Linux Power Savings 2016

 Posted on March 1, 2016  |  7 minutes  |  1356 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

Having moved to a new place, now at times, I also have to deal with power outages. As heat increases, the power outages will be much longer and more frequent. So much, that UPS and Power Inverters run out. Such are ideal times to measure idle power consumption for my laptop. Here’s what my default (and idle) OS looks like. It should be standard to most “typical” users. Some minor odds could be apport, dnsmasq, and maybe, tor. [Read More]
power saving  laptop-mode-tools  laptop  battery 

Unbricking my Linksys

 Posted on February 23, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  391 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

In trying to improve the WiFi service in my house, I recently dug out my old Linksys WRT54G Router. It is a 802.11 bg router, which can do 54 MBPS. Currently, I use a TPLink based router, with a DD-WRT community firmware, which claims is 802.11 bgn and can do 300 MBPS. The overall wifi signal isn’t adequate, so I thought of using the old router as a repeater. The default Linksys VXWorks firmware does not have the bridging capabilities, so it was time to flashback, again, the dd-wrt image onto it (The last time I did, I eventually had to revert back to the stock firmware because my ISP claimed that the router was giving too many packet drops). [Read More]
linksys  tplink  repeater  wifi  ddwrt  dd-wrt  bridge 

State of Email Clients on Linux Based Platforms

 Posted on February 1, 2016  |  3 minutes  |  605 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading list (Thanks to rss2email, now I can hold the list longer, than just marking all as read). And one item from last year’s end worth spending time was Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been the email client of choice for many users. The main reason for it being popular has been, in my opinion, it being cross platform. Because that allows users an easy migration path across platforms. [Read More]
gnome  evolution  Email 

Device Mapper Multipath status in Debian

 Posted on December 29, 2015  |  3 minutes  |  478 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

For Debian Jessie, the multipath support relied on sysvinit scripts. So, if you were using systemd, the level of testing would have been minimal. At DebConf15, I got to meet many people whom I’d worked with, over emails, over the years. With every person, my ask was to use the SAN Storage stack in a test environement, and report bugs early. Not after the next release. This applies also to the usual downstream distribution projects. [Read More]
iscsi  multipath  SAN  systemd 

apt-offline 1.7

 Posted on November 11, 2015  |  1 minutes  |  169 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

Hello World, In this part of the world, today is a great day. Today is Diwali - the festival of lights On this day, I am very happy to announce the release of apt-offline , version 1.7. This release brings in a large number of fixes and is a recommended update. Thanks to Bernd Dietzel for uncovering the shell injection bug which could be exploited by carefully crafting the signature file. [Read More]
apt-offline  Offline APT Package Manager 

Fixing broken videos

 Posted on October 30, 2015  |  2 minutes  |  355 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

Post iPhone launch, in this new age, it is common to carry a device capable of capturing high definition images and videos. Most people today carry a high end device capable of capturing video/audio, in the form of a Mobile Phone. This has made us raise our expectation that we should capture most moments, if not all. But as is with everything, sometimes things ditch you right at the moment when you did not want it to. [Read More]
video  gpac  data recovery  MP4Box 

Controlling ill behaving applications with Linux Cgroups

 Posted on October 20, 2015  |  7 minutes  |  1340 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

For some time, I have been wanting to read more on Linux Cgroups to explore possibilities of using it to control Ill behaving applications. At this time, while I’m stuck in travel, it has given me some time to look into it. In our Free Software world, most of the things are do-o-cracy, i.e. when your use case is not the common one, it is typically you who has to explore possible solutions. [Read More]
systemd  cgroups  desktop  digikam 

Laptop Mode Tools 1.68.1

 Posted on September 27, 2015  |  1 minutes  |  134 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools 1.68.1. The last release (1.68) was mostly about systemd integration, and so is this release. There were a couple of bugs reported, and most of them fixed, with this release. All downstreams are requested to upgrade. For RPM packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed), please see the homepage. 1.68.1 - Sun Sep 27 14:00:13 IST 2015 * Update details about runtime-pm in manpage * Revert "Drop out reload" * Log error more descriptively * Write to common stderr. [Read More]
laptop-mode-tools 

Laptop Mode Tools - 1.68

 Posted on August 27, 2015  |  2 minutes  |  225 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.68. This release is mainly focused on integration with the newer init system, systemd. Without the help from the awesome Debian systemd maintainers, this would not have been possible. Thank you folks. While the focus now is on systemd, LMT will still support the older SysV Init. With this new release, there are some new files: laptop-mode.service, laptop- mode. [Read More]
laptop-mode-tools  LMT  systemd 

Apport Integration with Debian - GSoC Update

 Posted on July 6, 2015  |  1 minutes  |  199 words  |  Ritesh Raj Sarraf

For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD. For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion. [Read More]
GSoC  Google Summer of Code  apport  debian