Zugschlusbeobachtungen

... have a mandatory policy about how Planet pictures have to look like? Or officially allow some individual touch?

And, btw, it is horrendously impolite to rant about people on IRC while the people ranted about are present. Sheesh!

While evaluating Gallery, I noticed that my test web server generates wrong links inside the web application. After getting some help on the Gallery Forum, I was told that this was because my setup was miscreating REQUEST_URI to contain the entire URI, consisting of scheme, host name and path, while Gallery expects that variable to be only the path portion of the URI.

Continue reading "What is REQUEST_URI supposed to be?"

Webforen sind ein Scheixx. Ich mag sie nicht. Jedes Forum hat sein eigenes Look-and-Feel, ich brauch einen blöden Account (und noch ein Passwort mehr) und ich habe keine einfache Möglichkeit, zu gucken, ob in "meinen" Threads etwas neues passiert ist.

Mailinglisten, im Vergleich dazu, laufen in meinem Mailclient auf, den ich mir so aussuchen kann, dass meine Wünsche bezüglich Filterung, Sortierung und Benachrichtigung berücksichtigt werden, ohne dass der Betreiber der Mailingliste sich dafür bewegen muss.

Umso ärgerlicher finde ich es, dass immer mehr Open-Source-Projekte keine Mailinglisten mehr haben, sondern nur noch Webforen.

Hall of Shame (wird ergänzt):

• OpenWRT
• Serendipity

Inzwischen finde ich den Zwang zum Webforum derartig lästig, dass ich bereit bin, ein schlechteres Open-Source-Projekt einem besseren gleichfunktionalen vorzuziehen, wenn das bessere nur Webforen und keine Mailingliste anbietet.

Ich habe ja nichts dagegen, wenn ein Webforum angeboten wird. Aber ich habe etwas dagegen, wenn man mit der Begründung "wir haben ja ein Webforum" keine Mailinglisten hat. Im Gegentum: Ein Webforum entlastet eine themengleiche Mailingliste von den DAU-Fragen, die einen eh nicht interessieren und dient somit dem Niveau der Mailingliste.

Ich geh dann jetzt mal den OpenWRT-Webforums-RSS-Feed abonnieren und weine.

To debug a ksynaptics crash, I need to install -dbg packages for all dependencies of ksynaptics.

We do not have a tool for automatically doing so, right?

If I am right, the following scriptlet seems to do the trick.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

PARENT="$1"
DBGPACKAGES=""

for package in $PARENT $(debfoster -d $PARENT | tail -n +2); do
  for source in $(grep-available --no-field-names --field=Package $package --show-field Source); do
      DBGPACKAGES="$DBGPACKAGES $(grep-available --no-field-names --field=Source $source --show-field Package | grep -- '-dbg$' || true )"
  done
done

echo $DBGPACKAGES

Just in case the combination of this blog software and your browser tries to do smart things with the quotes, pull the script from https://ivanova.notwork.de/~mh/stuff/listdbgpackages

I am open for suggestions.

The host hosting blog.zugschlus.de, ivanova.notwork.de, was down due to a network failure in the hoster's network for a few minutes today around 2 pm CEST.

After returning, I found a lot of my syndicated articles anew on Planet Debian, known as the "flood" phenomenon. Is it possible that the Planet software does react in a non-graceful way when an RSS feed cannot be pulled?

Mako, can you investigate this?

A few months ago, I have reported about getting the winmodem in my hp compaq nc 8000 to work.

Aside from the abysmally slow performance, the dependency on out-of-tree, non-free modules has been cause of grief since it has almost constantly forced me to keep an outdated kernel version around just in case that I would need the modem.

Fortunately, _this_ is over now since more recent kernel versions (I suspect somewhere in the 2.6.16 era) support my winmodem natively without out-of-tree modules. All I need to get only on a POTS line is sl-modem-daemon, which is reasonably painless.

My notebook is an hp compaq nc8000 running Debian unstable, and I'd like to know whether it is "already" possible to use software suspend (hibernation). To my knowledge, there is a lot of different ways to do suspension, all of them differently broken and/or incompatible.

I't like to run with an unpatched vanilla kernel, use suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk according to my choice at suspend time, and have the notebook wake up with the X session unhampered and the important hardware (sound, synaptics) still useable. Additional bonus points if wireless and/or wired network remains useable and USB/PCMCIA devices don't need an unplug/plug cycle.

Which solutions should I investigate, which web pages should I read?

The last days, Debian suffered a bug in the reportbug package which made it fail in postinst. This bug was promptly fixed, but reported like THIRTEEN times as a bug in the BTS. If I were reportbug maintainer, I'd have gone ballistic at this ignorance of bug reporters.

Guys, all of you who have reported this bug are running Debian unstable, an unreleased development version of your distribution. Is it asking too much to follow basic etiquette to look in the BTS whether a fatal bug might already been reported? I mean, THIRTEEN nearly identical reports?

I am wondering whether it is currently possible to run a personal laptop with Debian unstable and some init scheme that allows parallel startup of the services. Naturally, it would be very good to start the X server early to be able to log in faster.

Is this concept ready for testing and use? Which packages should I investigate? Any URLs that might be enlightning?

Anthony Towns will be Debian's next project leader. I am not happy with that outcome at all.

Continue reading "Debian loses DPL election, Cabal wins by tiny margin"

The new wpa_supplicant packages have removed the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file. Wireless LAN is now configured via special commands from /etc/network/interfaces, which looks like an elegant Debian way to do things.

While setting this up, I have learned the following:

• an ESSID starting with "+" is not accepted
• You don't enter the passphrase verbatim into /e/n/i, you use wpa_passphrase to hash it
• wpa_supplicant debugs surprisingly well

Well done, maintainers! Thanks!

Next time I'll figure out how to configure wpa_supplicant to automatically associate to the correct wireless LAN regardless of location

After months of complete silence, ICQ spam has started again. Unfortunately, it is not even possible to put these people on ignore since kopete does seem to have lost its ignore option. Or, at least, I cannot find it any more in the menus. At least, kopete doesn't show a message from a new contact before one has decided whether to add or not to add the new contact. A very good idea. Not.

I decided to query #kopete on freenode where the Ignore button has gone to. But, I didn't get any information. They said "your kopete, 0.11.1, is old. Please update to 0.12, this is the supported version."

WTF? I am using Debian unstable, with has the latest released KDE, and kopete 0.11.1 is part of current kdenetwork. And the developers refuse support for a package which has been built a mere six weeks ago? Have these people lost their grasp with reality? This sooooo ridiculous.

Is there any other useable ICQ client that integrates well with KDE?

Isotopp schreibt eine Artikelserie über MySQL für Dummies. Prädikat: Wie immer, lesenswert.

• MySql für Dummies (1)
• MySql für Dummies (2)
• MySql für Dummies (3)
• MySql für Dummies (4)
• MySql für Dummies (5)
• MySql für Dummies (6)
• MySql für Dummies (7)

Ich wollte ja schon lange mal ausprobieren, ob und wie es funktioniert, wenn ich sowohl mit meinem normalen Mailreader, einem direkt auf dem Maildir aufsetzenden lokal laufenden mutt, als auch mit einem grafischen Mailreader über IMAP (mit dem IMAP-Reader dovecot) auf den Spool zugreife.

Das funktioniert leider nicht so wie ich es mir vorgestellt habe: Thunderbird merkt sich eigene Messageflags und hat meine "New/Old"-Markierungen auf den Stand vor vor zwei Wochen zurückgesetzt. Ausserdem werden neue Mails sofort als "Old" markiert.

Das taugt für mich leider nicht, da ich sehr stark mit den "N" und "O"-Markierungen arbeite. Schade drum.

To support my experiments with OpenVPN, I have been trying to evaluate different CA software packages in Debian. With devastating results.

I tried

• pyca
• tinyca
• easy-rsa (from the openvpn package)

Continue reading "Looking for useable CA software"