Tools

For Debian Jessie, the version of apt-offline available is: 1.5.1. This version has had some [issues](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=apt-offline;dist=unstable).

My very 1st backports is available in the form of [apt-offline 1.7 for ](https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/apt- offline)[Debian](https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/apt- offline) Jessie Backports. For Debian Jessie users, this should fix most of the issues.

Today is an auspicious day. For those who know (or follow) the Hindu religion will be familiar; Today is Maha Shivaratri

On this day, It is great delight for me to be able to release Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.69

This release adds on many bug fixes and some enhancements. There is a new module (disabled by default) for cpuhotplug. The release tarball also includes a basic PolicyKit file for convenience, that packagers can use for the Laptop Mode Tools Graphical Configuration Interface. Apart from the policykit file, the graphical invocation script has been slightly fine tuned to work under pkexec and sudo. Some defaults have been tuned based on user requests - This should improve in situations where your External USB Mouse/Keyboard used to suspend after idle time periods.

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. Also, thanks to systemd, there are some native services which are now converted to socket activation based ones. There’s also Laptop Mode Tools for userspace power savings. But huge thanks to Intel’s work in making the kernel more power efficient. With things like Runtime PM and Intel P-State , we can now define, default and aggressive power-savings modes, helping conserve more power.

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). Being an old device, and me being lazy, I did not pay much attention to the exact steps; and ended up bricking my router, wherein it wouldn’t give me the Management Console to flash a new firmware; nor would it give me the old VXWorks firmware interface. All it gave was a White Screen of Death and an active IP connection.

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. It also bring persistence, in terms of features and workflows, to the end users. Perhaps that must have been an important reason for many distributions (Ubuntu) and service providers to promote it as the default email client. A Windows/Mac user migrating to Ubuntu will have a lot better experience if they see familiar tools, and their data and workflows being intact.

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.

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. Since apt-offline could be run as ‘root’, this one was an important bug. Also thanks to him for the fix.

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. In new age phones, scenarios usually are: you capturing a video and the actual data not written to the disk (battery drain, cpu overheat, software bug: Whatever). Such was my case from the year 2012, where one of the videos was corrupt. Corrupt as in, A/V not in sync.

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. It could be Bugs , Feature Requests or as is in my case, performance issues. But that is not to assume that we do not have better quality software in Free Software world. Infact, in my opinion, some of the tools available are far much more better than the competition in terms of features, and to add a sweetener (or nutritional facts) to it is the fact that Free Software liberates the user.

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. Do not hardcode a specific one

    * Call lmt-udev in lmt-poll. Don't call the laptop_mode binary directly.

      Helps in a lot of housekeeping

    * Direct stderr/stdout to journal

    * Fix stdout descriptor

    * Install the new .timer and poll service

    * Use _sbindir for RPM