03 November, 2008

 

EeePC 901 with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

I have finally bought an EeePC 901, mainly to use for travelling.

I had been holding off for some weeks because I had hoped (in vain) that the Linux version with 20GB SSD and without a Windows XP license would become available here in Australia.

Anyway, I decided to try putting brand new Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on it and I must say it worked really well. Here is what I did:
Everything else is pretty much ok. Apart from smaller fonts and makingg windows go above the top panel (with: gconftool-2 --set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y --type bool 0), I have not really made any changes.

I am typing this on the little keyboard of the 901 and it is actually quite usable even though I would not want to type pages and pages on it. (Somehow the Blogger editor behaves a bit funny, but I guess this has nothing to do with the hardware but if anything with Firefox 3.)

So far, I think this is an excellent little machine - it even plays Big Buck Bunny in 720p without any problems. ;-)

07 May, 2007

 

Etch Upgrade - Sweet As

I upgraded my little file & print server and firewall (in UML) VIA C3 box on the weekend.

Everything went perfectly smooth, it even worked to upgrade via the apt-proxy that's running on the box. Super cool!

The only issue I had was non-working HTTP connections via my Telstra Bigpond cable connection after the upgrade of the firewall UML. In the end I fixed it by forcing the same MTU on the cable-facing as on the LAN-facing interface. It may be related to NAT, but it worked with the same 2.6.18 kernel before the upgrade, so maybe it is an iptables thing.

02 May, 2007

 

Mondo Rescue 2.2.2 Packages Ready

New packages for amd64 and i386 are in unstable now. I did have to fix a few things here and there to get it to work. The biggest change is internal, however, I've finally moved to using upstream's install.sh script for the Debian package.

I've tested with kernels 2.6.18-4-amd64 (amd64) and 2.6.18-4-k7 (i386) and the usual assortment of nasties, i.e. NFS, AFS, LVM & RAID using NFS as restore media and amd64 and i386 as platforms.

Looks like 2.2.3 will be hot on its heels because of a bzip2-related issue with 2.2.2. (I normally use gzip, i.e. '-G' option, because it is heaps faster and compression rates are really only slightly worse.)

05 March, 2007

 

IA64 Support for Mondo Rescue!

The first fruit of my work on Debian IA64 packages for Mondo Rescue are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. It took a bit longer than I had anticipated and there was a bit of an interruption while I stayed on beautiful Norfolk Island for two weeks.

Everything should be fine and dandy apart from the fact that restores will currently miserably fail on IA64 because parted2fdisk expects an older version of parted than what Etch and Sid contain.

So, why publish IA64 packages at all if they don't even work, I hear you scream. Well, firstly I thought I give a bit of an update and show that things are actually moving forward. Secondly, maybe I'm lucky and someone is interested in helping out with getting parted2fdisk to work with newer versions of parted or (better) in getting mondo migrated to using parted natively on all platforms (pending Bruno's approval).

Other than that, the packages have a few user-visible improvements and fixes across all supported architectures and they bring the Debian packages a fair bit closer to upstream - see the changelogs for details.

As usual, check out the new packages, let me know if something doesn't (or does) work, get involved! ;-)

24 January, 2007

 

linux.conf.au 2007 Gleanings

I was fortunate enough to attend lca2007 last week and to meet Bruno Cornec, the Mondo Rescue project leader, for the first time in the flesh.

The conference was pretty cool, and I found the quality of the program to be generally impressingly high: Excellent topics, superb presentation skills, humor and genuine passion for the topic at hand. The atmosphere and organisation were great, too - extremely well done, 7 Team!

My personal two highlights were:
Apart from the conference as such, it was super cool to meet Bruno. We had a number of good conversations and did some nice hacking, burning the midnight oil a couple of times. And HP gave me a (used) zx2000 (which Bruno carried all the way from France to Sydney!) to enable me to work on the (Debian) Itanium port of Mondo Rescue - thank you HP and Bruno! Bruno's talk was well received, and it was great to actually meet people that use the software that I spend quite a bit of time on. :-)

Finally, there is the Linus phenomenon (so you can tell this is my first
Linux conference) - he amazingly is basically left in peace: People who know him obviously talk to him and he participates vividly in discussions and so forth, but everyone else does the business as usual thing - no autographs, no photos, no nothing. I was (positively) impressed and refrained from asking him to sign my copy of Just for Fun (just kidding).

Finally, finally, I propose to find an alternative for the term 'awesome' next year. ;-)

14 January, 2007

 

Debian Pre-Release of Mondo Rescue 2.2.1, Take 2

mindi-2.21~r1021-2 and mondo-2.21~r1021-2 are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/ with the following changes:
Other than that:
Off to bed now so that I'm fine and dandy when I pick up Bruno from the airport in the morning for lca2007. :-)

08 January, 2007

 

Debian Pre-Release of Mondo Rescue 2.2.1

Preliminary Debian packages for Mondo Rescue 2.2.1 are available at the usual place: http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. (r1021 is the SVN revision of the actual 2.2.1 release.)

The new version comes with quite an impressive list of fixes and enhancements as can be seen on the Mondo Rescue website. The new '-G' option which allows for using gzip as the compressor is my personal favourite as it really speeds things up! Also, I've finally gotten around to fixing #222065 and there is no more unsolicited creation of directories in /var/cache anymore (neither submitted upstream yet).

Unfortunately, there are a few issues:
Anyway, apart from the above, things seem to be ok. Give it a try if you like! If you do find more issues, let us know via the mailing list and - even better - send a patch. ;-)

Other than that, (belated) Happy New Year to everyone! :-)

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