Debian-Blog
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Thu, 05/17/2012 - 08:56
Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.61, has been released and will land up soon for Debian. This is the version that would be targetting Wheezy.
This release includes many bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines. This is mainly a bug fix release. Some parallel module execution approach has been used which could show runtime improvements. Changelog: 1.61 - Thu May 17 17:44:26 IST 2012 * Handle devices with persistent device naming. This fixes the issues where you don't have a disk referenced by a block name, the commit= value was completely skipped * Fix issue where hdparm skips SSDs for power management * Add parallel execution for the modules. In theory this should speeden up the execution. See git commit log comments for details * Add support for non-deafult customized settings * calculate design_capacity_warning on machines/arches where it is not readily available We have switched the SCM to git. The current code repository is available at [1] along with the changelog. The tarball is available here [2]. The md5 checksum for the tarball is 6685af5dbb34c3d51ca27933b58f484e [1] https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools[2] http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/tools/downloads/laptop-mode-tools_1.61.tar.gz
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sat, 05/05/2012 - 15:32
Now these are the kind of moves that needs to happen more often. Whether this will cause a negative impact on the overall market, and the further invention of drugs (including patent control), but the affordability of the medicatoin to an average citizen is a great move. The typical Chemotherapy can be on an average of 22 times. When summed up with the dosage (somewhere around 250 mg IIRC), the cost comes to approx: (22/4) * 15000 = 82k, which now, will be affordable at 27k. I guess the price slash is only for India and am not sure what the impact to the global market will look like. Quoting the article: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/cipla-drug-price-cut-not-to-hurt-revenue-much-say-analysts_700380.html Cipla cut price of its kidney cancer drug Sorafenib, which is sold under brand name Nexavar by multi-national Bayer to Rs 6,840 for a month's supply, from around Rs 28,000 earlier. Its lung cancer drug Gestinib, which is sold under brand name Iressa by AstraZeneca will cost Rs 4,250, versus Rs 10,200 earlier, and price of Temozolamide used to treat brain tumour, has been reduced by Rs 15,000 to Rs 5,000. India's Patent Office recently issued a compulsory licence allowing Natco to make a generic copy of Sorafenib, on the payment of a royalty to Bayer, which sells the drug at around Rs 2 lakh. Domestic sales account for 46-47% of Cipla's total sales and of that the cancer drugs portfolio is a very small portion, so these price cuts are unlikely to have any major impact on its revenue, Hitesh Mahida of Fortune Equity Brokers told moneycontrol.com "Cipla's idea seems to be to create disruption in the market, increase its market share..." the analyst says. Swiss pharma major Roche had earlier this year signed a manufacturing deal with India's Emcure Pharma so that its anti-cancer drugs Herceptin and MabThera could be made in India at affordable prices. Analysts say Cipla's move to slash prices could in future deter some MNCs from launching their drugs in India at all, but some may also look at doing deals like the one struck by Roche. Meanwhile, shares of pharma major Cipla surged over 3% on Friday after brokerage CLSA upgraded the stock to "outperform" from "underperform," saying, Cipla would be strongest beneficiaries of a weakening rupee. The rupee has been sliding sharply against the US dollar in recent days and hit over four month low of around Rs 53.78 earlier in trade. "We expect improving margins over the coming quarters on back of a weak rupee and a low base. We expect strong operating profit growth over coming quarters led by margin expansion and high margin product supplies," CLSA's Hemant Bakhru said. The US Food and Drugs Administration has approved Meda's drug Dymista for allergic rhinitis and the product is widely expected to reach USD 300-500 million in annual sales over the coming years. The analyst says Cipla being a partner, will benefit through product supplies over a longer term. "Apart from approval (outside North America) related milestone payment (US$5m), we expect gradual increase in Cipla’s sales from product related supplies to Meda. Assuming Cipla supplies product at 10-15% of sales, it could earn US$50-75m at peak sales," Bakhru said. Additionally, a low base in domestic formulations could result in reasonable India growth, he adds. Cipla shares were up 2.8% at Rs 326.60 on NSE in noon trade.
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 13:46
In the 3.x days of KDE, there were some wonderful applications. One of them I still admire, is kscope. Recently, I stumbled upon this blog entry and thought of sharing my living with kscope. The move from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a big one. During that move, the kscope author decided to port kscope to a Qt only application. That is what we have as the latest kscope, 1.9x version. But, on personal taste, it is not as good as the 1.6x series. With no viable replacement to my knowledge, making use of kscope 1.6x on Debian (and Ubuntu) was the choice. Thanks to the way it is all packaged by the KDE, it is easy. Kscope depends on 2 packages for its functionlity: kdelibs4c2a and kate. kdelibs4c2a is unsupported, but for the dire needs, you live with it. The library can be easily pulled from the snapshot website, or just get the package from the old distribution URLs. The same goes for kate and kscope (1.6x) Install the kdelibs4c2a package. 16:55:27 rrs@champaran:~$ apt-cache policy kdelibs4c2a kdelibs4c2a: Installed: 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-5 Candidate: 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-5 Version table: *** 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-5 0 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
You can't do the same with kate because the same package name is carried forward. Simply unpack the old kate deb package and copy the following libraries to /usr/local/: libkateinterfaces.so.0@ libkateutils.so.0@ libkateinterfaces.so.0.0.0 libkateutils.so.0.0.0
Since the kscope package has a dependency defined on the kate pacakge, use equivs to create a dummy package to satisfy kscope. With that, it is all done. Just make sure to put your kscope, kate and kdelibs4c2a packages on hold. For the eyes:
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 13:10
Many of the SAN components in Debian have me involved. So I think out to give an update on what the state of SAN would be in Debian Wheezy. Open-iSCSI: Just uploaded a newer version to experimental which eventually will crawl into testing. It should fix all release goals for Wheezy. Please give it a good test iscsitarget: Same goes here. This one is already in testing. Please test. It has some bugs reported, all in needinfo, as they haven't been easily reproducible or reported complete. multipath-tools: It is in pretty good shape. Some minor bugs. But still, please test. :-) Open-FCoE: Being dependent on hardware, for which I couldn't manage resource commitment, this one is literally untested. It lies in testing, untested. LIO Target: The newest target implementation for Linux. It is also available in testing, has had some minor bugs reported by users, and fixed. If you use, or anticipate to use it in the Wheezy life cycle, now is the time to test.
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 12:47
apport just cleared the new queue and is now available in experimental. For those who do not know what apport is: Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because: - Many crashes are not easily reproducible.
End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc. - A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.
- There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.
- Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.
Apport is a system which - intercepts crashes right when they happen the first time,
- gathers potentially useful information about the crash and the OS environment,
- can be automatically invoked for unhandled exceptions in other programming languages (e. g. in Ubuntu this is done for Python),
- can be automatically invoked for other problems that can be automatically detected (e. g. Ubuntu automatically detects and reports package installation/upgrade failures from update-manager),
- presents a UI that informs the user about the crash and instructs them on how to proceed,
- and is able to file non-crash bug reports about software, so that developers still get information about package versions, OS version etc.
At this moment, it is quite broken. The crashes are not intercepted by update-notifier on my box. With it now in experimental, my intent is to slowly integrate it well with all dependent tools for Debian. It won't be ready for the Wheezy release, but hopefully for the one after that. On the Ubuntu side, Canonical hosts a retracing service that takes user reported core dumps and generates a usable backtrace. For Debian, my plan is to have a chroot kind interface, where in the user could opt-in to download all debug packages to generate a valid backtrace. This could go as the debian backend for apport in the future. On the bug reporting side, afaik, we do not have a web interface to lodge bugs. To report bugs (minus the core dumps), we will want a backend to submit it over email. The current apport report gathering tool is pretty good (if compared to other tools like reportbug), so here the low hanging fruit would be to just take the report and feed in email to our BTS server. For the eyes: 
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Mon, 11/07/2011 - 09:36
I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in: - They were automatically detected
- Partitions/File Systems understood
- Desktop systems would prompt for actions
The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were: [56063.268107] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 13 using ehci_hcd[56063.401635] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=14cd, idProduct=6116[56063.401645] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=3, SerialNumber=2[56063.401652] usb 1-1: Product: USB 2.0 SATA BRIDGE [56063.401658] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Super Top [56063.401663] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: M6116018VF16[56063.402857] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0[56064.400896] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD50 00BEVT-24A0RT0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0[56064.401576] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0[56064.402102] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)[56064.402615] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off[56064.402618] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00[56064.403101] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.403105] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.404861] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.404864] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.419657] sdb: sdb1[56064.421850] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.421854] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.421857] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk But for my Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex HDD, things were different. The kernel would detect but then it would not mount. The error reported is that the device is busy. My FreeAgent's kernel messages look similar to what the regular one has: [ 168.520140] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd[ 168.657424] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=5021[ 168.657433] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3[ 168.657439] usb 1-1: Product: FreeAgent GoFlex[ 168.657444] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Seagate[ 168.657449] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: NA0C1BML[ 168.659079] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0[ 169.657136] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4[ 169.708786] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0[ 169.709079] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)[ 169.709954] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off[ 169.709963] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00[ 169.710567] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA[ 169.759942] sdc: sdc1[ 169.762050] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk As the Device Mapper Multipath Debian Maintainer, I have multipath-tools installed on my laptop. Turns out, for some reason, the device is consumer by the device mapper multipath stack. 20:12:58 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/mapper/1Seagate@ 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Np1 control LocalDisk-ROOT@ LocalDisk-SWAP@
Also the block device ID listing is enumerated as type SCSI. 19:56:44 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/disk/by-id/ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ata-HL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GU10N_M189CNI1127@ scsi-SSeagate_FreeAgent_GoFle_NA0C1BML@ata-ST1000LM010-9YH146_W1000ZD8@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0@dm-name-1Seagate@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0-part1@dm-name-LocalDisk-ROOT@ wwn-0x5000c5003d19c8c2@dm-name-LocalDisk-SWAP@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc@dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3D5DepV8w8nLrHfoAjIIQVnakOQJZEqJX@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part1@dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3k9aJfc9B7wRmVIwfoagffHUZjuN6c4cM@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part2@dm-uuid-mpath-1Seagate@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part3@raid-1Seagate@ But I'm not sure why the same doesn't happend for my external laptop drive. It gets properly tagged as device type USB. So Laptop or Server, if you have a FreeAgent that you want to connect to your machine, and see the device busy error when accessing the device['s] directly, do the following: First, the ID of the device. 20:17:43 rrs@champaran:~$ /lib/udev/scsi_id --whitelisted --page=0x83 --device=/dev/sdc1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N Add the ID to /etc/multipath.conf under blacklist section blacklist { wwid "1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex*" wwid "1Seagate FA GoFlex Desk*"# devnode "^(ram|raw|loop|fd|md|dm-|sr|scd|st)[0-9]*"# devnode "^hd[a-z][[0-9]*]"# device {# vendor DEC.*# product MSA[15]00# }} Run mulitpath -F to flush the unused maps. Run multipath -v3 to ensure that now the device is blacklisted. Nov 03 20:19:02 | sdc: (Seagate:FreeAgent GoFlex) wwid blacklisted
The front cause for the mis-behavior is: # Coalesce multipath devices before multipathd is running (initramfs, early# boot)ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", RUN+="/sbin/multipath -v0 /dev/$name" But something else, maybe the default blacklist table, needs the actual fix.
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Wed, 10/19/2011 - 08:08
OpenXenManager cleared the NEW queue and is now available in the archive. What it is: rrs@champaran:~$ apt-cache show openxenmanager Package: openxenmanagerVersion: 0.r80+dfsg-1Installed-Size: 3051Maintainer: Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>Architecture: allDepends: pythonDescription: full-featured graphical management tool for xen using xenapi OpenXenManager is a graphical interface to manage XenServer / Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) hosts through the network . OpenXenManager is an open-source multiplatform clone of XenCenter (Citrix)Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxenmanager/Section: adminPriority: extraFilename: pool/main/o/openxenmanager/openxenmanager_0.r80+dfsg-1_all.debSize: 396322MD5sum: 64df482dac6b99bc3403bcc0740f8718SHA1: 9c746f524c3c29eb88de7ae702c96cbca162f577SHA256: 454641eb26c57ba35ad573a3a8493ac6dbd82f7920c8b926049ef892724147e0
It is written purely in Python so should work at most of the places. The current consumer of OpenXenManager are users who have a Citrix XenServer platfrom running as a hypervisor. Soon, once XCP efforts are completed for Debian, OpenXenManager will also be able to manage Debian Xen Hypervisor installations using this graphical tool. 
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 04:36
Hello World,
I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.60.
This release includes lots of bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.The battery polling daemon now, more reliably, gets triggered and killed based on power states.
This release also includes 2 helper scripts to trigger suspend and hibernate, in case anyone is interested.Given the advancements of Linux PM (All thanks to Rafael J. Wysocki) in recent years, the freezer/thawfunctionality really does a very good job of handling suspend/hibernate, there is no need of a hacky suspend/resumemechanism. Thus, you'll notice the helper scripts just do a mere echo into sysfs.
I would also like to thank the Chromium project that has found and fixed many bugs and added many enhancements to Laptop Mode Tools.Changelog: 1.60 -- Fri Oct 14 13:08:09 IST 2011 - Use proper device reference for iwconfig (Debian BTS: #639388)
- Check for block device's existence. Thanks to Simon Que
- Add suspend/resume helper tools: pm-helper, pm-suspend, pm-hibernate
- What laptop-mode-tools is stopped from init, also kill polling daemon
- Reliable and much better locking mechanics
- Make polling dameon lock safe
- Make lmt-udev distro neutral. Thanks to Simon Que
- Change Intel HDA Audio's default power save timeout to 2 seconds
We have switched the SCM to git. The current code repository is available at [1] along with the changelog. The tarball is available here [2]. The md5 checksum for the tarball is 22bcc955c4e5d28e2f3a992b0efb50b4 [1] https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools[2] http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/tools/downloads/laptop-mode-tools_1.60.tar.gz
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 16:29
So this is the 2nd time I ran into a problem like this again. My FAT32 file system on the external USB HDD, all of a sudden, started reporting: 00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFNLogical sector size is zero.
I had been taking a lot of care to ensure that I don't run into situation like this. No body likes losing data. The good part is that I've been lucky enough that, even without backups (now who's gonna backup a backup disk), I have recovered all my data. All thanks to Christophe GRENIER for Testdisk. So what caused the problemI don't know. I do remember what I did last that must have triggered the problem. I started 5 copy operations from my Laptop HDD to the External HDD (FAT32 which got corrupted) using the File Manager, effectively triggering a random write for the I/O Scheduler. And at the very same time, I was also running Handbrake to try re-encode a corrupted MP4 video from my camera - CPU Intensive task. Well nothing RTOS or Mission critical, but unfortunately, the linux kernel couldn't take much. The moment it ran out of VM, it started paging. And looks like paging is the ugliest state for the linux kernel. Because the moment it starts paging, you have a very high probability of hitting an OOM. And that's what happened in my case. I wish Linux actually thawed processes instead of trying to give every a fair share, and thus ending up in an OOM situation. But anyways, having become good at predicting Linux's behavior, I decided to not touch the laptop at all. Left it as it is over night thinking it would eventually trigger OOM and the prime candidate would be Handbrake. And once Handbrake is killed, everything would recover. In the morning, every thing was back to normal. The HDD was idle and showed no more signs of the paging abuse the kernel did last night. The only evidence was syslog which did impress me for my predictability of Linux's OOM. The kernel did trigger OOM and just kill the most abusive (CPU intensive) process, Handbrake, and everything else had recovered to normal. Well. All good. I did not have to reboot my laptop. So just hibernated and pushed to work. Why FAT32? Is that the best?My beautiful Playstation 3, with which I like to share some of the files, does not understand anything else apart from FAT32. So back to home, plugged-in the External HDD and........... sigh!!! Does not detect. Plugged it into my laptop ...... No KDE automount... Something wrong.... 00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFNLogical sector size is zero.
I wonder why does a file system have to get corrupted for extensive I/O on it.. The Recovery..Done is done. Having run into similar problems before, I looked back at testdisk. It started off with a disappointment stating that the file system was damaged. Luckily, doing an advanced mode lookup did show some hope.  And doing a listing further yielded that the boot sector was available. Which when rebuilt, allowed me access to the partition. For some reason, the [undelete] option listed no data. It reported that there was no data available. Selecting the [Boot] option listed down all my files, which I quickly copied over to my other External USB HDD with a btrfs file system ;-) Testdisk has twice turned out to be my favorite data recovery tool from b0rken file systems.
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sun, 08/07/2011 - 10:41
Wrestling (WWE) is entertaining. The way the ww[ef] superstars (Especially the ones like Undertaker, Triple H) are presented is fun to watch. Or the kind of high flying maveuveurs the wwf superstars are able to perform, it really is super cool. The only catch is - it is not a sport. The feuds are all pre-defined to juicen things up. I recently came to know of UFC. I hope some day they start airing it in my part of the world. I'm still getting acquianted to MMA, but it really is an awesome sport. This is one forum which does show size does not matter. Was watching Royce Gracie's matches from UFC 4. Awesome matches clearly showing the skill with which one can beat any size or power. The final was in between a pro-jiu jitsu vs pro-wrestler. Gracie won it but was given a tough fight by the wrestler. That brings me to EA Sports MMA.  I downloaded this demo some time back but never played it. Only after the recent interest in MMA I looked back at this demo. The demo was good enought to convince for the full version. The gameplay primarily comes in 2 modes: 1 x 1 fighter mode and a Career Mode. If you start with the 1x1 fighter mode, you'll very soon be beaten out. Just like The Fight, this game does need some practising and getting a hang of the game controls. Uncommon - Attacks are triggered by the R1 key, with L3 as the modifier for kicks. In career mode, you can create your own custom character and start from scratch to becoming a fighter. You start off with the basics, learn the standards tactics on how to Clinch, Take Down, Block and Submit your opponent. With these skills learnt, the game starts to becoming a real fun. But the real gem about the game is in the Stamina. The developers ensured that this is not just another "who's the better button masher" game. You need to be careful to not run out of stamina. The stamina is the biggest key to winning in this game, just like in real life fighting. If you run out of stamina, you can't even submit your opponent even if you have a full body mount. To beat down the tough fighters you will need to master the key combinations with great speed. Be fast enough to Jab + Jab + Hook + Side Kick, all of this with minimal stamina spent. Overall, a great game to have if you like Mixed Martial Arts.
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