Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Planet Debian
Hosting problems and side effects of the OpenSSL vulnerability
May 19th
I am in the process of moving all my services (including this website and my mail server) to a new host (actually a virtual server). Until now, almost all of them were (hum, are… see below) hosted on my home server on a DSL line.
The aim is to ease maintenance, reduce power usage, and avoid any risk of fire when not at home.
Most of the websites and the mail server were moved to the new virtual server at the beginning of the week.
I had to postpone my backup configuration to deal with the OpenSSL vulnerability.
Unfortunately, one of the filer of my new hosting company crashed on Thursday and all the data of my virtual host have been lost.
The server is still unreachable, I had to move back to my home server on Friday.
This lead to some outages on all my websites in the meantime. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I have also lost a few e-mail (which I have received on the new host, but not yet read, ie. not yet in my MUA cache). If you sent something I haven’t yet answered to, please send it again.
I hope I will be able to work on the virtual server again next week-end.
New packages in my experimental repository
May 3rd
As some of you might have noticed, I have uploaded a bunch of new packages to my experimental repository, all of them related to digital photographic workflow. Most of them are based on existing packages, but built from a VCS snapshot to benefit from newly supported hardware and new features.
- ufraw was updated to support my Sony DSLR-A700 camera – packaged based on the latest release available in sid.
- hugin package in unstable is outdated – I have based my package on Debian PhotoTools member Cyril Brulebois’s work. It seems that some legal questions have been raised, preventing the package to be updated in the official archive.
- autopano-sift fixes FTBS and other bugs in Christian Marillat‘s package and proves working well with hugin. I will e-mail him a patch with the amendments I have worked on.
- enblend needs to be built from VCS to work with current hugin snapshots. The package is fully based on the package available in sid.
Though I use these packages on a regular basis, they haven’t been thoroughly tested as official packages would be, and might still contain bugs or errors. Please report any problem you might have.
I will try and update these packages when time allows it. VCS snapshots might be unstable, or even non-usable. As usual, use these non-official packages on your own risk.
Also note that these packages are currently only available for amd64. I will eventually build i386 packages if requested.
What t-mobile phones began as an experiment, is called the home of cell phone today. Yes nokia phones. Standing close to it is the motorola phones.
Etch to Lenny upgrade
Dec 26th
I have just upgraded one of my system from Etch to Lenny. The process was very fast and I had no problem, except hal which refused to start because of SELinux. This is now fixed thanks to audit2allow.
I have also lost some time due to the fact I had forgotten to install the headers of the upgraded kernel, preventing me from building the module of my wireless card.
#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.
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