Debian-Pages

IMO, Linux Distributors should seriously think about Role Based Operations for their distributions.

Every linux user is going to be using his copy of the distribution in a different way. But from the distributor’s point of view, it should boil down to:

Desktop Users

Laptop Users

Server Users

Currently, some of the distributions apply this thought only to packages. For example, Ubuntu rolls out a desktop flavor and a server (generic) flavor of its kernel package. I think the distributions need to think broad and realize that NOT One Size Fits All.

When writing packages for Debian, one of the biggest problems is determining the packages to be put in Build-Depends

Sometimes, a single dependency in Build-Depends ends up building the package successfully on your machine while it fails on other machines. This is where pbuilder is really handy. It allows you to have bare minimal Debian OS releases, to which you can pass the package to build. It downloads the Build- Depends and then does a build in the clean Debian build environment. Now if you’ve provided incomplete Build-Depends, your build will fail.

While this is not really specific to Debian, but somehow it does contribute to it.

One of the reasons why I like Debian a lot is because of its package organization and availability. I take full leverage of the good work the Debian Developers have done packaging various dictionary packages in Debian.

While recently doing a re-installation (Don’t ask me why), searching back for the Debian dict packages, yielded in the following:

I must admit, Linux Power Management is Fuckin’ Pathetic.

On a Dell XPS M1210 Laptop with a 6 Cell battery, I get a shitty 15 mins of power backup compared to 2 hrs on Microsoft Windows XP.

And woo, On my IBM T43 running Microsoft Windows XP, I watched a full movie on battery, and it still survived.

The Linux running laptop had no sound enabled.

Yes, Yes Yes!!! As many would say

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned about not being able to simply configured networking for the Guest VMs. I feel that area is still unimplemented properly by the GUI wrappers available for KVM/QEMU.

There is a good utility VDE2, which can work great for all your networking needs for the Guest VMs. But unfortunately none of the GUI wrappers (Qemulator, QtEmu, Qlauncher) are handling it.

The simplicity of vde is amazing. Here’s what all you need to do:

So Yesterday, I was finally confident enough to uninstall VMWare from my laptop.

Thanks to the richness of virtualization technologies which are present in Linux (2.6.22) now.

I’ve always liked to explore different operating systems (not distributions really) to see what interesting features they implement differently. BSDs being one, Solaris being the other. But sometimes it really was difficult for me to try them out.

Reason:

• The current machine that I have apart from my laptop is a very old box with 64Mb of RAM and a 750 Mhz Intel Processor
• This box is primarily used for building my cusotmized kernels to run on my laptop.
• This box serves as a file server.
• This box doesn’t have a head.

I also own a Dell XPS M1210 laptop with a pretty good configuration.

Currently, there’s no simple framework in NetworkManager for Firewalling support.

Here’s one way you can provide a simple and minimal firewall setup for your box controlled by NM.

Create the following files:

rrs@learner:~$ cat /etc/network/if-up.d/firewall
#!/bin/bash

if [ $IFACE == “lo” ]; then
echo;
else
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i $IFACE -m state –state NEW,INVALID -j DROP;
fi
rrs@learner:~$ cat /etc/network/if-down.d/firewall
#!/bin/bash

if [ $IFACE == “lo” ]; then
echo;
else
/sbin/iptables -D INPUT -i $IFACE -m state –state NEW,INVALID -j DROP;
fi

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So many of you might be aware of NetworkManager. The big new tool from RedHat does simplify Network Configuration on your Linux box.

But there lies a small problem with NetworkManager. It is very picky about what it is going to touch and what not.

Here’s a paragraph from the README.Debian file:

Configuration of wireless and ethernet interfaces

Only devices that are *not* listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have  
been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by

NM.

I’ve created an APT repository of my own for Debian because the package inclusion policy in Debian (for good reasons) is very stringent.

So this public apt repository is nothing but a placeholder for packages which I am not able to push to Debian.

Currently it only has fusecompress

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file for automatic installation/upgradation of packages.

# RESEARCHUT - APT Repository
deb http://www.researchut.com/packages/ sid main contrib non-free
deb-src http://www.researchut.com/packages/ sid main contrib non-free

FuseCompress is another lovely work I found.

Hence this package. I’ve verfied and it is lintian clean.

fusecompress_1.99.10-1_i386.deb