (g|w)ammu still don't like the communicator (or the dku2 cable) - I can connect via the at19200 connection type but then I have no access to contacts/calendar/sms/...

update 1: fixed an error (--get doing the same as --getdelete) in hendrik's version of obexftp & sent him a patch. updated packages are available from the Toastfreeware Debian Repository. — 2006-03-05

update 2: some 70 minutes later hendrik has applied a slightly modified version of the patch & has published new packages. thx! — 2006-03-05
packages removed from the Toastfreeware Debian Repository.

• ... boring
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• ... annoying because of the permanent reboots
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• ... bugging because some things work only on the 2^nd try
• ... boring
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• ... boring
• ... boring

at least knoppix & dd were helpful for cloning the installed disk.