Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Geek
My experience without Adobe® Flash™ Player
Jun 19th
Adobe® recently announced they have (temporarily) stopped working on the amd64 version of their Flash™ Player for GNU/Linux.
The previous releases contain a big security issue, which makes them totally unusable.
As I didn’t want to wait until the flashplugin-nonfree package to be updated to support the i386 plugin through nspluginwrapper (as suggested in #586273), I have decided to simply switch to the free alternative: gnash.
Switched to GIT
Nov 22nd
After having converted my packages to the new 3.0 (quilt) source format, I have decided to move everything to GIT.
rkhunter was moved to Alioth’s collab-maint project, and I have set up a personal GIT repository for the other packages.
This page on the wiki has helped a lot.
I now need to learn how to use this tool, but my first tests are very encouraging.
I haven’t had to change my packaging workflow, switching from svn-buildpackage to git-buildpackage.
I am even able to build i386 packages on my amd64 machine as before without the need to change anything in my ~/.pbuilderrc.
Email management and spam fighting, testing Google Apps
Jul 14th
I have been thinking a lot lately about email management and spam fighting.
For my personal email, I use a setup based on Postfix, RBL and WL, grey listing, and DSPAM (by the way, you can find unofficial packages of current development version in my personal repository).
To better train DSPAM, I have removed all other filters (except some very basic controls at SMTP time), and I am very happy of this setup (grey listing delays receipt of email, which I am not very satisfied with, and relying on third-parties RBL is also not the best thing imho). This lead however to much more mail in my DSPAM quarantine queue.
I will hence re-enable more advanced filters at SMTP time once DSPAM bayes are large enough.
More >
Xorg input hotplug
Apr 19th
I had written a few weeks ago about my new (almost) empty xorg.conf file and explained how I had to edit an HAL .fdi file to change my keyboard layout and define my compose key.
The Debian Xstrike Force have written a complete guide on the Debian wiki explaining this input hotplug system.
I have found that there is no need to edit .fdi files, just set the following options at the end of /etc/default/console-setup:
XKBMODEL="pc105" XKBLAYOUT="fr" XKBVARIANT="latin9" XKBOPTIONS="compose:lwin"
Even better, they should now be automatically grabbed from your existing xorg.conf when upgrading!
Switched to Pulseaudio
Mar 22nd
Following to an issue with esound not playing GNOME system sounds, I have decided to give Pulseaudio a try.
Installing the pulseaudio package pulled all necessary dependencies, including the esound compatibility plugin. I have added local users to the pulse-rt group, as recommended. After this, all worked perfectly except the main channel was muted and its volume set to 0% after rebooting.
I have found that not loading the module-device-restore does fix this issue, strangely. If you encounter the same problem, try and comment out the line load-module module-device-restore in /etc/pulse/default.pa.
IPv6 available on this site
Dec 24th
Thanks to a recent article published on debian-administration.org, I have managed to get an IPv6 connectivity at home, and have hence decided to make this website available through IPv6.
I have used Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel service as recommended on Linode wiki, and everything seems to be working.
This was a really simple process (both at home and on my Linode!).
The AAAA DNS records have been set up.
While the propagation is being processed, you can still test using the IP 2001:470:1f06:ccf::2 (I now really understand why DNS have been created!). You can use ping6 or telnet -6 or even use your browser.
While browsing www.kirya.net using IPv6, you should get a message in the header (just below the links to RSS feeds) confirming your request have been served using IPv6.
Note that I haven’t yet set up all Apache virtual hosts to answer on IPv6, which might lead to some web pages being redirected to the defaut vhost. More over, the HTTP server will only answer to IPv6 request on port 80 (no SSL at the moment).
