Kirya [.net]
Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
#455196: DM application for Julien Valroff – closed
Dec 11th
It seems like my application to become Debian Maintainer has been accepted. This means that in the near future, I will be able to upload myself the updated packages I currently (co-)maintain.
All of them still need to be uploaded by my current sponsors with the DM-Upload-Allowed field.
Again, many thanks to Micah Anderson, Christoph Haas and Loïc Minier for their advocacies and, in a more general way, for the help they bring on a day-to-day basis.
libpam-gnome-keyring
Dec 9th
Some time ago, I had explained why I thought I would never use network-manager, especially because of the gnome-keyring password which should be typed in at every new session.
The last evolution-data-server upload introduced a gnome-keyring binding which forced me to inquire again on how to avoid this annoying gnome-keyring password.
This led to the libpam-gnome-keyring which allows the keyring to be unlocked automatically at login from the display manager. This is great!
I am now using network-manager on my laptop!
I am still puzzled about the fact that there is no network connection until someone logs in, but I guess I will live with this, especially with a desktop machine.
OOoCalc limitations
Nov 24th
I have brought some work with me to be able to catch up during the week-end. Usually, I take a laptop running Windows which allows to connect to our network through a VPN the credentials of which I am not in possession of.
This time, I just want to make some analyzes on spreadsheets (created on MS Excel). I have tried to use OOoCalc for the first time in “work conditions” – ie. I expect a little bit more than the basic features, which was source of disappointment.
Autofiltering feature does not allow wilcards in the conditions. Even advanced filters do not seem to allow them. I want to select columns which contents end with ’00?’ (ie ’00′ followed by any unique character), and I can’t. I have read some posts talking about regular expressions in filters in the old 1.x series, but can’t find anything related in the documentation of the current series – regular expressions seem to be used only for the ‘find & replace’ feature.
Moreover, you cannot set more than 3 conditions in autofilter, which is not a lot (I am not sure that previous releases of MS Excel were better). I am fully aware of the advanced filters which do allow up to 8 conditions, but I must say they are not easy to use on a day to day basis.
Filters are mostly considered as visibility filters, which means if you apply a filter and use the ‘Fill down’ feature, hidden cells are also filled in. At least it is not the case with copying & pasting: only visible cells are copied.
These limitations (bugs?) as well as the old existing bug regarding the decimal separator make it impossible for me to use OOoCalc for my work.
I guess I could easily achieve to do my work thanks to OOoBase, but the data I want to extract need to be used and amended by collaboarators who exclusively use MS Excel.
Are there any advanced users able to work around these issues?
VirtualBox fun
Nov 11th
I have had some fun during these 2 rainy days thanks to VirtualBox.
I have first tried the latest Fedora 8 (upgrading from the previous release). Though the upgrade was painless, I was stucked with the Linux Guest Additions which weren’t working, due to SELinux being enforced (by default or by mistake, I am not sure).
I had even opened a bug for this issue…
Then I have tried OpenSuse, which also needs tweaking so that the additions run ok – the solution was on the VirtualBox forums (disabling concurrency for init scripts by changing RUN_PARALLEL=”yes” to “no” in /etc/sysconfig/boot file).
Well, I haven’t extensively tested these distributions, but I particularly like the new Nodoka theme used by default in Fedora. I have even begun to work on Debian packages for both the GTK+ and the Metacity themes (I know there is already someone working on this, I will e-mail him to propose a co-maintenance if he accepts).
On the other hand, I was very surprised that OpenSuse uses GNOME as default WM (maybe it isn’t new, but I haven’t seen a Suse desktop for years). Their gnome-main-menu is really nice, but really unusable for me!
I guess I will try more distros in the coming weeks to compare with Debian – for now, I get the feeling I have made the good choice, except maybe for the default artwork, which is hopefully improving…
ndiswrapper and WPA
Oct 13th
I had been using ndiswrapper with a Netgear WG511 PCMCIA card:”(the free prism54 unfortunately does not support WPA)”: without any problems for a while, then have begun to get kernel crashes, which were more and more frequent.
I have thus backported to Etch the 1.47 version available in Sid, which *does* fix my kernel crashes.
However, this newer version has brought new problems: with a “high” network load, the module just crashes silently, and has to be reloaded so that the network connection can be enabled again.
I have packaged ndiswrapper 1.48 as the release notes let me think my issues were fixed (“Disassocation with wpa_supplicant is fixed”), but the problem is still there with this latest release!
I have finally managed to get things work correctly thanks to this post: I use Debian linux-image, ie. without preemption enabled, and I can now confirm the still-to-be-released 1.49 version fixes this issue.
I have uploaded 1.49-rc3 packages to my unofficial repository just in case someone has the same issue.
Switched to Dovecot LDA and Sieve
Oct 13th
I have worked almost all the day to update my mail server configuration to use Dovecot LDA and the Sieve mail filtering language instead of maildrop.
This was very easy thanks to Christoph’s ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3 how-to.
More >
New motherboard and CPU for my workstation
Sep 23rd
I have just set up my new motherboard and CPU on my workstation.
I have chosen an Asus P5B-V motherboard with an Intel E4400 Core 2 Duo CPU. I have also acquired 2x1Go DDR2 memory from Corsair.
I wanted an Intel based video card (the Asus has a 965G integrated chipset), and I am now able to run (useless) compiz-fusion without a problem.
So far, everything runs fine, and the system is very quiet, even with the fan and heat sink shipped with the CPU. lm-sensors work fine with this configuration.
For now, I am trying to get a 1680×1050 resolution in console thanks to uvesafb and 915resolution in initramfs, but still have issues. I have contacted the developer and hope to be able to write an article explaining the necessary steps.
VirtualBox now in Debian
Sep 2nd
Thanks to Philipp Hug and Patrick Winnertz, virtualbox is now available in Debian.
I have just installed my first virtual machines, and I am now able to run Windows 2000 or Ubuntu from my Debian box. I was using Qemu until now, but the performances (despite the Kqemu accelerator) were quite bad, and I simply couldn’t run any Linux 2.6 based distributions with the kqemu active.
Setting up virtualbox is really easy, just run aptitude install virtualbox virtualbox-source, compile the vboxdrv module (I have used module-assistant), add your user to the vboxusers group, and that’s it!
I only had to download manually the guest additions iso image from http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.4.0/, as the VirtualBox manager wasn’t able to find it automatically.
You can launch the VirtualBox manager from the graphical menu and set up your first virtual machine.
Update (9/5/2007): 1.5 release has been uploaded with a new package name: virtualbox-ose. The aim is to avoid any possible trademark issue (see #440792).
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