+ 3 - 5 | § ¶Evolution Newsgroup UI

I've been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I've also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the *user*), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME.

Probably, many would disagree. Possibly, they might flame me too.I mean everyone supports GNOME as the default - Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu. And I always wonder WHY.

Was it the licensing ? I can't think of anything else. Anyways, why I still think that the GNOME design sucks, I'll give an example.

Evolution: Many call it the real killer app for GNOME. Maybe. There's one small feature in Evolution, that I've tried many times and I just feel that it is a UI design with stupidity at its best. The NewsGroup plugin of Evolution. Ever tried ? How fast can you subscribe to newsgroups there. Take these examples. I'd be interested to know how Evolution users subscribe to newsgroups.

I personally use leafnode to cache the news contents. In Kontact Knode, when the Gmane newsgroup listing appears, it appears with thousands of newsgroups. But KDE allows me to run a search on that list and find for the relevant newsgroup that I need.

Such a basic feature and I wonder what was there in the mind of the GNOME Evolution devs when they were designing that interface.

Keywords: evolution,gnome,kde,knode

+ 4 - 2 | § ¶Compressing Backups

Once upon a time CPU power was low. In those days, what we have today, was termed to be Super Computers.

Thanks to tough competition and great engineering, we now have CPU in the range of Gigahertz and multiple cores. But on  Destkops/Laptops, do we really have applications that utilize the ability of these processors ?

So I thought about making these powerful CPUs to do some work.

There are different views about Backups. My preference has always been that my backup should be an identical image of my entire OS. That'd include the cache, the packages installed, my personal data, my mail spool et cetera. Given the requirements, my preferred choice of Backups has been LVM Snapshots.

And now to add to that is this

rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso | bzip2 -v > /tmp/bzip.test

  (stdin): 965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 291.708 s, 1.7 MB/s
 1.058:1,  7.559 bits/byte,  5.51% saved, 494178304 in, 466933711 out.
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.test
472M    debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
446M    /tmp/bzip.test
rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=/tmp/bzip.test | bunzip2 -dc | dd of=/tmp/bzip.uncompress
911979+1 records in
911979+1 records out
466933711 bytes (467 MB) copied, 135.861 s, 3.4 MB/s
965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 136.115 s, 3.6 MB/s
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.uncompress
472M    debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
472M    /tmp/bzip.uncompress
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum
md5sum            md5sum.textutils
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0  debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum /tmp/bzip.uncompress
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0  /tmp/bzip.uncompress

Keywords: backups,bzip2,compression,dd,lvm,snapshots

+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Crab Mania

Do you like crabs ?

Have you bitten one ?

Or been bitten by one. That'd be the case if they weren't tied.

Keywords: crab

+ 3 - 2 | § ¶Backups && Recovery

Backups

Most of the users using computers have a very high dependency on it. Day-by-Day, our data is getting digitized. Everything is getting into electronic formats (Movies/Pictures/Music et cetera). If you are one, you know how important it is to have a backup.

Lately, I haven't been using Microsoft Windows on a daily basis. So I'll comment on Linux here.

The definition of Backup can be different. People like backing-up only the Important data. The problem is that the term Important is very volatile. What is important to X is not necessarily important to Y.

For my backup solutions, in the past, I've relied on a KDE Backup tool, Keep. It internally uses rdiff-backup. It was good. It allowed incremental backups. There were some hiccups here and there but overall it was pretty good. But it was very difficult to tell the application about What all it should backup. And then, it needed to do a diff verification for every file that was a candidate.

Restoration from rdiff-backup was not always great. Especially the incremental backups. If something was messed up, it was tough to recover. For example, assume that the backup was in progress. And you needed to rush for home immediately aborting your backup. Keep wouldn't play good there.

Then came LVM. I've used LVM for years but never really looked at it as a backup option. To start with, I'd say, LVM is the Best Backup Tool for my needs. I described Important above. For me, Important is my HOME dir, my /var/tmp/kdecache-rrs dir, and my /tmp/kde-rrs dir. Apart from that, my /etc/ dir, my /usr/loca/ dir. And many more that I can't recollect. If there was one simple tool to backup all without worrying of Permission, Security Labels et cetera, that'd be LVM.

And LVM allows Online Backups. So I can have my / volume online and still go ahead with the backup while I'm working.

And depending on I want, I can do a File or a Block based backup.

Recovery

So we know how important our data has become for us, depending on how dependent you are on computers for your day-to-day life. I hate thinking about it but increasing dependency on computers gets me worried about security. Yeah!! You'd say Linux is more secure. (Wouldn't want to discuss in that direction)

I really like the SELinux Security Features. Most of the people (including Enterprise Customers) I know,  disable SELinux on their machines. Currently SELinux doesn't see a widespread integration into the entire Application Stack. Thus apps just fail as SELinux restricts their access.

On my Debian Box, SELinux is miles away from the kind of integration packages have through apt. That sometimes makes me run to Red Hat based distributions to see what their state is, on SELinux.

So yesterday, I wiped off my Debian setup and installed Fedora. Used it for a couple of hours and decided to go back to Debian again (More of a personal taste).

That's what I do once in a year.

The thing I have the most, is to lose data. Data being - My Settings and other stuff I mentioned above.

So to recover Debian was just a couple of hours. Just had to do a Block Restoration of the Block Backed ROOT LV to the new LV. And then, a minor grub and kenrel installation. And voila, everything was back just as it was yesterday.

Keywords: backups,lvm,recovery,redhat

+ 4 - 1 | § ¶Another Debian Merit

So there was a recent thread on the Destop Architect's forum, where Dan Kegel discussed the idea of silent upgrades (for Security, at least).

I for one, am not very fond of the idea. Updates/Upgrades (Security or Features) are something which should be done with some Human Intervention. But still it is not an idea to be completely ruled out. Free Software is about choice. There definitely are use cases where Silent Updates look a good choice. With a carefully crafted policy, this could really help achieve the ultimate goal that Dan was looking after. Closing down vulnerabilities asap.

One of the concerns I had was that a mere upgrade is not what can protect vulnerabilites. Standard Package Managers will do the job of updating the vulnerable libraries with the newer patched ones. But they don't come into effect untill re-loaded. Take the browser as an example. It is vulnerable. You silently got it updated by your distro's package manager. But still it is vulnerable. For the patches to be effective, the browser needs a re-start.

In Debian, you could attain Silent Upgrades with some settings defined in apt.

apt ships a /etc/cron.daily/apt script.

So with the following in place:

APT {

    Get {

        Assume-Yes "true"; Upgrade "true";

    }

}

So, with the above settings in place, one can achieve Silent Updates. This ofcourse comes with an assumption that you are not on a Rolling Release of Debian.

But my focus was about getting those patched libraries/binaries effective. So here's the cooled feature of Debian, which has been there for years. apt/dpkg allows you the debconf interface. And there you can set the priority of messages/questions that you'd like to see. So assume that your remote machine, that you access through ssh, has a sshd vulnerability:

Debian updates the sshd package
It'll ask you (Depending of debconf priority), whether it should restart the sshd daemon

And thus you get a patched sshd package, installed, with the patch effective.

I haven't tried but I believe, if you don't install debconf, dpkg/apt will go with the default action that is defined in the package by itself.

So with all this in place, Debian has a very nice approach to package management. I haven't come across a similar interface in any other non-Debian derived distribution.

Keywords: apt,debian,dpkg,security,updates

+ 3 - 2 | § ¶Debian Lenny - Reviews and Comparison

Now that Lenny is released, we see a lot of reviews around the world. I think most of the reviewers do an unfair comparison for Debian.

I followed Heise Online's review and see that they are comparing Lenny to Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE.

IMO, the philosophy behind Debian Stable is very different than that of Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu. Fedora/openSUSE are more focused to bring you the latest and greatest. The same applies to Ubuntu (Excluding the LTS release). These are releases where they are targetting users as Beta Testers. And that's good. It brings a good final Stable Release product. But comparing Debian to them is not really correct.

Debian Stable's Release Policy is very well defined. It'll be released when it is ready. A lot has improved there. And also the "Codename and a half" are a very good add-on to the existing process.

Debian Stable should actually be compared against - RHEL/SLES/UBUNTU LTS
Debian Testing should be compared against - Fedora/openSUSE/UBUNTU

This is something reviewers should be educated about. And they should keep this in mind during their reviews. Debian Stable is designed with stabiilty in mind. The focus is more on the Server side.

Keywords: debian,lenny

+ 3 - 3 | § ¶Debian Lenny Released

Amazing Moments
Debian Lenny has been released.

Go, grab now.

Keywords: debian,lenny

+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset

So my friend game me a cute little birthday present, a Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset.

Making it work under Linux was not very difficult but still has to catch-up in terms of utils.

To make the headset work, I just had to run a scan on the Linux host, and get the hw address and specify it in .asoundrc.

pcm.bluetooth {                    
    type bluetooth  {                     
        address = xx.xx.xx.xx.xx                
        description "Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset"
    }                           
}                               

 And then to play a file, like in mplayer, you just specify the alsa device.

 mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth foo.ogg

KDE's Phonon currently doesn't show the Bluetooth Headset even if it is paired.

PulseAudio doesn't work good. (I couldn't make it work in my limited attempt) 

Keywords: bluetooth,bluez,motorols_s9