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Linux Friendly Equipment Vendors.
by Robert Shelton 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hello, I'm curious if anyone could recommend Linux friendly hardware suppliers in Melbourne? We're a small/medium business, and I often get the feeling that server, network and storage vendors want to push non-FOSS platforms and are unable to advise on integration with existing FOSS systems. Would make a nice change to have a vendor who understood the merits of Linux KVM, DRBD, Amanda backup, etc. Cheers, Rob.

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Recommendations for good Linux Haswell laptops?
by Chris Samuel 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hi folks, Anyone got any recommendations or experiences with Haswell laptops running Linux yet? Thinking that it might be time to refresh my work laptop and a Haswell Ultrabook could be quite enticing.. cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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15" laptop recommendation
by Bianca Gibson 25 Dec '13

25 Dec '13

Hi everyone, My brother is looking for a new laptop. He uses it for generally pretty basic stuff - multimedia playback, web browsing, a bit of gimp. His criteria is: - Ideally 15" screen, 14" would be acceptable - 2.5kg or lower - ideally battery lasting through a day at uni - running ubuntu Please reply all to include him in the discussion. Cheers, Bianca

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kdeconnect - sync your phone and KDE desktop
by Andrew Greig 21 Dec '13

21 Dec '13

Hi all, I thought I would take kdeconnect-kde for a spin, I used the OpenSUSE13.1 version and installed the Android App on my Samsung Galaxy s2. My phone is connected to the WiFi network but the desktop can't see it and vice versa. Has anyone else used this, yet, and do I need to register my phone name in my desktop hosts file for this to work? In theory, when I walk in the door at home my computer should automatically link with my phone. At the moment they are not on speaking terms. Cheers Andrew Greig

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Re: ALSA USB and motherboard
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

zlinw(a)mcmedia.com.au writes: Oops for got the Subject line Russell Coker said, > Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs > to > be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB > bus > is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. > Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device > and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be > useful > so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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None
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

Russell Coker said, >Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs to >be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB bus >is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. >Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device >and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be useful >so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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git add slow; git status quick
by Tim Connors 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

git beginner here, so forgive me. As part of change management of a couple hundred servers, we do a regular 'git add .' on a central repository of half a million files, followed by a bit of munging, then a 'git commit -a -m ...' (rhel5, so 'git -a' is 'git -A' elsewhere). 'git add .' is very very slow at finding the additions and modifications (we don't care about the '-u' deletions at this stage, because of the future munging required) and staging them. I suspect it's actually staging every single file rather than just changes. 'git status -s' on a freshly changed repository prior to doing any git add is really quite quick (no, it's not a cold or undersized cache issue), and finds all additions, deletions and modifications. We could simply pipe that rather small output to 'git add' and it would be much much quicker at staging them (er, I think; but also, a bit of a kludge). Any known reason why git-add would appear to be recursing through the entire tree staging even unchanged files, and not just acting on the changed files that git-status obviously can find very quickly? Any missing bit of git magic I could be applying? -- Tim Connors

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Graphics driver work update
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 15 Dec '13

15 Dec '13

Some time back I was mentioning a problem I was having with the NVidia closed src driver. Russel Coker made a sugestion I checked out the open src driver. Now I have had a look at the state of progress on both NVidia and ATI/AMD cards and the big open src improver is for Radeon R600g driver. This covers ATI/AMD Radeon HD3000 to 6870 cards, (NOT the 6900 cards these being covered by the Radeonsi driver). For the R600g driver benchmarks using 3.11.1 kernel and Mesa 9.2 (both being in current debian testing) show that 3D apps were running at around 2/3rds of the frame rate as the windows driver. There were plenty of reports from users saying it was running all linux games with the quality sliders at max at 60 fps, there being only a single report slower than that and it said it was smooth and highly playable. All stated the driver was very stable and one could switch to a kernel console and back to X without crashing the system. With kernel 3.12.0 and mesa 10, this of course is fairly new, benchmarks comparing with windows 7 produced the same results, ie the driver was as fast as the one on windows. This is all excellent news for opensource Linux. Interestingly around 2 years ago when the AMD open source liason officer was asked if the opensource driver would EVERY get as fast as the then windows driver he replied it would and would likely end up faster. His reasons for saying that was he said that the opensource was a far cleaner and simpler driver than the windows counterpart, not having to worry about backwards compatibilty and a binary interface to the kernel. Lindsay

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Debian on USB, and Seagate USB 2TB drive
by Mark Trickett 14 Dec '13

14 Dec '13

Hello Cogniscenti, I am wanting to install Debian to a USB stick. Has anyone attempted this, and what problems and special techniques are required? I have UNetbootin, but might need to get on a later install, this IBM Thinkpad is still running Hardy Heron, and I need to unjam the package management, it is wedged with a removed older kernel, but the modules not removed, they were removed in the wrong order. There should be a way to force. Even then, with 256Mb of RAM, and limited HDD space, more to the point to migrate to next PC. On the latter point, I am wanting to transfer the contents of the home directories to a 2TB Seagate external USB3 HDD. It appears to be NTFS, and the Hardy Heron support is "flaky". I can attach to another later laptop with Debian (Gnome3 and not preferred) or Knoppix on USB. Any comments about resizing and repartitioning? I would like to retain a NTFS stub with the Seagate software, which includes the serial number of the drive. Regards, Mark Trickett

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A bash question
by Allan Duncan 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

I have a rc.local script that runs fine in csh, but I'd like to change it to sh, but I've had no success at it. #! /usr/bin/tcsh if `ping -w 1 -c 1 -n 192.168.1.3 | grep -o "1 packets"` == "1 packets" mount /nfs/bulk2 While we are at it, is there a more elegant way of mounting the remote partition only if that machine is on?

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