An engineer's life around Kyoto

Recently, I had to move a personal settings of Firefox in Microsoft Windows XP machine to Windows 7. As a reminder for myself, I write down the instruction here: Copy a folder C:\Documents and Settings\ userid \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox in XP machine to C:\Users\ userid \AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox in Win7 machine. Copy a folder C:\Documents and Settings\ userid \Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox in XP machine to C:\Users\ userid \AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox Note that the above ' userid ' is an account name of the user. A similar copying policy is applicable to Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have been in trouble over setting up my laptop Linux box (Panasonic T7) to enable the headphone output. I have been looking into PulseAudio sound system settings in the desktop menu to enable it, But recently, I found that I had to check both ALSA soundcard device driver and PulseAudio sound system configurations. Unfortunately, the headphone output switch was disabled in the ALSA configuration. What's worse, the configuration item is hidden by default! After that, I noticed that the microphone input is muted, I search around the configuration menus and found that the amplitude of the microphone is minimized in the hidden configuration item in the PulseAudio setting panel. Hmm, isn't the sound system too complicated and guiding information too few ?

It's been a long time since my last post. Recently, I bought a secondhand Panasonic T7 laptop PC. It was as much as seven thousand yen (about 76 USD), and I am pleasant for the price. I installed Debian 7.1 (wheezy) to the PC and set up Xfce desktop environment. Most of the things went well, but the X-Window system didn't recognize automatically that its touch pad device was circle and able to sense tapping operations. I was disappointed a while, but managed to write additional configurations for the X server with a help of the man page of Synaptics touch pad input driver. For reminder,  here it is: $ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "InputClass"     Identifier  "MyTouchPad"     MatchDriver      "synaptics"     Option        "TapButton1" "1"     Option        "CircularPad" "true"     Option  ...

The Debian's next major version 'wheezy' is planned to be released this year. Before the release, I have already upgraded my home PC to wheezy. But after I upgraded the latest kernel, I have experienced kernel crashes frequently. Owing to the detailed review and good inspiration of the kernel maintainers, the cause was detected shortly and the fix has been prepared for the next kernel package release. The cause was a wrong change of the Intel graphics controller's driver, which was introduced to the wheezy's kernel in the last autumn. The crashes of this cause seems to be reported on the BTS only on the PC's with Intel 82865G graphics driver. I hope owner of the PC's like mine be happy until the wheezy is released.

Although I am not an Asterisk user, I encountered the information that the recent security update of Asterisk contains  a backward incompatible change.

Recently, when I launched powertop in my "squeeze" machine,  it crashed. Hmm... I looked around the Debian bug database and finally found the cause. The bug report #646522 says that it crashes if /boot/config-* has more than 5000 lines. Yes, I ran the kernel of linux-image-2.6.32-5-xen-686 and the package contains a config file with 5023 lines. That's it!

A few weeks ago, I upgraded one of my Debian box from squeeze to wheezy. Upgrading task was not so difficult, also I had to manage a trouble concerned with X11. Then I tried running Xen dom0 kernel upon the Xen hypervisor 4.1. After the installation I booted the hypervisor followed by the dom0 kernel. When a X server launched, the screen was filled with the textile-like tiling patterns. But after several seconds, the normal GDM login console appeared. I did some tasks in the desktop environment, for example, watching a video stream. During the tasks, I encountered one Xserver's crash and one kernel panic. The thing around Xen and xorg's Intel driver must be getting better. But it seems to be still unstable.