An engineer's life around Kyoto

As a system administrator, I have experienced sendmail, qmail and postfix for mail servers. Even after I started to use Debian, I continued to use postfix. But default MTA for Debian is exim4. And now that I am no loger a mail server's administrator,  I feel it's time to try exim4. For several months, I didn't know how to understand exim4 configuration. But finally found hint in /usr/share/doc/exim4/README.Debian.gz   apropos exim Well, I didn't imagine Debian specific configuration guides are in man pages. man exim4-config_files Still, I don't know exim4 configuration syntax, but I can setup a smart host for my laptop PC.

I recently upgraded my wheezy box to jessie. As always, upgrade ended in success. It's amazing for me that all the major upgrade have never made my Linux box ruined. I believe that both well-designed package management system and the Debian developer's effort have achieved this result. Thanks a lot, all the contributors!

Another short story of Xen. Since Xen 4.1, a new command line tool "xl" is introduced. According to the wiki page on xl of wiki.xen.org, xl will take place of xend toolstack. Because PCI passthru and VGA passthru information is richer with xl than xm in the Internet, I became interested in xl. So, I have tried several times to use xl to create domU under my Xen 4.1 environment. But "xen create " subcommand wouldn't bring up a domU virtual machine. Finally, I gave up with Xen 4.1 of wheezy and tried xl in Xen 4.3 of jessie. Just adding device_model and device_model_override item in the domU's configuration file, domU virtual machine brought up. I wonder this might be one of the reasons the xl toolstack is not default of Xen 4.1. If you dare to use xl in Debian GNU/Linux, install Xen packages and add the following line in /etc/default/xen : TOOLSTACK=xl Note: virsh does not seem to work with xl, as far as I tried in my wheezy box.

My laptop PC is fairly old and running Debian wheezy. Though it's not powerful, I am trying to run Xen 4.1. At my first trial, Xen dom0 kernel itself launched without a trouble, but just after the X server started the display was filled with textual black and white patterns and lost reaction to keyboard and mouse input. I got disappointed and kept away from Xen for a while. Today, I tried again Xen 4.1 following the "Google Teacher"'s work around for some kinds of Intel's integrated video controller. Before launching dom0, I added the following setting to /etc/X11/xorg.conf: Section "Device"         Identifier "myvideodevice"         Driver "intel"         Option "AccelMethod" "sna" EndSection After I checked that the setting is actually effective by restarting X server and looking into X server's log messages,  I reboot the system and launched dom0. As before, th...

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  ...