The Ring Two
I watched The Ring Two last night, it brought closure to a well of issues.
Pros and Cons
All this time of owning cons.org.nz and none was able to think of pros and cons. Today someone finally did, and the results of a quick hack are somewhat amusing. Anyone can make new topics (just change the url) and anyone can add to them. Hopefully I can add some more features to it later.
A huge thanks to fibonacci for coming up with it.
nss-mdns
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!
Domain Names
It all started so innocently, there was a domain i wanted to register as it had been discarded. It turns out some registrar picked it up with dubious intent. I’ll see if they bother to register it again next year. That’s beside the point.
I was ready to buy a name so I checked what was out there. I liked the idea of something short and quickly found n.gen.nz, but that wasn’t the end of it. After using it as a bookmark system another learned of it, shocked by the abundance of single letter domain names he poked around and gathered a list.
Then to the interface meeting. Many domains were registered, including h.ac.nz, m.ac.nz and t.ac.nz.
Names like blu.t.ac.nz, tic.t.ac.nz and rocket.n.gen.nz come to mind. Creative suggestions welcome.
Back Again
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!
Without a bootable CD
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!
Kerberos Woes
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
Beware the coming storm
There has been a brilliant show of lightning recently, enough to make me panic and switch off everything not on a surge protector. Everything has been converted over now but it was a somewhat nice feeling having a backup server in another country to take care of essential services while moving things around.
Shiny white plastic
My laptop was failing. Badly. It had a very sensitive screen what would only work if you hit it just the right way. The battery was used, not wasted, just used. Physically it was very large and appeared to have had a hard life. Alas with the screen as it was i couldn’t rely on it if I needed it. It was time for a new laptop.
I looked at what I wanted in a laptop. I concluded it must not run windows, be portable, have wifi built in and have decent powersaving and/or battery life. Where does this leave me? The 12″ iBook G4. It reads just like that description.
I accept I won’t be able to run Linux on it and have wireless networking but Mac OS X, being based on BSD, is very Unix-like. There’s both a debian and gentoo based package manager for it, as well as a provided set of developer utilities and even an X11 server.
Running Mac OS X surely is an experience. You cannot talk about Mac OS X without mentioning how it looks. So I’ll simply say it looks good. Applications are typically distributed in a self contained directory. (Which reminds me of rox). Applications appear to store data in ~/Library. I’m running with all the normal (free and cross platform) tools I’d use for doing my assignments. bash, subversion, emacs, latex, xdvi, xfig and so on. The dock (as I believe it is called) does do a decent job of task switching and launching. The keyboard controls are at some level based on readline/emacs and the general windowing controls are much like I was getting used to with firefox. Just walking out of Linux and into Mac OS X is quite a comfortable step even if the ctrl key is in the wrong place.
Hardware support is decent. I plugged in a fairly generic USB BlueTooth adapter and it automagically set it all up for me. Plugging in a digital camera had roughly the same effect. My GPS is supported by the USB serial bridge manufacturer. I haven’t yet tried the irda adapter but I’m not hopeful. A neat feature is iScroll2, an addon that lets you scroll in 2D just by using two fingers on the trackpad.
So far it has been much what I expected. I’m happy with what I have and will enjoy using it even more so when I’m back to studying after these holidays. While transcoding a dvd I was told iBooks do have fans, however I’m not sure I’d call myself a full blooded fan just yet.
Single Window
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