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Dennis Ritchie (printf("Goodbye, World!")
by John Simmons 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

FYI ... A note on the passing of Dennis Ritchie. http://boingboing.net/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011-computer-scientis… All the best. John. ------------------------------------------------------------ John Simmons - Director Genesis Networks Phone: (03) 9754 6479 Email: jss(a)genesis.net.au Fax: (03) 9754 6514 Web: www.genesis.net.au Postal: 3 Gully Crescent Belgrave Victoria 3160 Australia ------------------------------------------------------------

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Disabling wifi on laptop
by Daniel Dalton 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

Hi, I've recently purchased a Dell vostro 3350 laptop, and to save battery, I was planning to disable wifi, when it wasn't required. On my old laptop I could use the rfkill package like so: rfkill block wifi But it seems to have no effect on my Dell. The wifi hot key on the laptop does not seem to work either (from the console). Does anyone have any other ideas? If I do ifdown eth1 to bring down wifi, is it likely the wifi will still be consuming significant battery? Thanks for any help, Dan

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cups and printer memory
by Russell Coker 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

I had a printer with 160M of RAM and some print jobs were failing. The spool files that CUPs was using were about 220M in size. Obviously 220M spool files and 160M of RAM isn't going to work. I upgraded the printer to 288M of RAM, which would hopefully be barely enough to print those files. CUPS is now generating ~360M spool files for the same print request (printing a page from a flash-based web site). It seems like CUPS is asking the printer (Brother HL-3040CN connected via LPD protocol on Ethernet) how much RAM it has and is then using more! Is it possible to configure CUPS to limit it's spool files, dropping quality if necessary? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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LVM ate my volume group?
by Brett Pemberton 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

Hi, Got an odd situation here, where I can't find my volume group any more. Earlier tonight I moved my logical volumes from an old drive to a new drive Before, I had sdf1 - /boot sdf2 - pv - system volume group - contained root, swap, home To move things, I did a pvcreate on the new partition, sdg1 then vgextend system /dev/sdg1 then pvmove /dev/sdf2 /dev/sdg1 Sure enough, it moved all my lvs over. Was then able to 'vgreduce system /dev/sdf2' and 'pvremove /dev/sdf2' Lastly, moved /boot contents to be inside /, and unmounted /boot My next plan was to install grub2, chainloaded, since I'd need that to boot from inside an lvm. At this point, ubuntu didn't like it, and errored on configuring grub-pc, saying it couldn't detect the filesystem. Stupidly, I decided to reboot, at which point it loaded grub (1), booted the initrd/kernel, and then couldn't find root. Inside a rescue environment, sure enough, if I do 'pvs', I can see my pv, but it doesn't have a VG. Any suggestions on how to rectify this? Why doesn't it know it's part of the 'system' volume group? I presume once it remembers this, I should be able to boot again. cheers, / Brett

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Purchasing a new laptop
by Daniel Dalton 09 Oct '11

09 Oct '11

Hi, I've been using an Asus netbook for the last 2 years or so and feel I need a bit more power!:) I've done some preliminary research, but not quite sure where to start. Basically my top requirements are: 1) Reasonable CPU apparently I5 is supposed to be fairly good? 2) 6 hrs + of battery life 3) I'm looking to spend around the $1200 mark give or take. 4) Linux compatible of course! I also wouldn't mind a smaller laptop eg. 12 or 13 inch as I'm using it in a class room environment, although this doesn't really matter too much. I checked out a few of the lenovo thinkpads (T series I believe, but could be wrong) and these were way outside of my budget. I also investigated the hp envy, but this seemed to have poor battery life. I also checked out the mac book pro which looked ok... However, apparently the linux install is a bit more tricky. Does anyone have any ideas on any other machines? Is the mac book pro something I should look into? The only draw back I see so far is the battery that can only be replaced by Apple... BTW, not too concerned about graphics as I'm blind, just need something that is sufficient for any day to day use by a sighted person, eg. navigating the desktop or reading text...:) (I don't need any high performance graphics) Thanks for any suggestions, Dan

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Virtualbox and Linux-Vserver issues
by Tim Lyth 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

Hi all, Today, my server was rebooted (due to a 17min power interuption), and I was greeted by an email from it saying that it couldn't start up Virtualbox. My server is running Debian's kernel image 2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64. Yes, I AM running two virtualisation solutions on here - I didn't like Xen when I tried it for a couple of months, I just couldn't get the hang of it despite reading heaps of tutorials about it. Linux Vserver provides a very light (in terms of overhead) way of running multiple virtualised Linux "servers" through extensive use of security contexts and the like. But I also wanted to run a single Windows server instance, so hence the use of Virtualbox. The virtualbox email states that I need to ensure I have virtualbox-ose-dkms and the kernel header files installed. I have virtualbox-ose-dkms installed, but somewhere along the way my linux-headers-2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64 package became uninstalled. Instead I have headers for 2.6.37-1, 2.6.37-2, 2.6.38-1, 2.6.38-2, 2.6.39-2 and 3.0.0-1, but none of the corresponding kernel images... Go figure. So I'm thinking I'll upgrade to a newer kernel, but none of the kernel images mention vserver in their name, nor directly indicate that they support it either. I am willing to go down the path of rolling my own, and packaging it up with make-kpkg (from kernel-package) so that I don't break apt's idea of what's installed... Therefore, can anyone confirm for me if I upgrade to 2.6.39 or 3.0.0, will I still be able to use my Linux vservers (I really do NOT want to have to rebuild them all within another virtualisation environment)? Or has Xen become the defacto (and possibly only) virtualisation system that Debian's pre-packaged kernels will support? Cheers, Tim Lyth.

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Another security concept
by Peter Ross 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

.. I discovered over the last months is Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/papers/2010usenix-login-… It comparts _parts_ of an application and grants specific rights to them. It also discusses and compares several methods, especially used to tame Chromium. While it is prototyped and partially included in FreebSD-Current (and upcoming release 9, I think), there is a port to Linux as well, supported by the project team. See, among others, the discussion here: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/cl-capsicum-discuss/2011-January/msg00000… Regards Peter

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FreeXperia
by Craig Sanders 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 10:26:40PM +1100, Russell Coker wrote: > Sent from an Xperia X10 Android phone FYI, saw this on slashdot recently. thouught you might be interested http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/03/2357228/sony-ericsson-helps-out-fre… "Smartphone maker Sony Ericsson has decided to work closely with developers creating custom Android ROMs for devices in order to learn from them. The company said in a blog post that it has decided to support an open source developer group called 'FreeXperia,' which creates custom Android ROMs based on the CyanogenMod for several Sony Ericsson phones like the Xperia ARC and Play. Sony Ericsson maintained that it does not approve of some of the work carried out by independent developers but was keen to work with people who were creating custom ROMs." craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #399: We are a 100% Microsoft Shop.

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faking a debian package
by James Harper 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

I want to install libvirt-bin under Debian, but it depends on libxenstore3.0 and I don't want it installed because I already have xen installed (built from source) and installing the debian version breaks it. What are my options? I can think of: 1. rebuild the libvirt-bin and remove the dependency (easy enough, but the next upgrade of libvirt-bin will break it) 2. force package installation (not even sure I can do this anymore) 3. create a dummy libxenstore3.0 package with a high enough version that nothing can ever upgrade it 4. install libxenstore3.0 but somehow redirect the files (?) Any other suggestions? Thanks James

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vlan's, igb, and 3.0.0
by James Harper 29 Sep '11

29 Sep '11

Is anyone using vlan's with a 3.0.0 (tried 3.1.0-rc7 too) kernel and the igb network driver? It just isn't working for me, even if I turn off all the offloads. Thanks James

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