Recent blog entries for mones

Lenny will rock you!

It took two months, but finally the hard disk replacement for the MacBook has come. Of course I'll think twice before ordering anything else from Alternate (ES), not to mention the fact they served the SD cards without micro adapter (which means they're useless to me)...

Anyway that was not the point. The point was, as you may have guessed, I tried the latest Debian installer for Lenny, which is beta 2 at this moment:

First, the niceness of jigdo downloading the first amd64 DVD image flawlessly and without a single retry.

Second, wodim burning it without error in a disc I had forgotten for two weeks inside the drive.

Third, being able to swap broken disk and the new one despite Apple's instructions to change it forgot to mention you need a very small torx screwdriver to detach the drive from the pulling tab it has (it's located deeply inside and the tab is necessary for removing it).

Fourth, partitioning and installing MacOS X... well, last time I tried dual-boot it didn't work at all, so I had to try again, and with a 320 GB disk using less than 10% for a proprietary OS doesn't look like a great loss ;-). Partitioning is a bit tricky, as detailed in the wiki, but the Disk Utility method worked fine for me. Scheme was 30-2-288 (more or less), you'll discover later why. Worth to mention that the MacOS X showed a lot of upgrades after setting up the wireless, including an EFI firmware upgrade (new boot ROM version is MB21.00A5.B07). I installed all of these before continuing.

Fifth, installing rEFIt, though this one has no trick...

Sixth, rebooting and installing Lenny beta 2 from the DVD. To run an encrypted system two partitions are required, one for /boot (unencrypted, bootable) and other for the encrypted filesystem, hence the two partitions defined. I forgot to add a swap partition, but a swap file can be added later. The uswsusp package will warn about lacking swap, but seems it does complain even if you have a swap partition. You have to avoid installing bootloader at this point, because <acronym title="Master Boot Record">MBR</acronym> layout is not the same that GPT (which Disk Utility wrote), hence bootloader installer would be misled.

Seventh, rebooting and entering rEFIt's disk utility, which immediately offers to resync MBR to match GPT layout. Wonderful.

Eighth, restarting Debian installation again, having to reinstall, because the filesystem inside the big encrypted partition is not recognized and had to be reformatted. Not a great problem though. Finally installing grub in the /boot partition, and finish installation.

Et voilà!

Upon restart, rEFIt menu shows both MacStuff and the penguin, and both work fine... in fact I'm writing this from the new Safari in MacOS X, because the wireless card in Debian is still to be configured, but that's another story...

Note: if you're going to try this, first of all read the wiki like I did, it has been improved a lot.

Syndicated 2008-11-12 23:53:50 from Ricardo Mones

Bits, bytes and nibbles

If you think Debian has one of the most time consuming and complicated process to join in, now look at this nice mess our beloved ftp master produced and one of the effects that caused. Despite of helping Joerg with one of his packages I'm not the one to told anybody what to do with their time, but fixing any of the <acronym title="Release Critical">RC</acronym> bugs which are preventing Lenny to be released would have been more useful for Debian than writing such proposal. Introducing more classes of people in an already clustered project will only end on more problems and, IMHO, doesn't help to address the problems it's supposed to solve.

Syndicated 2008-11-06 18:51:43 from Ricardo Mones

And another one gone...

Yep, another vacation period gone. Lately I'm posting from vacation on vacation, so it may seem I'm on permanent vacation, but, of course, that's not true. It's just I'm more lazy than often, maybe influenced by reading of Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs! this past week. Or maybe not, as I'm posting again ;-)

As these post tend also to be a recapitulation of my, well, activities (or part of them), this will be no exception. In no particular order...

The claws-mail and extra-plugins packages are now in experimental (they require a libetpan which is only in experimental, so no other choice was possible here). Because a strange bug which made CVS Claws Mail crash on exit in my box, I found some motivation to start from scratch again my build script and make it something different: package CVS for Debian. Primary target was to prove that the bug was not in Claws but somewhere else in the build chain, which resulted a right intuition. Secondary was to have an automatic CVS packager, so I could still use CVS and Debian packages and the added benefit of keeping packaging always synced with upstream requirements (otherwise build breaks).The result can't be other than another wild beast. As you may figure out, these experiments are only possible thanks to the strong commitment of the Claws Mail Team in keeping CVS break-free.

Went to watch "El hombre almohada" (ES), which we liked a lot. Curiously we met and old friend and his girlfriend at the theatre, and shared the usual desires to date for some drink, but I still didn't feel motivated to call him. While is no excuse, he didn't do either, anyway I'm happy to know things go fine for them.

Movies have also taken some time, right now I can remember "Burn After Reading" which we laughed nicely (Silvia more than me though) and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" which didn't left me the same sweet mouth-taste than the first part.

I've seriously decided to take over my long procrastinated final project at university and finally get my grade. The idea was born several months ago, but got a sudden stop when I went to Madrid early this year. Now I'm back with it. There was some work done previously, and this week of vacation was preparing all the development environment which a Java based webapp requires... which is more of the same I have at work (well, except I'm on Linux here, not XP :-P), but I preferred not to innovate in order of getting things done right.

At least tomorrow is still vacation...

Syndicated 2008-10-19 18:32:17 from Ricardo Mones

Vacation, whose vacation?

Work

Yep, supposedly I'm on vacation, but these are not going to be as fun as other years. First Silvia couldn't choose vacation period on September, as we would have wanted and had to split vacation between August and October. I don't like to be on vacation on August for several reasons, but as this year we don't have money to go those nice places we used to go most of these reasons vanish. So far we're practicing some short-range tourism, like having lunch in Cudillero and going back home by evening, and some house-keeping ungrateful tasks, like cleaning windows (no pun intended!). I expect the October period to be less static, because not going somewhere feels a bit like having no vacation.

Debian

My Debian stuff is mostly frozen now, as we're in the way of getting Lenny released soon. The newmail crasher is finally fixed also in Debian, so, unless something really nasty appears in the meantime, current versions will be the ones shipped in Lenny CDs/DVDs. The only thing I miss is not having a more updated themes package, because current release dates from beginning of 2007 and doesn't contain any of the new <acronym title="Portable Network Graphics">PNG</acronym> themes.

Hardware

As some may already know my MacBook hard disk (Hitachi 160 Gb) died two or three weeks ago. I've been able to recover most of data from it, thanks to SystemRescueCd and some help to mount encrypted partitions by hand. Unfortunately one of the lost pieces was the trial-error-made deb package with a mostly working driver for the Atheros wifi card of the MacBook (but only with kernel 2.6.21). As I was stupid enough not to document the process or backup it I guess I will have to start from scratch with that again or fall-back to MacOS X for wifi connectivity.

The MacBook was 1 year and few months old, but there's a known conflict between which warranty Apple provides (1 year) and the one supposedly granted by the Spanish law for consumer goods (2 years), and Apple is actively rejecting to follow it (no links, but Google is full of stories). Therefore I've decided not to fight on lost battles and just buy a replacement (another Hitachi but 320 Gb, still don't have it though). Of course I will think thrice before buying anything more from Apple. And for those wandering, no, I don't like to pay another heap of euros for the "AppleCare Protection Plans" when the law already gives me almost the same for free.

I only hope the disks of my main box not to start failing soon (they're two, they're older and they're spinning most of the time: 14:41:56 up 24 days, 22:07, 13 users, load average: 0.11, 0.08, 0.09).

Syndicated 2008-08-21 12:53:49 from Ricardo Mones

Sardine festival

Last Friday was holiday for me, and like previous year I went to the Candás Sardine Festival. This time it was a bit different because seems now I have my five seconds of fame on the globalised TV. Only a hint: I'm the one on green, and Lucho is the one pouring (escanciando) the cider.

Syndicated 2008-08-07 11:44:28 from Ricardo Mones

Diablo enters room

Despite reading some problems with it, some related with the new mail client -- but I don't use it, of course ;-) -- I decided to do it for first, and, if it works as promised, for last time too:
<small>

# ./flasher-3.0.amd64 -F RX-44_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin -f -R  
flasher v0.8.1 (Jan  5 2007)

SW version in image: RX-44_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14_PR_MR0
Image 'kernel', size 1536512 bytes
        Version 2.6.21-200823maemo3
Image 'initfs', size 2286848 bytes
        Version 0.95.16-200823maemo2
Image 'rootfs', size 125042688 bytes
        Version RX-34+RX-44+RX-48_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14_PR_MR0
Image '2nd', size 8192 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0808
        Version 1.1.16-200823maemo1
Image 'xloader', size 9216 bytes  
        Valid for RX-44: 0808
        Version 1.1.16-200823maemo1
Image 'secondary', size 100736 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0808
        Version 1.1.16-200823maemo1
Image '2nd', size 8192 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
Image 'xloader', size 9216 bytes  
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
        Version 1.1.16-200823maemo1
Image 'secondary', size 100736 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
        Version 1.1.16-200823maemo1
Suitable USB device not found, waiting
USB device found found at bus 001, device address 009
Found device RX-44, hardware revision 0805
NOLO version 1.1.6
Version of 'sw-release': RX-44_2008SE_1.2007.42-19_PR_MR0
Sending xloader image (9 kB)...   
100% (9 of 9 kB, avg. 2250 kB/s)  
Sending secondary image (98 kB)...
100% (98 of 98 kB, avg. 8943 kB/s)
Flashing bootloader... done.
Sending kernel image (1500 kB)... 
100% (1500 of 1500 kB, avg. 8774 kB/s)
Flashing kernel... done.
Sending initfs image (2233 kB)... 
100% (2233 of 2233 kB, avg. 11110 kB/s)
Flashing initfs... done.
Sending and flashing rootfs image (122112 kB)...
100% (122112 of 122112 kB, avg. 6928 kB/s)
Finishing flashing... done

</small>
I didn't do any backup, so I've started from scratch again with it. Just for reference the detailed instructions for flashing are described in maemo.org wiki.

Syndicated 2008-08-02 12:06:07 from Ricardo Mones

Theme change

Tired of the classic livejournal theme, I've switched to something else. Not specially better, not specially worse.

Syndicated 2008-07-17 16:49:42 from Ricardo Mones

Command of the day

for d in `ldd /usr/local/bin/claws-mail | cut -d\( -f1 | cut -d\> -f2 | sed 's,\s,,'`; do dpkg -S $d 2> /dev/null; done | cut -f1 -d: | sort -u | xargs | for p in `cat`; do dpkg-query -W $p; done


Nice, isn't it? ;-)

For the curious: it gives all package names and versions of the libraries a binary depends upon (recursively, per ldd, and errors discarded, so beware!).

Syndicated 2008-06-11 09:27:35 from Ricardo Mones

Bye Madrid, hi new home

The result has finally been unleashed yesterday to me, and as expected, I'm not going to work in Madrid anymore with the client I was assigned for the last three months.

The result was obviously not the desired for my company, because, in abstract, it may have been a nice contract until 2009, but it's very difficult to compete with meat factories which lower the prices more than 30 percent over an adjusted budget. Anyway this prevented myself from having to take a plane every monday and friday for, probably, the rest of the year. There's also a negative part, like not meeting anymore soon with some Debian dudes in Alfredo's, like the dinner we had two weeks ago.

On the positive side, we're now living at our new home, though still setting things up. Lots of boxes and stuff spread on the floors, which is slowly being sorted and relocated. Still waiting for the dinning's room sofa, so we have to watch TV japanese style and have dinner in the kitchen. Fortunately internet connection seems to work smoothly, but now we have less bandwidth. To cut some costs the basic package was the choosen, which currently is a 4 Mbit download / 300 Kbit upload cable link.

My debian stuff is basically frozen since last post, though I've been able to sponsor one vagalume release and upload the 2.5 release candidate of sylpheed, which, by the way, is having a strange bug on some architectures. Public thanks goes to fgeek, which has allowed me to steal a little of his home bandwidth and cpu to maintain my IRC presence during this transition period.

Syndicated 2008-06-04 10:56:17 from Ricardo Mones

Blackout

No, it's not a Britney's album reference and probably not as dark as the subject suggests, but the home change (which is not going to effectively happen until June 1st) requires the Internet connection I'm using to be removed from our current hired flat. Thanks to our much beloved Asturian ISP I perfectly know that from May 1st the current contract will be finished (and service dropped) and on 8th they will take back the cable-modem, but I have no fscking idea when the new contract and the new connection will be ready at the new home, despite having solicited it two weeks ago.

If that were not enough, and thanks to Murphy's law, my main IMAP mailbox (the account I have at the university since twelve years ago) seems to have disappeared into /dev/null. Service failures were not uncommon from time to time, but now I can connect and both mutt and Claws Mail keep on saying I have no INBOX, which looks pretty true from the little I can see when ssh'ing the mail server. I've already redirected the forwarders, but if telecable cancels also the current mail accounts associated with the contract I'll have to do again. And seems also I've been subscribed to a lot of lists with that address from aic.uniovi.es, because i'm not receiving any mail from debian lists... which is a real pleasure for now :-D. Fortunately Claws lists were double subscribed and I can read them on gmail, I hope the failures from the uniovi address aren't causing excessive trouble to our listmaster ;-).

On the Debian front the bugs for all sylpheed-claws related packages have been issued, so expect them to disappear soon from the unstable archive (they already were removed from testing several weeks ago). Bye bye sylpheed-claws, we won't miss you.

Syndicated 2008-04-28 10:42:15 from Ricardo Mones