gregoa's blog

due to the latest changes in apt (which installs packages marked as Recommends: by default since 0.7.7) aptitude — even if "Install recommended packages automatically" is not checked in aptitude's options dialog — pulls in recommended packages just like apt-get, whether called from the command line or interactively; cf. also #448561.

the fix to keep both apt-get & aptitude from installing recommended packages is something like:

$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/15recommends
APT {
        Install-Recommends "false";
};

(also very useful for (p|cow)builder where installing recommended packages in the chroot is just wrong & takes a long time; cf. also #448562.)

after a little communication problem between my Application Manager & me I got an email today stating that T&S 2 (the second set of questions in the "tasks&skills" part for my New Maintainer process) is finished, too.
the next part will now be a check of my packages which will be interesting, too.

gudrun lent me her old TFT (thanks!); it's small (15") but works much better than the crappy old CRT I've been using for the last two days. at least I won't turn blind until the samsung 226bw I've ordered today will arrive.

& philipp hast lent us an old machine called "phercab" (thanks!) which has become guinan's fourth host body; i.e. I put the two disks (& the NIC) into the machine, & after a little fsck'ing guinan is up & running again.

coming home after a long work day I detected a strange smell in my room; after some investigation it turned out that guinan's motherboard has melted down; i.e. her third host body is dead for sure (offers for a replacement welcome). well, no flat server at the moment.

more unpleasant is that it seems to have killed (via the kvm switch) my TFT; need to check again, call the insurance company, probably buy a new screen. — currently I'm typing in front of an old & not very healthy 15" CRT; I hope the problem is fixed before I turn blind.

(oh, BTW, the kvm switch might be dead, too, at least keyboard & mouse have stopped working several times.)

good news: my hero&hausmasta chrisu has soldered a — whatever, the part to be able to connect to the serial port in my bricked fonera, & after changing the RX/TX cables it really works with the serial extension cable I have (& cutecom as a terminal app).

some times later it works ("works" as in: I successfully re-flashed & therewith de-bricked kes). the key was not to transfer the needed files via cutecom and the xmodem protocol but via tftp.

helfpul links:

• Fonera - Debricking and more
• Reflashing LaFonera original firmware

don't ask me why but yesterday & today I played with the modem on nerys (my thinkpad R60e). it's a conexant hsf softmodem or something like that, & it didn't really work with sl-modem-daemon which was installed but not activated.

in the end it was not that difficult: I grabbed hsfmodem-7.60.00.09full.tar.gz from the linuxant download page, detected the debdist target in their makefile, & after some swearing & fixing errors I got a .deb (no, I don't really know if it's different from the .deb offered there).

when installing the .deb a kernel module is built (so kernel-headers & stuff are necessary but they are here anyway). one reboot (hello?) later the module works. wvdial didn't like me but pppconfig/pon/poff worked (with an old account from technix.at).

no, I still don't know why I would actually need /dev/modem on my laptop :)

after P&P I've now also finished T&S 1 (the first part of the "tasks & skills" questions of my NM process.)

so far NM took me several hours of work but I enjoyed learning new things, I'm quite excited that it went rather smooth until now, & I'm looking forward to the next steps.

I got an additional hard disk a few days ago (300 GB, IDE, PATA). today I finally took the time to remove the (empty) old 40 GB disk with the two uncorrectable sectors from my internal mobile rack & put the new disk in. after some hours of copying stuff around I now have my three disks set up as like this:

• SATA 1: "system" (i.e. / /boot swap) — 160 GB
• SATA 2: "data" (i.e. /home) — 250 GB
• PATA: at the moment only backup of the first disk — 300 GB

hm, actually that's a huge amount of disk space. — sometimes I think back at the times when my father's first computer at his office (a 286, in 1987) had one hard disk with 20 _M_B; & it was half empty ...

gregoa@belanna:~$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde3            152807104   9158584 135886316   7% /
tmpfs                   509460         0    509460   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                     10240        48     10192   1% /dev
tmpfs                   509460         4    509456   1% /dev/shm
/dev/hde1                45130     22914     19808  54% /boot
/dev/hdg1            240362656 106449076 121703780  47% /home
/dev/hda1            288435168  10465756 263317732   4% /mnt/hda1
gregoa@belanna:~$ 

oh, & when I finally deleted the backup of my moved home directory I accidentely deleted parts of my real homedir. grmpf. I think I could recover most of the deleted stuff from my laptop but still ... oh, & I also deleted my homedir on our flat server (& I don't know how exactly, it must still have been mounted somewhere). *sigh*

I'm quite happy that I've completed the "philosophy and procedures check" — commonly referred to as P&P — of my new maintainer process. let's see what T&S (the "tasks and skills check") will bring.

yesterday I realized that direct rendering (dri) is not working anymore on my xserver (checked as usual with glxinfo | grep -i direct).

the solution was:

Section "Device"
        Identifier    "Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller"
        Driver        "intel"
        ...
        Option        "Cachelines"        "3582"
EndSection

& the most interesting part: all this fuzzing around for dri or the modlines is not the xserver's fault, not the monitor's fault, not the graphic card's fault — but it's necessary because there's a KVM-switch between the monitor & the machine. if I plug the monitor directly into the machine's vga-port I don't even need an xorg.conf.

a few hours ago I was assigned an application manager for my new maintainer process (the path to becoming a Debian developer). — exciting :-)