Bart Verwilst a.k.a Bort :: w3bl0g

Even the most fanatical Windows drone will probably be a Linux user as well, since Linux is all around you. I was reminded about that little fact when i found a piece of paper on my desk. It probably fell out of the box of my new Philips LCD TV. On closer inspection, the paper had a copy of the GPL license on it, along with a list of open source software Philips was using inside the TV. I was pleasantly surprised to find out my TV is actually running Linux 2.6.15, along with a host of GPL’ed tools such as libgphoto2, base64, gcc, libc, … Respect

I have updated the Zabbix 1.6 packages in my PPA to 1.6.1. I’ve enabled Intrepid builds next to the Hardy builds for maximum coverage As soon as Jaunty because a valid target for Launchpad, I’ll start including builds for that platform as well.

I got to work, did my daily apt-get upgrade in the background, while i suddenly noticed something strange. My apps were no longer starting. I already had a browser and some terminals open, so i looked at the problem a bit closer. It seemed that apt-get tried to update my libc6 package, which was b0rked and caused some mayhem everywhere in my system. A quick launchpad search confirmed my guess, libc6 upgrade was the culprit. Since i wasn’t root on any of my terminals, and sudo and su crashed right away, i downloaded the previous version of the libc6 package ( luckily wget still working fine ), and rebooted with a livecd. As a sidenote, Gentoo still has the best damn rescue-cd’s known to man. I installed the older version of libc6 from a chroot, and voila, all fine and dandy!

A bit later, sdog pointed me to another post about the incident.

People around the world that are pissed off about this problem, or are moaning/flaming to the devs, please, get a life. As you might have noticed, the word “ALPHA” is used pretty abundantly all over your beloved Hardy system, and the UWN and release pages clearly mention “Pre-releases of Hardy are “NOT” encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage.”. You’ve been warned. Deal with it.

Anyways, kudos to the Ubuntu devs for their swift and prompt fix to this problem! Hardy is shaping up to be a very nice distribution!

Lately all major graphics card developers started releasing their specs to the open source community. Nvidia, AMD and Intel released vital information about their chipsets to the public, so that better open source drivers can be written, and no time gets lost with reverse engineering. Intel was the last to provide docs on http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/ . I’m pretty excited about the state of graphics drivers in the following couple of Xorg releases!

Upstart, the sysvinit replacement written by Ubuntu people, is finally extending its reach. This morning, Raskas pointed me to his Fedora 9 Alpha, running his daily system-update , which was replacing sysvinit with Upstart! Hooray!

Well, it’s been collecting dust for quite a while now in my wiki, but decided to release it to the public anyways My very own kdump / kexec howto

You can find it here.

I was using it in the line of duty, but maybe somebody else can save a lot of time with this It may need some additions/fixes, please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have some! Enjoy!

Linux kernels are brave warriors, standing up against lots of bad hardware and rootkits.

But even the mightiest warrior has a soft spot. The Linux kernel in particular is just terrified of the letter ‘c’.

Meaning you can force a kernel to panic by just doing the following:

# echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

Great for testing, not recommended in production