mikas blog

Sitting at Wörthersee (Klagenfurt/Austria):

As I wrote a few monce ago I’m owner of a NSLU2 device powered by Debian. Now I had to install another device (using di-nslu2-etch-4.0r0.bin – md5: db8e8ec3571aff8fb2132479f860f16b this time) and I wanted to change the setup from using /dev/sda2 to a UUID based one – to get a stable root device. Nothing really tricky […]

Since about two days I’m proud owner of a Lenovo X61s notebook. It will become my main and new developer box for grml, featuring all that nifty stuff like 64bit support, hardware virtualization and so on… I managed to use all the important features with a very current version of grml. I’m using kernel 2.6.22-grml […]

It was on my todo list since ages, finally I took some minutes to set up my own jabber server (reach me at mika@jabber.grml.org). I’m using ejabberd, a free and open source instant messaging server written in Erlang. Reference system: Debian etch (current stable), ejabberd version 1.1.2-6, installed via a simple: # aptitude install ejabberd […]

One of the coolest features of grml IMO is grml-tips. grml-tips is a collection of tips you can request via a keyword. For example if you want to know how to use grml-x just run ‘grml-tips grml-x’: mika@meilenschwein ~ % grml-tips grml-x Start X window system (XFree86 / Xorg / X.org): % grml-x $WINDOWMANAGER Usage […]

Running hot off the press 2.6.22-grml I took a look at the current version of VirtualBox. And I’m really amazed how responsive it is. Not only booting grml is rocking fast but also typing on the console is reaaaally fast – much more responsive than with VMware. (I took a look at VirtualBox several months […]

This is UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE of CyberTAN Inc. the contents of this file may not be disclosed to third parties, copied or duplicated in any form without the prior written permission of CyberTAN Inc. This software should be used as a reference only, and it not intended for production use! Found in HTML source […]

Quoting the project homepage: Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). It really rocks, especially as it works for Linux/Unix […]

Hopefully fuzz testing is well known nowadays, right? But did you check how smart your software can handle ENOSPC – the ‘No space left on device’ error? I like stress testing software (to be honest: no, not really). Yesterday I debugged a problem regarding zsh history writing on ENOSPC. Usually I use the grml Linux […]

I wrote a small python webpage for the grml-wiki to provide some information regarding Python-development on grml. I just upgraded Vim on my main system to version 7.1 and omnicompletion with vim-python became better once more. So time for a short demo of ctrl-x-o: I also very much like ‘%ed’ within ipython using the following […]

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt: stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!) thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!) the filter language feature of the […]

I’ve installed python-2.5.1.msi on Windows using power user rights (in german: Hauptbenutzerrechte) and it works fine: Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>> Ok, let’s take a look at Twisted (an event-driven networking engine written in Python). There […]

It’s done. grml 1.0 is available. New features? Tons of them. 8-) Just check out the official release notes for grml 1.0. Need grml for a x86_64 system? No problem, grml64 0.1 is waiting for you. You are used to grml-small? Check out grml-small 0.4. You want to know what are my favourite features of […]

docbook2odf is a toolkit that automatically converts DocBook to OASIS OpenDocument (ODF, the ISO standardized format used for texts, spreadsheets and presentations). Conversion is based on a XSLT which makes it easy to convert DocBook->ODF, ODT, ODS and ODP as all these documents are XML based. This piece of software is pretty rocking for example […]

As formorer mentioned already we have new release candidates of grml: grml 1.0-rc1 with codename Meilenschwein is available as well as grml-small 0.4-rc1 with codename Springinkerl. We are proud to be able to present a 64bit version of grml as well: grml 64 0.1-rc1 with codename LiveShell which is based on the amd64 port of […]

I got ‘remote: abort: No space left on device:’ when running ‘hg push’ via ssh during a repository migration (from subversion to mercurial). Huh?! The partition with all the repositories on it has enough free space, so what? Ah, wait a second. When pushing data via ssh, mercurial does a ‘ssh $HOST hg -R /path/to/repos […]

As grml supports booting from usb devices (harddisk installation via grml2hd as well as booting from usb pens via grml2usb) and I helped many people at debugging booting problems I think I stumbled upon every existing pitfall. 8-) There are several situations where booting might fail. So here we go with a summary of the […]

Do you already know crm114? Taking quotes of the crm114 book: What is this? Some kind of grep bitten by a radioactive spider? — apocryphal ­CRM114 isn’t ugly like PERL. It’s a whole different kind of ugly. — John Bowker Want to get a calculator using crm114? No problem: % cat > calc << EOF […]

I just had the annoying problem, that the AltGr key did not work in VMware Server on my 64bit system via SSH whereas it worked fine within the 32bit local system. xev, ‘cat /dev/input/event0’ & CO verified that not a single keystroke reached my client system within VMware. Solution? Add the following line to /etc/vmware/config: […]

Update on 2007-09-12: updated shell script and added Pre-Invoke to dpkg configuration. Based on Bart Trojanowski’s blog article “etc snapshots with git” I removed one further item from my todo list: maintain /etc with mercurial on my Debian systems. First step is creating the repository and securing access to the repository. As mercurial stores all […]