mikas blog

ak’s mutt-ng project is in the news: german article in the Linux User magazine 2005/03. Great! mutt-ng is a fork of the well-known email client mutt with the goal to both incorporate all the patches that are floating around in the web, and to fix all the other little annoyances of mutt. I’m mentioning mutt-ng […]

Yes, no joke. I was offline and did not touch computers for 7 days – whooo! :-) I was on holidays: skiing at Nassfeld (Carinthia/Austria) with my girlfriend and her family. Weather was perfect (expect for half a day on wednesday), ski piste and snow were great. We went skiing for about 6 hours a […]

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced hotplug-ng which replaces the existing linux-hotplug package with very tiny, compiled executable programs, instead of the existing bash scripts. Great news IMO! Marco d’Itri will probably maintain this package in debian (see his ITP). Marco is also maintainer of the udev-package so I’m expecting good integration.

Sometimes sysadmins have to debug a computer running with (too) high load. I usually used free(1), cat /proc/interrupts, vmstat(8) [-s, -m,…] and top(1) to debug such situations. Today I stumbled upon ‘dstat’. It produces some important stats in realtime with (IMO) readable output. Check it out! And please let me know if you know of […]

As usual I’m busy working on grml. ;-) udev is already part of the current grml-devel-iso. I was interested in the xorg xserver because according to many people it should be faster than the xfree86 xserver. xorg-packages for debian should be available as soon as sarge is released *harhar* so I decided to take the […]

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account. […] Enjoy your trip back to the golden […]

My grml talk has been accepted for Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005. Now I’ve to check out how to drive to Chemnitz. ;-) According to the (yet unofficial) program I’ll meet maaaany people who I can meet only on such events. ;-) I’ll even meet one of the grml developers for the first time in real […]

QEMU is an emulator for various CPUs. It works on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Inspired by user feedback I tried to run grml via QEMU on a windows box today. Worked like a charme, except that running it via emulation is much slower than running it in native mode. ;-)

Free Software Magazine is a free magazine for the free software world, available on paper and in electronic format. (pointer by Emanuele Rocca)

grml 0.2 – Codename Satura is available. The new release brings 455 new packages and many new features like an updated hardware detection, new bootparameters and a kernel 2.6.9 including several patches. For details take a look at the release announcement and the grml website.

$ apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 Reading Package Lists… Error! E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/dpkg/status (1) E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. WTF? I did nothing since last time I used apt-get. Oh, not true. I updated grml-scripts and grml-etc. Let’s take a look at /var/lib/dpkg/status. Ah, 567 […]

Today I discovered the useful tool tcprobe. Till today I used mplayer and GNU strings for getting details on movie files. tcprobe is part of the transcode package and provides detailed information on files: $ tcprobe -i test.avi [tcprobe] RIFF data, AVI video [avilib] V: 25.002 fps, codec=DX50, frames=1597, width=352, height=288 [avilib] A: 32000 Hz, […]

Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger (ISBN: 0-596-00461-3) is a collection of 100 tips and tricks for servers running linux. I read the german version (ISBN: 3897213613) and enjoyed it. First of all I like the short “stories” because it’s possible to savour the book when you’ve just a few minutes of spare time. About […]

echo ‘Du gruenst nicht nur zur Sommers zeit, nein auch im Winter, wenn es schne it. O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deeeeine Blaetter’ | festival –tts

While preparing and testing the Linux kernel 2.6.9 for the grml-system I noticed problems with loading the reiser4-module: # modprobe reiser4 FATAL: Error inserting reiser4 (/lib/modules/2.6.9-grml/kernel/fs/reiser4/reiser4.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg) # dmesg | tail -1 reiser4: Unknown symbol find_get_pages_tag Google does not know the problem (yet ;-)) and taking a […]

While checking for new magazines at the bookstore I discovered Software 2.0 Extra. The magazine is published by Software Wydawnictwo. That’s the company you might know from their other magazines like Linux+, Hakin9 or PHP Solutions. AFAICS there have been already two releases of the german version of “Software 2.0 Extra”, the current one covers […]

As you can see in the screenshot I’m using 2.6.9 for the current devel-release of grml. It was hard work to set it up due to problems with cloop in the initrd (thanks to Worf for his help!) but now it works like a charme on my laptop. Now I’ve to add some more modules […]

You still don’t have a computer on your toilet? Well, make a hardcopy then. ;-) My prefered way of making sourcecode more readable: $ which makereadable makereadable() { output=$1 shift a2ps –medium A4dj -E -o $output $* ps2pdf $output } Together with my a2psrc it provides a readable output. Take a look at my pdf-files […]

Opensource-CD is a german project which provides several open source programs for windows. Version 1.1 provides 70 up2date programs. I just downloaded the ISO and took a look at it. I think I don’t have to build my own ISOs anymore, because most programs I usually need when sitting in front of a windows box […]

At the end of december I would like to release grml version 0.2. Many new packages will be available, some more scripts which should make life easier and a first public version of grml2hd by Jimmy should be available too. Today I installed grml to harddisk with a first version of grml2hd: grml@grml ~ $ […]