Andreas, I am not a nice guy. I am only lazy. If the change to exim4 (it now displays a debconf note to everybody who tries do dpkg-reconfigure exim4, -base or a daemon package telling them to dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config) saves #debian from answering the question "how do I reconfigure exim4, dpkg-reconfigure exim4 does nothing!" twice a day, it is a good change.
I basically agree with you that people who not read the minimum basics of documentation are a nuisance, but they're unfortunately real. You need to hurl the docs into their faces. And even then they're going to ignore them and google for answers instead. And on google, they're going to find wrong or outdated docs.
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?
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dependency on out-of-tree, non-free modules has been cause of grief since it has almost constantly forced me to keep an outdated kernel version around just in case that I would need the modem.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?
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?
Disclaimer: I am not comfortable with technical documents in my native language, German. I generally find German translations of technical stuff clumsy, overly complicated and badly worded. I might have a "special" feeling for the language, but some output of translators is just too bad to tolerate.
For example, I constantly keep stumbling over the german translation of the Debian security team FAQ, which I consider horrendously badly done. Especially the use of the german word "Gutachten", which basically means "opinion" in the legal sense (as the document produced by an expert called by a court of law) to translate "advisory" is a very very bad choice. My toes curl when I read the german version.
In April 2005, I suggested to the German translation team to review the translation of the security team FAQ. I might not have chosen the right wording for that request, but besides a lot of flamage and "the translation is just fine", I received the usual "send a patch". Which I did in April 2005.
No answer. In October 2005, I asked again, and received answer from the translator that my patch was just too intrusive. Well, a bad translation was rewritten, and the bad translation is still being used.
Consequences for me? I'm not going to bother any more about German translations. English is just fine, and when somebody needs a German translation, I'm going to translate the stuff myself. Pointing people to the official German translations is just too embarrassing. A pity.
After over two years without a release, and after having release candidates in experimental since October, aide 0.11 was released a few days ago, and I have just uploaded 0.11-1 to unstable. This time, I even haven't forgotten to use the -v option to svn-buildpackage to have the changelog entries for the package versions uploaded to experimental in the unstable upload notice as well.
aide is the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, a program which compares the real state of the file system with a database which holds various file attributes such as inode data and/or cryptographic checksums. In 2005, the Debian maintainer of aide, Mike Markley, has accepted me as a co-maintainer, and since I have done the biggest part of the work in the last months, I have adopted the package as responsible maintainer in January 2006. Mike is still listed in Uploaders and can commit to our alioth svn, though.
Well, after reconfiguring my blog on Debian Planet, a few old articles have shown up again. Most probably the Planet had forgotten about having seen these articles before I left Planet weeks ago.
It isn't so bad, since most of the articles are still current - adduser is still beingn worked on, exim4 needs GnuTLS knowhow desperately, and clamav-data packages are still being built automatically for volatile.
