An engineer's life around Kyoto

I have not paid a little effort on power-saving setting of my laptop machine, but I finally made it to some extent. After searching around the web pages, the article on the https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=1920 page reminded me of laptop-mode-tool package and tried it. At first, I installed laptop-mode-tool, rebooted and launched the powertop . The following screen capture is its screen: PowerTOP 2.6.1    Overview   Idle stats   Frequency stats   Device stats   Tunab >> Bad           Wireless Power Saving for interface wlan0                         Bad           Enable Audio codec power management    Bad           Enable SATA link powe...

I own an old printer, Canon LBP-350. It has both parallel port and USB port, but I never have been able to use it through USB port regardless of several trials. Because my one-year-old main desktop PC with Debian Jessie does not have a parallel port and direct USB connection seems hopeless, I recently bought a USB to Paralell-port convertor. How wonderful, it IS a cable. It has no extra power supply input nor a box at the intermediate location of the cable. I connect the printer and the PC with a little bit peculiar feeling and booted the printer and the PC. Then I opened the system-config-printer panel on the XFCE4 desktop. LBP-350 had already appeared. But the printer was set to inactive state. I couldn't figure out the reason, but I went on. I opened the URL http://lcoalhost:631 and looked into the CUPS administrative page. Yes, the printer was there. I changed the status of the printer to active and pushed the test-page button and the printer printed it. It was not a ...

I have been using MATE desktop environment on my laptop PC since my installation of Debian Jessie. Shortly, I noticed that Emacs M-< and M-> wouldn't work. Since then, I have managed to use the Emacs using ESC key instead of the Alt key as the Meta key. After one year of inconvenient use, I finally find what intercepts the Shift - Alt key. It is keyboard layout switching function of MATE. Here is the screenshot of its setting panel: My next question: Are MATE users happy with this default setting?

About two months ago, I installed Debian Jessie (8.1) to the another second-handed laptop PC.  During the install process, I made a non-root normal user account as the installer guided me. One day,  I wanted to add another normal user. Because the Debian system recommendation is to use adduser command, I reviewed its usage and functions. Then I found that the groups to which the initial account belonged were different from the adduser command default groups. I feel peculiar at first, and added the following line to /etc/adduser.conf EXTRA_GROUPS="dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev netdev lpadmin scanner bluetooth" Then the following command works as expected: adduser --add_extra_groups [new uid] I guess if the tasksel changes the extra-groups default parameters depending on the the purpose of the installation, it is more convenient to the users, at least, to me.

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.