Users of Debian’s testing or unstable distributions may be noticing messages from apt saying things like:
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated! foo bar baz Install these packages without verification [y/N]?
I noticed today that google doesn’t turn up good hits for the fix. The fix is really simple:
apt-get install debian-archive-keyring apt-get update
That’s it. You now have secure packages from Debian. Nice, eh?
I finally purchased my first iPod: a black 60GB iPod video model. I had been holding off for years. The iPod sounded nifty, but I just didn’t quite go there.
The thing that finally won me over was the camera connector. It lets you plug your iPod directly in to a digital camera. The iPod can download photos from the camera to its internal disk without the need for a PC. Very slick.
So anyway, we got the iPod and the camera adapter at the Apple store in Cambridge — a quick subway ride from Usenix. They were out of stock on the FM tuner, so I ordered that online.
The next step was to get the iPod working with Linux. I currently have it working with both music and video. Here’s how I did it.
At work, we’ve been using vserver for virtualization for some years now. Due to various reasons, we’re looking at Xen.
I’ve been trying to switch my workstation to use Xen. I’ve enountered a few issues so far. Probably these will go away as I learn the system.
Overall, my greatest gripe is the documentation. It is outdated and just plain wrong far too often. For instance, there’s a place where it says to run “make ARCH=xen xconfig”, but the Xen kernel patches don’t (any more, at least) provide a xen arch.
The next gripe is the very weird kernel build system. Xen doesn’t ship a diff against a kernel tree. They instead ship whole files to extract atop a particular kernel version. Annoying and unwieldy. There is a command to generate a diff, but you have to download the full kernel tree first.
A couple of other gripes: There is little documentation on memory management (can Xen adjust the RAM usage of running VMs?), on 64-bit systems (can you run a 32-bit kernel under a 64-bit hypervisor? how about a 64-bit kernel that supports 32-bit userspace?)
I’m also having trouble with my forcedeth card locking up under Xen.
However, I’ve heard of lots of people having good luck with it so I’m going to keep trying.
But one would think that basic docs could be actually worked on a bit more.
Following the “release early, release often” motto, I am happy to announce version 0.1.0 of HSH, the Haskell shell.
You may obtain it with:
darcs get --tag 0.1.0 http://darcs.complete.org/hsh
Things are still very rough in many ways, but this version already lets you:
Here is an example session: (some lines wrapped for readability)
$ ghci -fglasgow-exts HSH
*HSH> run $ ("ls", ["."])
COPYING HSH HSH.hs TODO announcements testsrc
COPYRIGHT HSH.cabal Makefile _darcs test.hs
*HSH> run $ ("ls", ["-l"]) -|- ("wc", ["-l"])
12
*HSH> :m +Text.Printf
*HSH Text.Printf> let countLines = (zipWith (\i line -> printf "%-5d %s" i line)
[(1::Int)..])::([String] -> [String])
*HSH Text.Printf> run $ ("ls", ["-l"]) -|- countLines -|- ("grep", ["hs$"])
6 -rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 1285 Jun 6 09:43 HSH.hs
11 -rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 565 Jun 6 09:43 test.hs
*HSH Text.Printf> :m +Data.List
*HSH Text.Printf Data.List> run $ ("ls", ["-l"]) -|- countLines -|-
filter (isSuffixOf "hs")
6 -rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 1285 Jun 6 09:43 HSH.hs
11 -rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 565 Jun 6 09:43 test.hs
*HSH Text.Printf Data.List> run $ ("ls", ["-l"]) -|- countLines -|- filter (isSuffixOf "hs")
-|- ("tr", ["a-z", "A-Z"])
6 -RW-R--R-- 1 JGOERZEN JGOERZEN 1285 JUN 6 09:43 HSH.HS
11 -RW-R--R-- 1 JGOERZEN JGOERZEN 565 JUN 6 09:43 TEST.HS
*HSH Text.Printf Data.List> let generator = \(_::String) -> unlines . map show $ [1..20]
*HSH Text.Printf Data.List> generator ""
"1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n11\n12\n13\n14\n15\n16\n17\n18\n19\n20\n"
*HSH Text.Printf Data.List> run $ generator -|- ("grep", ["1"])
1
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Future versions will likely simplify syntax to make it easier to write scripts and introduce a sh to hsh converter. I also plan to add pure Haskell tools for some common shell-ish things that one could do in Haskell.
Lately we’ve been looking at backup solutions at work.
And I’ve got to say that Bacula is looking downright awesome. It’s GPL’d and it has just about every feature a person could ask for.
I am a complete Bacula newbie. Today, after using Bacula for a total of about 30-60 minutes, I added the first client machine to my Linux test box. The client machine was running the Windows bacula client. It took about 10 minutes to install and configure the client and the server. And both backup and restore worked perfectly the first time. Nice. Setting up a *nix client is even easier.
I’ve been using Amanda for many years at home and at various workplaces. Looks like we’re going to be switching.
We’ve also ordered an HP MSL4048, a 48-tape LTO3 library with barcode support. Each tape has a native storage capacity of 400GB. Should be nice when it arrives. With that library and Bacula, we should be able to back up all our servers using a single backup system. And both our Windows and Unix people can manage the system, including running restores to any machine, from any authorized console machine.
At long last, I’ve finally updated Debian From Scratch (DFS). For those of you not familiar with DFS, it’s a single, full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel. The DFS ISO images also contain a small Debian mirror subset that lets you use cdebootstrap, along with the other utilities on the CD, to perform a manual, “Gentoo-like” installation. It also serves as an excellent rescue CD, with a full compliment of filesystem tools, backup/restore software, and a development environment complete enough to build your own kernels.
DFS also refers to dfsbuild, the tool that generates DFS images. dfsbuild is available as a Debian package. dfsbuild is designed to make it trivial to build your own custom DFS images. You can have your own set of Debian packages on your images, your own kernels, etc. Unlike many other systems, you can go from the example dfs.cfg to a customized DFS build in just a few minutes, even if you’ve never used dfsbuild before.
Version 0.99.0 is a from-scratch rewrite and port to Haskell. You can read the full list of new features in the announcement, but the biggest is that it now supports standard Debian initramfs kernels in addition to ones that have enough drivers statically linked to be able to read the CD-ROM.
You can also download my DFS images or browse the docs online.
Thanks to some assistance from Garvin (lead Serendipity developer), it looks like the bug that Planet dislikes so intensely is indeed the <slash:comments> tag. I don’t believe this is a bug in Serendipity bug rather in Planet.
(There is still, IMHO, a pubDate bug in Serendipity, but it appears to be unrelated)
So, the dupes you were seeing from me really are gone now. I hope.
The fix is to edit the file templates/default/feed_2.0.tpl and remove the line that provides the <slash:comments> tag.
BTW, seems that Planet Haskell also ran afoul of this.
It seems that some of my posts are appearing on Planet Debian multiple times, and others not at all. I think the problem is a strange combination between subtle bugs in Planet and Serendipity. The SF bug report for Serendipity is here. I think the workaround should fix this.
Either that, or Planet is somehow taking offense as the <slash:comments> tag that Serendipity is putting in there.
Sorry about that — hopefully it is fixed now.
After my mail reader comparison, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few mail server troubles. So here, to help you with your mail server decisions, is my mail server comparison.
Well, finally! I’ve switched to Serendipity!
The best part: comment spam blocking that works. So to those of you that had trouble commenting on this site… try again. It should just work! (And I’m sorry you had to put up with the hassle so long.)
Serendipity is a very nice system. I’m glad I chose it. And the support from Garvin and the others has been great too.
I’m running 1.0beta2 and have found a few bugs, but nothing serious.
As I mentioned before, I wrote a tool in Haskell to convert posts, comments, and categories from Drupal to Serendipity. If you use darcs, you can fetch it with:
darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/unmaintained/blogcvt
The darcs-impaired may download a tarball.