An engineer's life around Kyoto

I usually use the gdm for X session manager. Under this circumstance, I wanted to test a xdm, a very traditional X session manager. Rather than replacing gdm with xdm, I tried to start a xdm within a gdm session. Here is how I did: In a gnome-terminal type as follows: # su # xdm -server ":1 nest local /usr/bin/Xnest :1 -geometry 800x600" Cheers!

I am preparing for a presentation using X desktop, and want to start another gdm session inside my GNOME desktop environment. It seemed to require long descriptions in the configuration file at first, but  a simple command solved the problem. $ gdmflexiserver -n This starts another gdm greeter inside a  Xephyr (if unavailable, Xnest instead) window. Excellent!

Here is a tragic news from Japan. Japanese hosting provider Sakura Internet started its cloud service 'Sakura-no Cloud' last November. Unfortunately, after the serious performance depression in December, about ten percent of the virtual servers has lost its whole data in the end of the year 2011. They say one of the operators has done a wrong data shrinking operation while they struggled against the performance depression. I feel sorry for the owner of the lost virtual servers. At the same time, this accident makes me change the point of view at the cloud service. That is, you can't control this kind of risks behind the virtualized service. You've got to protect your data by yourself. Refrecence: The trouble report of Sakura Cloud around new year

A happy new year. The climate was good here in Kyoto. I watched the final game of  the Emperor's Cup All-Japan Soccer Championship on TV, because Kyoto Sanga, my favorite football club team, played the game. Surprisingly, Kyoto Sanga doesn't belong to the top division, but inferior J2 division. Although Kyoto Sanga didn't win the game, I feel satisfied with the fact the team fought the final game. I'm sure I can enjoy the Sanga's games of the coming regular season.

I recently tried to set up Xen on my Squeeze box, with intel 945GM graphics controller. I followed the instruction on Xen - Debian Wiki . I installed the Xen hypervisor, kernel, xen-tools and other stuff, then created a domU image of Ubuntu natty. After that, I rebooted the system. But when X server was about to be launched, the screen became black out,  both keyboard and mouse don't work anymore. I reread the article on the wiki, and figured out the Xorg driver for Intel graphics controller  is suspicious. So, I changed the Xorg driver 'intel' to 'fbdev' wrting /etc/X11/xorg.conf , and rebooted.  This workaround works out! The drawback of the workaround is, 'intel' driver specific features, including DRI and XvMC, are disabled.

Kyoto is a famous for old wooden temples and shrines. They attract as many as about 50 million tourists per year. But, if you visit Kyoto for sight-seeing with your children, they might become boring with old wooden structures. Such children may be excited with japanese macaques in Mt. Iwata, just behind Arashiyama, one of the most popular sight-seeing spots in Kyoto. You can meet there with wild japanese macaques. When I visit there, I saw many foreign tourists enjoy feeding and touching them. Actually, my son was  very excited  feeding them apples and peanuts. Remember that climbing Mt. Iwata is a good exercise, and you can borrow shoes for climbing. Reference: Arashiyama Monkey Park  Iwatayama

I have been a  Debian GNU/Linux user since 2007. Since then, I experienced several major OS upgrades (dist-upgrade).  But every time I dist-upgrade, some trouble annoyed me. The most recent problem was related to the seting of Xorg server. When starting up X server (from gdm3), the xserver process couldn't find the glx symbols. In the /var/log/Xorg.0.log: (EE) GLX error: Can not get required symbols. This prevented Compiz Fusion window manager from working on the X desktop. Although the hardware video driver was "intel", it seams that some extra glx code for Nvidia caused the trouble. The following command fixed the problem:   aptitude purge fglx-glx fglx-driver nvidia-vdpau-driver (I don't know which package was actually problematic.) If you have a glx related problem with the intel graphic controller chip, try removing unrelated packages that supposed be combined with nvidia or Radeon! That save you some (small amount of ) disk spaces :-) B...