After Kai Hendry 'nuked' his Debian unstable system by a simple upgrade, he decided to put up a wiki page which lists the status of unstable. An interesting page you might consult before upgrading your system. I have had my share of unstable problems too, but after checking the Bug Tracking System I often quickly found a solution. Of course, you could install 'apt-listbugs' too, which will print a summary of all RC-bugs before each upgrade.
Oh yes, I've encountered 3l33t leenuks idiots on IRC too, on both camps (Fedora and Debian), but luckily there are still lots of people willing to help you out.

What should I read next ? is a database of favourite books, and will suggest which books you can read based on your perferences (in this case, a given author and/or title).

I never fancied JK Rowling's Harry Potter books : too dark, too much Roald Dahl alike. However, Potter has taken over the world by storm, and for all those mage-apprentices out there, here's the Harry Potter lexicon, with a collection of magical spells and maps. So now you know again what your children are talking about.

In my first post about Linux on the Medion 8800, I noticed that the Debian/unstable drivers for the NVidia card wouldn't load, bailing out with the error message Unknown symbol register_ioctl32_conversion. Using the experimental nvidia-7676 drivers, everything compiled nicely, and the module loaded without any problem. If X.org refuses to start, spewing out a message about not being able to find the module, that's because you need the nvidia-glx package.

Gisteren zijn we voor de wet getrouwd, en daarmee is de eerste (zij het kleine) kroon op het werk gezet dat we al hiervoor gedaan hadden. De plechtigheid op het gemeentehuis stelt inderdaad niet zoveel voor, al was dat al bij al nog plezant. Daarna in intieme kring de blijde gebeurtenis gevierd en verscheidene flessen champagne soldaat gemaakt. Hier een kleine selectie foto's van de gebeurtenis.


Veel meer knallende kurken op 4 februari eerstkomend, dan wordt het grote huwelijksfeest gehouden. Nog een zevental weken. Spannend !

Perl's extremely flexible syntax makes it easy to write code that is harder to read and maintain than it could be. This article describes some very basic practices for a clear and concise style of writing Perl. It has even a link to the Perl design patterns wiki.

Sinds verleden week ligt ook de DJ vast; op het trouwfeest gaan we d'er een goeie Leuvense fuif van maken met de draaiskillz van DJ Freaky Music (tja, ik verzin de naam echt niet zelf). We hadden de man al aan het werk gezien/gehoord, en het mocht er zijn : muziek uit het beste van de jaren 70/80/90 voor alle leeftijden en zonder vervaldatum. De gast heeft een redelijk goeie muzieksmaak die met de onze overeenkomt, dus moet je er niet op hopen dat 'em grijsgedraaide zever als 'Summer of 69' gaat draaien.


Even freaky is de limousine die we gaan nemen als ceremoniewagen. That motherfucker is *HUGE*, zoals inspecteur Dick Durkin in 'Split Second' zei. 't Was wel effe verschieten, want het is de grootste wagen die we tot nu toe gezien hadden, en dat zijn er ondertussen al wat. Maar het resultaat zal de moeite zijn, zeker met ons erin ;)

Since mid november, Sun released Nevada build 27, which contained the source code of the anticipated ZFS file system. ZFS is IMO a radically new and revolutionary filesystem which completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, all operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck a ZFS filesystem ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations, which is kinda neat.


So I decided to test drive the new x86 build; unfortunately, the Solaris installer is not for the weak at heart : the installer hardly doesn't upgrade, doesn't contain ZFS support, which is really sad, so your filesystems are created as UFS . I believe it is still impossible to put your root partition on ZFS, too, so I guess we're still stuck with UFS.


I installed the build in a VMware container, which makes the installer friggin' slow (it took over 7 hours to install), and I had to scrape my 256 MB RAM based notebook for all available memory : if I gave the VMware guest too much memory, it got terminated by the Linux OOM killer. Giving it 200 Meg RAM went fine, but then you're stuck with the textual console based installer. In short : use a machine with a minimum of 512 Meg if you're planning to install this in VMware. I'll be downloading the sparc build in the near future, to see how this behaves when installing it onto my Enterprise 3000 server.


Luckily, you don't need a JBOD or a million dollar RAID5 storage system to play around with ZFS : ZFS has the ability to use files as virtual devices! Instead of using a real disk, you can instead create files of 128MB or larger and use them just like a disk. This allows for debugging, testing, and experimentation with complex pool setups without having to require immense resources. Obviously this is gonna be slow. You've got ZFS on top of UFS, so, don't expect it to be speedy. But the point here isn't performance, its about being able to experiment, play, and learn with ZFS configurations that otherwise be impracticle if not impossible. As an example :

root@harad ~$ mkdir /vdev

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk1

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk2

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk3



root@harad ~$ zpool status

no pools available

root@harad ~$ zpool create oasis raidz /vdev/disk1 

 /vdev/disk2 /vdev/disk3

root@harad ~$ zpool status

  pool: oasis

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: none requested

config:



        NAME             STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

        oasis            ONLINE       0     0     0

          raidz          ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk1  ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk2  ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk3  ONLINE       0     0     0

That the builds are *test* builds I had to discover unfortunately : I bumped into this bug which refuses to boot the kernel :

Reading beyond end of ramdisk

start=0x2000 size=0x2000

failed to read superblock

panic : can't mount boot archive

This image is circulating internet for a few days; it comes from Virgin, and they claim it contains 87 music bands. How many can you spot ?

The Aldi Medion MD8800 is a multimedia PC containing

• A Pentium D 830 64bit dualcore processor


• 1 Gig RAM


• wireless mouse and keyboard


• a wireless LAN card


• a NVidia Geforce 6700 XL card


• a 250 Gig SATA disk


• a Philips SAA7134 TV card


• Windows XP (32 bit) preinstalled...

Most of the config setup can be found at Martins site.


The machine is completely geared and configured towards Windows XP, but which new machine isn't nowadays ? I noticed the XP install contains MPlayer and a program called Power Cinema Linux, which has nothing to do with Linux itself, so I'm wondering if there's some copyright or trademark violated here. It was the first time I used Windows XP for a day or two, looks nice, but it seemed continuously like I was driving a Ferrarri in first gear. How sweet the system would be running a complete 64bit OS on it. Time to fetch the Linux install CDROMs...


I chose to install a Debian 64 bit version on it. For AMD64 and Pentium EMT64 (x86-64) processors, you need the Debian amd64 port (ia64 is the port intended for Itanium). I used the Debian Sarge amd64 netinst iso, but that refused to detect the SATA disk. Using the updated netinst iso from Lennart Sorensen, with an updated 2.6.12 kernel, fixed the problem eventually, though the installer detected the disks only after loading the ata-piix module.


There's a price running a 64 bit system, and that is that you can't run 32bit applications, and unfortunately, Openoffice is some of them... for the rest, all the software I use, is available in 64bit version.


Update : I run Ubuntu 32bit now.


Kernel
I tried to build myself a stock 2.6.14 kernel, using the /boot/config file, but that one paniced while trying to mount the root fs, and I didn't have any time to investigate this problem any further. There's a 2.6.14-smp image for p4 based systems in the Debian archive, which I use now. The dualcore is nicely detected as a two-processor system.


Sound
The onboard soundcard doens't reveal itself with a 'lspci -v', so this took me a little time; the soundcard is a Trident 3D Wave, so use the trident driver. The /dev/dsp device gets activated through the snd-pcm-oss module.


Keyboard
Works without problem as a USB mouse and keyboard. While powering up the machine, the mouse refused to work, but that's because you need to charge the batteries first with the USB cable. I installed the hotkeys package in order to use the multimedia keys from the Medion keyboard. Works great with a little fiddling (you need to remap some of the application startup keys).


CD- and DVD Writer
Works without problem. The DVD drives are detected as hda and hdb.


NVIdia
I use the 'nv' xorg driver. I tried to build the Debian nvidia driver from source, but that gives unresolved symbols while loading the module. Seems a global problem in Debian, though...
Using the experimental nvidia-7676 drivers, everything compiled nicely, and the module loaded without any problem. If X.org refuses to start, spewing out a message about not being able to find the module, that's because you need the nvidia-glx package.


TV Card
See Gentoo documentation for the SAA7134 driver.
update : use these options while loading the module
modprobe saa7134 i2c_scan=1 card=55 oss=1
Linux-2.6.19 will provide a better driver for this card...


Remote control
You should use the ati_remote kernel module, or use the lirc ati_usb module. You'll need to define a .Xmodmap file to remap most of the keys, though.


WLAN card
yet untested, though the driver detects the Ralink card. Probably supported with the rt2400 module.


Firewire
untested


Functional display
Works, but not out of the box. You need lcdproc-0.5.1 or higher, since that version contains the MD8800 support.


Cardreader
Only USB ports work, Compact Flash and SD card slots do not work out of the box.




I will try to update this post whenever I get additional info how to tweak some settings...