Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Geek
New router – livebox!
Jul 3rd
I decided to buy a Livebox on Saturday. The livebox is a modem-router used by my French ISP Orange.
It allows me to profit from Orange VoIP service (and thus stop my standard phone line), as well as from the TV over ADSL (which I haven’t tried yet).
My only issue is that I can’t disable to router mode of the Livebox (which is a Sagem F@st 3202 router) – I would have liked to keep my current configuration with a simple modem, in bridge mode. However, I have managed to re-configure shorewall on my internal router and redirect everything from the livebox to this router.
This setup means double NAT, but it seems to work like a charm.
New camera: Sony DSC-H9
Jun 9th
I received this week my new bridge camera: a Sony DSC-H9. It is meant to replace my Konica Minolta Z5, which had some defaults for the use I have.
Along with its 8.1MP CCD and its 15x optical zoom, the H9 has some nice features, such as a big 3″ screen, a NightShot® infrared system, a high sensibility mode (up to 3200 ISO with some expected noise) etc.
Following to my first tests, I particularly like the menus, which are clear and allow very quick fine setup. The AF is very reactive, the built-in flash quite effective. The camera is delivered with an infrared remote control, as well as a lenscap. The only drawback for the moment is the usb cable which is not easy to connect to the camera. I guess I should use an external smart card reader in the future.
Switching to lighttpd
May 30th
My unofficial Debian packages repository is now powered by lighttpd. This website is hosted on a small vserver I rent and I hope the switch will allow better performance in the future.
The configuration was very easy, using fastcgi for PHP5 and mod_simplevhost. The next step is to allow encrypted sessions through OpenSSL which should be painless.
I will stick with apache2 on my main (home hosted) server, but will use lighttpd by now on all the vservers I own.
I only regret not to have done it earlier!
New 16:10 wide screen
May 19th
I have purchased a new screen, and I have chosen an Acer AL2002W, mainly because of its low price. It is a 20″ wide screen, with a native resolution of 1680×1050 @60Hz. For now, it seems to be good value for money, and working with this screen is very confortable (I previously used a standard 4:3 17″ screen at 1280×1024).
While configuring Xorg was painless (with both free nv and proprietary nvidia drivers), I still haven’t managed to get the framebuffer working with the native resolution of the screen.
As vesafb doesn’t seem to be able to use a 1680×1050 resolution (hwinfo --framebuffer only gives 4:3 modes), I have tried to patch my kernel with vesafb-tng, which haven’t yield better results.
While nvidiafb allows me to get a 1680×1050 framebuffer, it conflicts with proprietary nvidia driver, preventing it from being loaded. With the free nv driver, I can’t have the display centered both in console and in X (they both use the same mode, and the screen is able to stroe user modes at the condition the new display information habe 1Khz difference for horizontal frequency or 1Hz for vertical frequency or the syn signal polarities are different from the default modes).
By the way, I have noticed that two of my laptops have the same Intel 915 video chipset, and one only is able to have a 1280×800 framebuffer (using the undocumented vga=0x362 code). I can’t understand the reason of this difference.
Kirya.eu registered
May 8th
I have just registered the kirya.eu domain name. Though I don’t have real use for it (at least for now), I have already updated all my configuration so that it is a mirror of the kirya.net domain.
I am now waiting the worldwide DNS servers to be updated to check if everything is OK.
First steps with SELinux
Apr 1st
I made my first steps with SELinux today, on an up-to-date Etch system. So far, everything is running smoothly thanks to the Debian wiki, and to other distributions online documentation (namely Gentoo’s and Fedora’s).
I have even bought a book on SELinux, which isn’t exactly what I expected, ie. a little bit too technical for beginners like me.
My system is now fully working (hopefully securely) with SELinux enabled and enforced.
Playing with Linux-Vserver
Mar 18th
I have set up my first vserver to play with. I am very impressed how easy the process is! The performance on my Dell Inspiron 1300 seems very good as well.
I have almost no experience with virtualization techniques, and was stuck to User-Mode Linux until today. According to the Wikipedia article, Linux-Vserver has many advantages compared to other tools due to the fact the virtual servers share the same system call interface and do not have any emulation overhead (I do obviously agree this can also be a drawback).
I haven’t yet had the chance to study the security part in depth, this will be my main task this week, I will then be able to make the choice between UML and Linux-Vserver – I’m not yet ready for Xen.
Murrine gtk theme engine
Mar 3rd
I uplodaded this morning the Murrine gtk theme engine to my unofficial repository. I have used the source package from Ubuntu Feisty as a basis and build the newer version available from the official website.
I have learned how to build packages in pbuilder with build-dependecies from the experimental distribution (nothing to do but adding the experimental repositories to sources.list and pining the experimental packages to be equal to those coming from unstable).
I have thus opened again my experimental repository for this package, Note that gtk2-engines-murrine only includes the gtk engine, themes have to be installed separately on a per-user basis.
I know there is already an ITP for the package, I just wanted to try some new themes, I will however contact the ITP owner to let him know about “my” package.
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