Technology

Linux has improved many many things over the last couple of years. Of the many improvements, the one that I’ve started leveraging the most today, are Control Groups.

In the past, when there was a need to build a prototype for a solution, we needed hardware.

Then came the virtualization richness to Linux. It came in 2 major flavors, KVM ( Full Virtualization ) and Xen ( Para Virtualization ). Over the years, the difference of para vs full, for both the implementations, is almost none. KVM now has support for Para-Virtualizaiton, with para-virtualized drviers for most resource intensive tasks, like network and I/O. Similarly, Xen has Full Virtualization support with the help of Qemu-KVM.

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools , at version 1.65

This release took a toll given things have been changing for me, both personally and professionally. 1.64 was released on September 1st, 2013. So it was a full 9 month period, of which a good 2-3 months were procrastination. That said, this release has some pretty good bug fixes and I urge all distribution packagers to push it to their repositories soon. While I ’d thank all contributors who have helped make this release, a special thank you to Stefan Huber. Stefan found/fixed many issues, did the messy code clean up etc.. Thank you.

Starting yesterday, I am a happy user of the Basis B1 (Carbon Edition) Smart Watch

The company recently announced being acquired by Intel. Overall I like the watch. The price is steep, but if you care of a watch like that, you may as well try Basis. In case you want to go through the details, there’s a

pretty comprehensive review here.

Since I’ve been wearing it for just over 24hrs, there’s not much data to showcase a trend. But the device was impressively precise in monitoring my sleep.

With the final package, [fcoe-utils](http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcoe- utils.html), clearing the NEW packages queue, the Open-FCoE project’s Fibre Channel over Ethernet stack is now in the Debian archive. I had anticipated to have access to FCoE hardware by the time the packaging would complete but that didn ’t work out. It has been delayed, hence the packages are in experimental. If you have access to FCoE hardware, please test and provide your feedback.

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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Most people who’ve bought laptops, would see a pre-installed version of Windows, for which they’d have already paid. Recently things have changed but still for the majority of the laptop models available, Windows is the most commonly used option.

I own a Dell XPS M1210 which too came pre-installed with Microsoft Windows XP. Since the machine was low on hard-drive space, I had to eventually knock-off all Non-Linux partitions to make more space. Recently I was able to swap my Seagate SATA Laptop Drive (160 GB) with the one that was shipped with the Laptop. This made me rich in disk space. So, being a small PC gamer, I decided that I do want to have a copy of Windows XP installed on my machine. And why not, I already have paid for it and own a license.

Thanks to Pierre Chifflier , Debian now has setroubleshoot packaged. The good thing about setroubleshoot is that it gives you a very user friendly message about the SELinux violations that occur on your box while you were doing something.

Now that something is very difficult to define (at least for Debian). My day job requires me to work on the RHELdistribution which has very good SELinux policy defined (Same is the case with Fedora). Here’s a list of things which Debian’s SELinux policy lacks and that RHEL/Fedora’s doesn’t

A couple of years back (or maybe still), it was difficult to find Device Support in Linux from the Hardware Vendor.

Recently I was at home on a small vacation. There something surprised me. I bought a device which had a logo saying, “Designend for Linux”. Cheers!

I’ve been working on a bug recently related to udev which under certain circumstances triggers an OOM on the Linux kernel. On another bug, I also wanted to look for the max open processes for a single file. The results I found and pretty good. The Linux Kernel’s OOM feature has imporved a lot.

This is the one liner used to trigger the OOM.

while true; do tail -f /tmp/test.txt & x=expr $x + 1; echo $x; done

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Today I also bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000. She is small, sleek and sexy.

And the good thing is that she Just Mates with Linux.

Here’s what she speaks to her buddy:

input: Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse� 1.00 as /class/input/input14
input: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse� 1.00] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-2.1