Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Geek
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).
First x86-64 system
Jul 30th
Despite my previous choice to stick with an i386 system, I couldn’t resist any longer when I have seen that both openoffice.org and the proprietary Flash player were easily available in the amd64 port (not a fresh piece of news).
I have thus just re-installed my main desktop machine which is now running a complete amd64 system.
I have added this architecture to my unofficial packages repository, and all the arch-dependent packages in the unstable branch were re-built. Note that I do not plan to re-build packages available for the current stable distribution (namely etch). This might however change in the future if people show interest for
this.
I have been able to build i386 packages in a chroot using pbuilder and cowdancer, which I will explain later in an article.
Compiz Fusion: first tests
Jul 13th
I have been playing with some unofficial packages of the brand new Compiz Fusion, and must say I am quite impressed. Although I do agree it is totally useless, I have had a lot of fun when trying all the new plugins and features. I really like the shadows and the transparency effects.
Here is the mandatory screenshot (expo plugin):
Everything seems stable for the moment.
If you have nothing better to do, just give it a try!
New mobile phone: Sony Ericsson K750i
Jul 12th
I have just received my new mobile phone: a Sony Ericsson K750i which I have chosen mainly for its price and multimedia features, but also because it has an internal modem, accessible via both bluetooth™ and irda.
So far, I was already able to connect to the internet in GSM, will try GPRS tomorrow as I need to change my SIM card.
libbtctl and gnome-bluetooth 0.9.0 were also released today. Updated packages have been uploaded to my unofficial repository (please read carefully the release announcement which explains these packages have been deprecated).
I have also tried wammu for the first time, it will help me update my address book.
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