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.

After a few hours with it, I am now able to use most of the websites I usually visit, including Youtube and Dailymotion.

Note that I use Iceweasel, which does not support WebM (for now), nor H.264 (which will never be supported by Mozilla).

Youtube support is brought by a Greasemonkey user script available at: http://turanct.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gnash-youtube/
The only tiny drawback is that the videos load in pause mode. For now, everything else seems to work fine.

Users of other browers (Chromium, Safari, Opera) can try their HTML5 beta: http://www.youtube.com/html5

It is even easier for Dailymotion, as the videos on their HTML5 beta program are encoded in the Ogg Theora format, which is natively supported by Iceweasel/Firefox >= 3.5.

To ease things, I have written a small Greasemonkey script which simply automatically redirects www.dailymotion.com to openvideo.dailymotion.com. This script can be downloaded here.

The drawback is that videos won’t play before they are loaded completely, which is not a big problem anyway.

I still cannot play the videos avilable on Vimeo, and have noticed while wirting this post that the Flash™ file uploader of WordPress didn’t work with gnash (obviously, WP provides an alternative way for file upload).

I will go on with this experience as long as I do not see major issue with gnash.
I will also update this post, or add comments, if I encounter other issues, or find any alternatives.

I would be curious to read your comments if you have run similar experience.

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.

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.

I have also played a bit with SPF, and configured my DNS server for my main domain to use it. It now passes the recommended tests. However, I haven’t implemented SPF checks in my Postfix setup.

For work, we rely on a (very old) MS Exchange setup, which is about to be replaced soon by a newer MS based solution. The costs for this replacement is quite high for a small company (about €7,000 including the hardware, the required software licenses, and the costs for setting this up by an independent worker during our summer closure).

I have hence tested Google Apps Standard Edition with one of my domains. I am always very much impressed by Gmail, which is really fast, seems reliable and easy to use. I haven’t tested it carefully in “work conditions” though (ie. using MS Outlook client for calendar sharing etc.), and the cost of the premier edition is €40 per user and per year, which means €1,600 per year for 40 users, ie. it would take more or less 4.5 years to reach the cost of our replacement server. Considering the current server is about 10 years old, I am wondering if Google would really be an alternative (other factors would also play a role, like our low quality DSL connection, 10 years for a mail server seems to be much too old, considering we cannot run any good anti-spam software on it etc.).

Note that an opensource solution was not considered, nobody could administer it (this is not my function in this company).

SaaS (Software as a Service) seem to be the future of software (this is at least what major companies in this sector tend to say, like Microsoft, Adobe, Google to only list some examples), is it already mature enough for small companies largely depending on their email like us?

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!

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.

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).

PS: No, I am not paid by Linode and I have no link to them, but I think it is good to tell people when something is good.

DNS haven’t yet been finished propagating (should be done in the next hours). Should you notice any issues with my website or any other services run on this VPS, please contact me.

My aim is now to use a laptop for my daily tasks: picture editing, small development, multimedia etc.

Ideal features would be:

• Large screen (18,4″)
• Large disk space (at least 250Gb)
• Separate numpad
• At least 2Ghz CPU (dual core)
• 4Gb RAM
• Wifi 802.11g, ethernet 100 connections
• At least 3 USB and 1 firewire port
• Built-in memory card reader with Compact Flash support
• DVD burner

I do not care about the weight, as it would mainly stay on my desktop.

I currently have a desktop computer with 2Go RAM, an Intel 4400 Dual Core CPU (@ 2Ghz) with 200Gb hard disk – though it is enough at the moment, I would prefer the laptop to be more powerful in order to be able to run smoothly with future applications which will be released in 2 or 3 years!

Ideally, it would be around €1,000 (obviously, the cheaper the better, but I want something reliable for a few years if possible).

Last but not least, it needs to be 100% compatible with GNU/Linux (Debian in particular) – I do not care about compiling kernel modules, but would rather prefer they are free (as in free speech).

Do you have any experiences with such laptops?
What would be your recommendations?

Is my idea something totally weird (I mean, should I keep my current desktop computer)?!

When trying the upcoming new Ubuntu 8.10 release, and after installing the VirtualBox clients on the guest, I had the following issues:

First, the video driver refused to give me more than a 800×600 resolution. This can be worked around by adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "vboxvideo"
EndSection
 
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
 
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

A second issue was the mouse grabbing which did not work at all. Adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file has fixed the issue:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier   "Configured Mouse"
   Driver       "vboxmouse"
   Option       "CorePointer"
EndSection

You need to restart Xorg after amending the file so that the changes are taken into account.

Both issues are due to the fact Xorg 7.4 is supposed to automagically recognize the hardware – but it seems like this is not always the case (or it refuses to use it, not sure what’s happening in that particular case).