August 1st, 2008 cmsj
Update: It has been suggested that it is not productive or collaborative to talk negatively about some developers releasing software for unixy operating systems without really trying to integrate it with the versions of widely deployed software available in those operating systems.
It is a fair point. It’s not productive or collaborative. It may be true, but ranting about it doesn’t help anyone but me.
More productive and collaborative would be to nicely ask these ISVs to establish a less isolated packaging process with our communities and companies (but I don’t mean LSB or a new package format). Clearly some people won’t work with them on ethical grounds, but a more pragmatic position will accept that commercial software exists, so it might as well not make our lives unnecessarily hard. And the companies shifting Linux are hot on ISVs.
Jorge: No, I don’t like having multiple JVMs, but I have been in corporate situations before where it has been necessary because specific applications have required different versions :(
Posted in FOSS, Rant, Techie, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
July 7th, 2008 cmsj
It’s been far too long, but here it is. Terminator 0.9.
As usual, head over to the home page to get all the links and information you need.
“So what’s new in this release?” Well let’s have a little look at the ChangeLog:
* Tab support
* Drag & Drop support
* Added support for ~/.config/terminator/config
* Switch the meanings of “horizontal” and “vertical” wrt splitting,
after extensive user feedback. Added context menu icons to try and
make the meaning clearer.
* Added keybindings for terms size and scrollbar manipulation. Thanks
Emmanuel Bretelle.
* Completely revamped config system which now transparently makes use
of gconf settings if they are available, falls back to sensible
defaults if not, and can be overridden entirely by ~/.config/terminator/config
* Support terminal zooming - now you can quickly hide all terminals apart
from one and either scale the fontsize or not.
* New application icon from Cory Kontros
* FreeBSD support (thanks to Thomas Hurst)
and a whole heap of bug fixes. Rock on!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
July 6th, 2008 cmsj
It’s taken us some time to get there, but as this page shows, we now have all of the bugs we want solved for 0.9, solved :D
The string freeze came way too late unfortunately, so I’m expecting we’ll want to do a 0.9.1 consisting of translations and fixes for any other bugs we figure out on the road to 1.0.
I now need to prepare all of the parts required for a release and push out a final RC build into our PPA and if all is well, 0.9 will be released very shortly! Please test it now and tell us if you hit any last minute problems.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
June 19th, 2008 cmsj
The list of bugs left for Terminator 0.9 is getting shorter (although I do keep failing to resist the temptation to add more) and so it’s time to try and get some wider testing.
Therefore, we’ve started uploading beta packages of 0.9 to our PPA. If you want to help test and you run Ubuntu, add this apt source:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-terminator/ubuntu hardy main
If you have Terminator installed already from a package, it should then be offered to you as an upgrade, otherwise run:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install terminator
Please report any bugs you find to http://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator/ and please feel free to drop by #terminator on irc.freenode.net with any feedback!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
April 8th, 2008 cmsj
You have new hardware (most likely server).
You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but….uh-oh, it can’t find the CD!
What do you do?! Well, realistically there’s not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed.
You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn.
You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you’re still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don’t have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen.
You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko.
Can you see where this is going? :)
find the .udeb’s on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules.
You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don’t do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of.
Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to!
Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
February 7th, 2008 cmsj
Maybe you’re fresh out of college or university, or maybe you just love tinkering with computers so much you didn’t bother with stuffy education.
We’re looking for someone to take on a junior role in our sysadmin team, so if you’re interested, take a look at the description and mail our lovely HR people!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
January 31st, 2008 cmsj
Some administrivia about my PPA builds of Terminator.
Firstly, and somewhat late (for which I apologise), the 0.7 release should be available shortly from the PPA. It’s just been accepted, so should be built for gutsy soon.
Secondly, as some people may have noticed, Terminator is now included in the Universe repository of hardy (for which I humbly thank all involved in making it happen).
When hardy is released, I will remove terminator from my PPA. at that point, we can consider publishing further gutsy packages in the Terminator team’s PPA, however, I’m not hugely keen on supporting old distro releases that I don’t run myself anymore.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
January 14th, 2008 cmsj
I have a fair stack of data that I quite like, some of which is vitally important, stored in multiple places and generally not at concern for loss without some very bad things happening already.
The rest I’d just like to keep. For example, I wouldn’t cry if I lost all my uni work, but it would be a shame. Same for the working emulation of my trusty Amiga that I used for so long, but now barely remember how to use.
So, not wanting to trust it all to a single hard disk, I bought a second so I can could clone the data onto two disks with RAID1. Not a problem in Linux thanks to software RAID. I knock up a RAID1 with a single partition on the new disk (which the tools like doing as much as they make sandwiches, grr). rsync across the existing / to the raid volume, modify fstab, grub and maybe something else and reboot expecting tenshu to finally live up to its name…
Except that’s not its name.
Not when it’s booting.
It turns out that having created the RAID volume while fully booted, it had been tagged as being for a machine with a hostname of “tenshu”. The initramfs does not know your hostname because your hostname is stored on your root partition, which is a RAID partition that hasn’t been mounted yet. It is possible for the initramfs to have a hostname, and I expect it might even have a kernel commandline option to specify it, but either way it’s not there by default.
As any string comparison function will tell you, “tenshu” is not an acceptable match for “(none)”.
So to fix this, boot the system and it should sit for ages waiting for the RAID arrays to assem ble (this timeout is *far* too long. what the hell takes this long to be detected by the system?!). After a while it will get bored and give you an initramfs shell. Busybox to the rescue!
I suspect you can run mdadm -A /dev/md0 --auto-update-homehost, although I ran mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb3 --update=homehost to be specific and because I found those options first.
Reboot and bam, the orange bar of progress skips up merrily.
Assured that my data is safe on the new partition, I can now proceed to trash the original disk and grow the RAID1 to include it.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
September 21st, 2007 cmsj
If you’ve been over to my Terminator page you may have noticed that I use Launchpad for basically all of the services of releasing.
Taking this one step further, I have been building packages for Ubuntu Gutsy with Launchpad’s excellent PPA service. Details for how to get your Terminator goodness from PPA have been added to the Terminator Homepage.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
August 22nd, 2007 cmsj
I use a docking station with my laptop. When it’s in the dock it has a wired connection, otherwise it’s just wireless.
Since most of my work involves ssh and I tend to have several long running ssh sessions at a time, it’s quite annoying if I quickly undock to go and work in another room and have to reconnect everything.
Of course, this is entirely fixable in Linux (albeit by way of some slightly dodgy hackery). Network Manager is just about quick enough to pick up a new connection before TCP connections time out, and Linux’s routing stack is somewhat forgiving about connections switching interface. So, with that in mind, and using a DHCP network - all you need to do to preserve a connection across switching interfaces is have the same IP address on both. Sure you could go and hack at the DHCP config to make sure it serves the same IP to both of your MAC addresses, or you could just have both interfaces share the same MAC. I’m quite sure this breaks all manner of rules, conventions and RFCs, but the point is that it works and it makes my life easier :)
I’ll happily take suggestions for a better way to override the MAC address, but this is how I do it:
-(cmsj@waishou)-(~)- cat /etc/modprobe.d/local
install ipw2200 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw2200 ; ifconfig eth1 hw ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
So in this case I am setting my wireless card’s MAC address to that of my wired interface (replace the XX:XX bit with the MAC from your other interface).
This worked fine for me in feisty, but was failing in gutsy and my wireless interface was coming up as eth1_rename. Obviously something new and strange was going on.
It turns out that, in the same way we handle disks by UUID, we now handle network interfaces by MAC address, so udev was getting a little confused.
A quick change of /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to stop recognising them by MAC address and start looking at the driver name instead, and it’s all fixed. This is how the file looks now:
-(cmsj@waishou)-(~)- cat /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, probably run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line.
# PCI device 0×8086:0×1077 (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”e1000″, NAME=”eth0″
# PCI device 0×8086:0×4220 (ipw2200)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”ipw2200″, NAME=”eth1″
I’d be wary about doing this on a desktop system where interfaces are more likely to change, but this is a laptop and I am quite certain the e1000 NIC isn’t going to move on the PCI bus!
So there you have it :)
Update: It’s worth noting that sometimes this will confuse some networks (e.g. I recently confused a hotel wired&wifi network into not talking to my laptop anymore and had to change both the wired and wireless MAC address to different addresses)
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
