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Tue, 16 Dec 2008

Leaving Las Vegas ...

... and Debian.

Today I resigned from Debian. It has been something I have been thinking about for quite a while but it was a recent post by Bastian Vethur that brought about a tipping point.

For me, Debian has always been about new, and shiny. I've always used unstable, and over the last few months had switched to experimental because the flow of updates had basically stopped. Bastian's graphic shows the issue dramatically.

There are also a whole bunch of other reasons but if I have not already discussed the political reasons with you in person they do not bear repeating again.

So, I changed my laptop over to Ubuntu (running Jaunty, and updating daily). The process was far from simple, but if you are used to living on the unstable (or, even, experimental) edge of the blade relatively uncomplicated.

I noted the issues I had upgrading in another entry.

Anyway, Debian is going through a growing phase. Whether it grows to be bigger, more relevant or more useful is what others will have to decide. It's been fun, and I hope the future brings success.

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Mon, 11 Feb 2008

GRUB disturbs me

Something else that bothers me about Jordi's GRUB2 screen shot is that it is all localised.

I've had to assist people using foreign versions of Windows which had no way to present the English version of the interface. Sometimes I've been lucky enough to figure out the text but, just as often, I've had to shrug my shoulders and give up.

Which leads me to suggest that there should be some mechanism — it need not be the default, it need not even be displayed until a specific keypress occurs (or something) — to get an English version of the boot loader screens so you can assist someone knowing there is a common baseline.

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No so grubby.

Wanting to help along GRUB2 adoption as per Jordi's suggestion. I tried out apt-get install grub-pc.

I'm not so sure that a bugreport entitled Installing grub-pc achieves nothing would be so useful. Here is what seemed to happen: 

eve:[~]% diff -u /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup_by_grub2_postinst /boot/grub/menu.lst
--- /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup_by_grub2_postinst        2008-02-09 18:59:46.000000000 +0000
+++ /boot/grub/menu.lst 2008-02-09 18:59:47.000000000 +0000
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
 #
 # You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
 # is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
-default                saved
+default         0saved

 ## timeout sec
 # Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
@@ -113,6 +113,11 @@

 ## ## End Default Options ##

+title		Chainload into GRUB 2
+root		(hd0,0)
+kernel		/boot/grub/core.img
+savedefault
+
 title		Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.24-1-686
 root		(hd0,0)
 kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-1-686 quiet root=/dev/hda1 ro resume=/dev/hda5 usbcore.autosuspend=1

Booting into the chain loaded GRUB2 and I get a nice prompt with no idea what to do next.

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Sun, 26 Mar 2006

DNS Entries in the debian.net zone

I spent 45 minutes searching around for this, so this is mainly just so I don't have to spend a lot of time searching for it again.

You can add/update entries in debian.net by doing: 

echo "<host> in a <ip>" | gpg --clearsign | mail changes@db.debian.org

All the commands are documented on db.debian.org, look for 'DNS Zone entry'.

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Tue, 27 Dec 2005

Packaging scripts

I use a lot of different things to help me package things for Debian. Sometimes I use revision control and sometimes not. I've recently been playing with both git and StGit to package rpm

Rather than go through the standard convolution of building the original tarball and then creating a diff and then using dpkg-buildpackage to do things as normal. I thought I'd try something else.

Instead I pulled about dpkg-source and created (an initial) cut of dpkg-gendsc and also git-buildpackage to do Do The Right Thing.

While they aren't finished they are usable, patches welcome

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Fri, 11 Nov 2005

yummy, yummy, yummy

Just a few days ago, yum entered Debian. Why is this interesting?

Well, if you happen to be using Xen on Debian then you can easily create yourself a Fedora installation.

You only need to perform Step 5 on the procedures listed here after doing an apt-get install yum. Note, you'll want to make sure that rpm is setup correctly (mkdir /var/lib/rpm; rpm --initdb) before you begin.

It is always interesting checking out the competition. Soon you be singing along to I've got love in my tummy

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Thu, 03 Nov 2005

IPv4 Link Local addresses

James Henstridge notes that zeroconf can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A bug was filed and then fixed within 2 days.

This was because I was at DebConf and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an ARP packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them.

Update: 18:20 AEST

Davyd asks why would you use zeroconf over NetworkManager. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong.

I do believe there should be an overall co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding.

Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates IPv4LL addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against RFC3927.

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ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musing

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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