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Ritesh Raj Sarraf's picture

I am so indebted to the community

Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on

As someone who learned computers on his own, I always acknowledged the value that the Free Software movement has brought. The accessibility of these topics, which are only supposed to be part of text books and schools, is available for anyone and everyone who has the resource and passion to do it.

But this past week, 2 things made me pretty impressed with the maturity and quality of work that we do.

rrs@zan:/media$ sudo lvextend -r -v -L 100G /dev/BackupDisk/DATA

    Finding volume group BackupDisk
    Executing: fsadm --verbose check /dev/BackupDisk/DATA
fsadm: "ext4" filesystem found on "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA"
fsadm: Skipping filesystem check for device "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA" as the filesystem is mounted on /media/DATA
    fsadm failed: 3
    Archiving volume group "BackupDisk" metadata (seqno 7).
  Extending logical volume DATA to 100.00 GiB
    Found volume group "BackupDisk"
    Found volume group "BackupDisk"
    Loading BackupDisk-DATA table (254:2)
    Suspending BackupDisk-DATA (254:2) with device flush
    Found volume group "BackupDisk"
    Resuming BackupDisk-DATA (254:2)
    Creating volume group backup "/etc/lvm/backup/BackupDisk" (seqno 8).
  Logical volume DATA successfully resized
    Executing: fsadm --verbose resize /dev/BackupDisk/DATA 104857600K
fsadm: "ext4" filesystem found on "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA"
fsadm: Device "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA" size is 107374182400 bytes
fsadm: Parsing tune2fs -l "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA"
fsadm: Resizing filesystem on device "/dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA" to 107374182400 bytes (13107200 -> 26214400 blocks of 4096 bytes)
fsadm: Executing resize2fs /dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA 26214400
resize2fs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012)
Filesystem at /dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA is mounted on /media/DATA; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 4, new_desc_blocks = 7
The filesystem on /dev/mapper/BackupDisk-DATA is now 26214400 blocks long.
 
 
I didn't have much hope that this extend operation would succeed. But it did. When I initiated this operation, in the background, I had the backups being synced parallely (which actually made me resize my volume. :-)
 
 
The other item which made me happy yesterday was Audacity. Once upon a time, when I needed to split a music file to cut a ringtone out of it, I'd go looking for software that could do it. Then I would hope that one of those software vendors have a fully working version and not a demo with just 5 seconds clipping. Cowon was one media player I can recollect I've used to split audio files.
But in this case, I had a different requirement. I needed to increase the dB of my ringtone file so that it sounded really a ringtone (Example: Bourne Ultimatum OST). Audacity, not only did it do the job, it did it for me in just 3-5 minutes. And all with just button clicks. For a n00b with no experience in that domain, I was really impressed.

 

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Ritesh Raj Sarraf's picture

apt-offline - 1.3

Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on

It is still 2012 in this part of the world and the world is still intact. Since nothing major happened, I thought of spending the new gifted time to add a long pending item to apt-offline. As shown in the screen shots, apt-offline's GUI now has support to detect and display the downloaded offline bug reports.









This is part of the just released, version 1.3.

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Ritesh Raj Sarraf's picture

Debian Boot time

Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on

In case, the video doesn't show on the page, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTK3aIZbe2A This blog post is to show-off the impressive performance I saw with my machine.

I recently switched to a ThinkPad W530 laptop. It is a fairly recent machine with the following hardware config:
  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz
  • 8 GiB RAM
  • nVIDIA Optimus
  • Samsung SSD Drive

On the software front, I decided to take my chances. Hence:

  • BTRFS File System
  • SystemD Init
The rest is in the video. It is impressive to see how drastically the experience has changed with this combination.
From my limited time spent exploring the machine, all credit goes to the SSD technology.

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Ritesh Raj Sarraf's picture

Reporting bugs with Apport - III

Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on

 

Hello World. This is the follow-up to the last 2 updates on the state of apport in Debian.
 
A lot has changed since the last update on Apport. Currently, in Experimental, we have version 2.6.1-2. With this version, and going forward, there will be no hacks to make it work for Debian. Thanks to Martin Pitt, with his assistance, Apport now has a very basic crashdb in place for Debian. The Debian crashdb provides Apport the interface to interact with the Debian BTS.
 
This change is already upstream as part of the 2.6.1 release. So for Debian, the packaging is a mere change of the crashdb from 'default' to 'debian'. Being Just Another CrashDB inside Apport, it leverage full support of future Apport releases, fixes and enhancements.
 
I would like to highlight some points, and some concerns, I have heard in my previous blog posts.
 
  • Direct email reports to the developer: This was a concern from the last blog post. There will be no such pop-up anymore. It has been knocked off.
  • Useless/Incomplete bug reports: With no proper backtrace, it is worried that the bug report will be useless. Apport has intellignece to check if the backtrace is complete. If it is not, it will not report the bug.

Pop-up for Incomplete backtrace

  • Opt-Out: What if the maintainer is not interested in apport reports? The maintainer can ship a blacklist hook into /etc/apport/blacklist.d/. See /etc/apport/blacklist.d/README.blacklist for details.
 

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Ritesh Raj Sarraf's picture

Reporting bugs with Apport - II

Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on

This is a follow up to the previous post regarding Reporting bugs with Apport

Apport, version 2.2.3-2, has been pushed to experimental. There were some nice feedback that led to some more changes that I will talk here.

Opt out: As a developer, if you see the volume of reports to be annoying, you have the option to opt out of apport reports. To do this, you should specify the XBS-Apport: No field in your package's control file. When your application crashes, apport first checks for that field in your package's description and acts based on what you chose.

Following image is that the user sees for packages where the developer has opted out.opt out

Repetition: Repetition of the same crash could lead to multiple reports on the same buggy behavior. For this, apport, if senses that you have already filed a bug, it provides you with the option to further ignore all crashes for that particular type.

Following image should explain it better.

ignore report

 

My initial thought regarding defaults was to make apport a default opt out tool for the entire archive and only file reports for packages where the developer has manually enabled to opt-in for apport reports. But that'd have been very slow in terms of adoption, hence, for now, instead, the version in experimental does it the other way around. It will file bug reports for all packages. If you need to opt out, you will have to add the above expalined control field. 

That's it for this post. Please provide feedback once you spend some time with apport.

PS: Please take conscious steps when filing bug reports with apport. I think it is a great tool. It just needs great users. :-)

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