Debian-Pages

Finally, I am proud to be officially part of one of the most successful and well organized Free/Open project, the Debian project.

I would like to thank everyone who have worked with me. I would also like to thank my Advocate Giridhar and my AM Pablo. It was and is really awesome working with you guys.

It is holiday time and so finally time to installing Debian onto the Sony PS3 box. The installation was smooth as most of the stuff is already documented. The Debian Installer has all the support needed, to install onto the Sony PS3. As of now the only thing not working perfectly is the boot loader. It seems to be taking default is the kernel that was booted last. Even if I change the default in /etc/kboot.conf, it still boots into the kernel that was booted last time.

It all started long back when I worked for a giant computer manufacturing company. Certain IT policies led fo the need for an Offline APT Package Manager

While I got it working for a long time, I didn’t have the aggression to polish and push it for general usage. Thanks to my friend appaji, [apt-offline](http ://apt-offline.alioth.debian.org) (a.k.a pypt-offilne) is now part of Debian.

Given the recent switch to a stronger key by everyone, here’s mine.

The old key that I’ll still keep using till I get the new key signed by a good amount of people.

pub 1024D/04F130BC 2003-08-18
Key fingerprint = CF0F EDEF 1052 83D2 62A4 0549 E118 62EA 04F1 30BC
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf rrs@researchut.com
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) rsarraf@netapp.com
uid [jpeg image of size 52128]
sub 1024g/A876BF8F 2003-08-18
sub 4096R/5D93A273 2009-04-25
sub 4096R/7FBB6077 2009-04-25

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

Amazing Moments
Debian Lenny has been released.

Go, grab now.

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”
}
}

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