Tools
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, 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 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
A copy of this article is also available at: http://www.debian-administration.org/article/648/Offline_Package_Management_for_APT This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline. In Debian, when you need to install a package, you usually would fire up the apt-get command and the software would just install without any hand holding. While APT is really very cool one of the main reasons for its success is the Debian Policy. The Debian Policy is like the brain of the project that controls the entire project ensuring that all the bits and pieces fit well together upto the Debian Standards. APT is just a result of the fantastic Debian Policy work. In Debian, every package is very well self-contained and is tightly related to each other using APT. APT does a very good job of integrating and resolving dependencies for Package Management and takes off all the Dependency Hell problems from the user. This is where the problem starts - for a machine which has network access it works very well because APT generates the list of packages and their dependencies and is able to download and install them successfully. But when it comes to downloading a package individually on a different machine, along wih resolving any dependencies this can be a big problem. Consider this real world example: I have a Debian box at home. At home, I have no (or very slow/expensive dial-up) internet connection. At work, I (or my friend) do have a very fast connection but (as part of IT policy) am required to use Windows. I would still like to be able to painlessly update/upgrade my Debian box at home, with all the power and flexibility of APT. This is where apt-offline is useful. apt-offline is an offline APT Package Manager. Using apt-offline: - You generate a signature on your Debian box at home and carry the signature file on a removable medium (Probably a USB Stick).(e.g. "apt-offline set /tmp/apt-offline.txt")
- Now you take the USB Stick (with the apt-offline.txt signature file) to the office machine which could be running any linux version, or as I mentioned above, even Windows.
- There, you could run apt-offline giving it the signature file. (e.g. "apt-offline get C:\apt-offline.txt")
- apt-offline would generate you an archive file or a folder with all the data. That data can be copied on a removable media. The removable media can be attached back to the disconnected Debian box at home and installed. (e.g. "apt-offline install /tmp/apt-offline.zip")
Let's start with a 3 step example Step 1 Generate a signature file on the Disconnected Debian box at home apt-offline set /tmp/apt-offline.sig
The above command will generate all information required from apt about updating its database. By default, with no additional arguments passed, apt-offline will extract information about APT Package Database Update i.e. the --update option as well as the list of Packages to be upgraded i.e. the --upgrade option. These options can also be individually passed if you want only one of those. Step 2 Download data based on the signature file generated earlier apt-offline get C:\apt-offline.sig --threads 5
The above command will download data as mentioned in the signature file. To speed up downloads (that can be from multiple apt repositories), in this example we spawn 5 download threads. Note: It would be good to also download the bug reports for the packages that you are downloading. So that example now becomes: apt-offline get C:\apt-offline.sig --bug-reports --threads 5
There are many more options that you can pass to apt-offline, like the --bundle option which would generate for you, an archive file with all the data. Once completed, you could just copy the data (an archive file, if you used the --bundle option) back to the removable medium and copy it back onto your offline host. Step 3 Once you're back upon the home Debian machine, you feed the data from the removable medium to apt-offline: apt-offline install /media/USB/apt-offline.zip
This will update the APT database on your disconnected machine seamlessly. If there were packages that needed to be upgraded, now they would all be available (with dependencies) in the APT database. So if you do an apt-get upgrade now, APT won't prompt you mentioning even a single bye download. APT would find that all required packages are already present in the APT cache. If you had used the --bug-reports switch that I mentioned earlier, during install apt-offline would prompt you with the list of bug reports related to the packages on your machine that need be upgraded/installed - not just the list but the full bug report will be available for you to look at and evaluate the severity involved. As you can see from the article above, apt-offline helps you achieve the power of APT, in just 3 steps. apt-offline is part of Debian and isdeveloped at Alioth.
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 Fri, 04/08/2011 - 07:36
I just completed the release of apt-offline version 1.1. This release has many bug fixes, adds basic proxy support and has a new Advanced Options window for the Get operation. 
Submitted by Ritesh Raj Sarraf on Sun, 11/07/2010 - 12:46
My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.
With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.
I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it.
Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:
Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information.
Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove.
And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well.
So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.
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