Posted by lorne on September 15th, 2005 — Posted in Linux
The design of pros.and.cons makes it difficult to easily track new changes. I’ve whipped up something to notify you when there are changes.
I used the phrase “notify you” as this is what took the most time to do. There is a notification management daemon running which broadcasts the messages generated by the pros.and.cons script. To get this working nicely over HTTP, the background request is made to a script that returns either when there is something to report, or a period of time has elapsed. Notice the typical chain of events would cause a notification to be sent, an instance of the client script to return and the result to be displayed, such that there is no wasteful polling.
No Comments »
Posted by lorne on July 31st, 2005 — Posted in Linux
I like the idea of Bonjour, effortless ad-hoc networks and there is a bit of free software out there (Howl, Avahi, daapd, probably more?). I’ve made a portage overlay of nss-mdns for gentoo users. In short, this package allows name resolution over multicast dns.
Enjoy!
No Comments »
Posted by lorne on June 7th, 2005 — Posted in Linux
Silly me, what was I thinking? Debian, for my desktop? Hah!
To be fair, Debian’s ok. Small quick package manager even if being binary restricts your options a little. That’s not that drove me from it. I just can’t figure out Debian’s policy on packaging software. My examples include sun-jdk, mplayer, nvidia-kernel, flash and doom3. Which of the above would you think would be packaged? The GPLd media player? The binary kernel module? The binary game? The binary flash plugin?
Well, for some political reason mplayer is out. So is doom3 (and related). Java too. This does irritate me somewhat, but here’s the real crunch. A binary kernel module is ok! So is a non-free flash player! Double ewe tee eff I say!
Apparently some Debian release thing happened today, I read the release notes and saw non-current packages right after the words “up to date”.
Debian on a desktop? Yeah right!
No Comments »
Posted by lorne on June 5th, 2005 — Posted in Linux
I wanted to mess with /, change things around that would have broken any running process. I wanted to move Gentoo to the side and install Debian on the same partition without having to decide what data to save or worry about repartitioning. This should have been an easy task of booting off Knoppix and going for it. I couldn’t find Knoppix.
Here’s what I did. Disabled swap and debootstrapped into it, changed my grub config and rebooted. Hurrah. Moved Gentoo into /gentoo and debootstrapped back into / and returned swap to its swappy goodness.
All went fine until I decided I could use my existing modules, (as I was using my existing kernel). Deciding against this a few minutes after copying them over, I tried to remove them. Please note that there’s more in /lib than /lib/modules. Alas! Everything was toast, I couldn’t start any processes. Rebooting with sash instead of init let me symlink my Gentoo libs into place. It was ugly, but it let me function enough to re-debootstrap into swap.
Next time around I followed the Debian way for making kernel packages.
We don’t need no stinkin’ boot CD!
No Comments »
Posted by lorne on June 1st, 2005 — Posted in Linux
Configure Kerberos on Debian is a simple procedure. It merely consists of
aptitude install krb5-config krb5-user libpam-krb5
and following the prompts. A small bit of tweaking PAM and OpenSSH and the magic continues. Before I could stop it every user was getting tickets and forwarding them. And it was good.
Enter: Gentoo. My distribution of choice, at least, until recently. The installation of mit-krb5 and pam\_krb5 goes well, tweaking PAM and OpenSSH goes well. Or so I thought! I spent most of yesterday going silly trying to determine exactly where my configuration was broken. I still don’t know. Perhaps it’s to do with pam\_sm\_setcred being called with PAM\_REINITIALIZE\_CRED? Logging into the (virtual) console works fine, while sshd doesn’t cache any credentials. This is, perhaps, not a major concern, but it’s rough around the edges without it. Examining a little further and you run into this:
Would the real pam\_krb5 please stand up?
I give up, I’m going with what works, even if that means Debian
No Comments »
Posted by lorne on March 20th, 2005 — Posted in Linux
I was thinking there should be a way to take full control over what I view. Which is one of the reasons why I like privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org). A quick Google reveals the following extension, which makes new windows open in a new tab.
http://www.spuler.us/extensions/singlewindow.htm
No Comments »