An engineer's life around Kyoto

Recently, the 11th point release of Debian 11 has been announced, and it will be the last one. For I am still maintaining one Debian 11 machine, I am starting to prepare its upgrade to Debian 12. Because it is a dual boot machine, I must not forget about the change of grub OS probing. Before I ugrade, I have to add  GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to / etc/default/grub,  or I lose grub menu for Windows OS.  Another thing that impacts me is the change of gnome-text-editor. In Debian 11, gnome-text-editor is a kind of alias of gedit controlled under the Debian alternative system with update-alternatives command. On the other hand, a new package gnome-text-editor appears in Debian 12, and it is a different thing from gedit. For I am an uim user, I was confused when I tried to use launch a Japanese input method via uim on gnome-text-editor in Debian 12, for it wouldn't work as in Debian 11. Yes, these two things are important reminder to me.

 I built and am running a mail server, using dovecot for IMAP4 server and Power DNS (pdns) for DNS authoritative server, and memcached for back-end service for some mail filter. I also use LXC for staging environment to test my mail server, but running those services is not straight forward. My understanding is that it is because some security features of systemd using Linux kernel namespace function conflict with the use of namespace in LXC container. So, if you want to run memcached, dovecot, and pdns via systemd within LXC container, you have to disable some security features of systemd by configuration. My additional configuration to systemd is as follows: root@myhost:/# cat /etc/systemd/system/memcached.service.d/99-ns.conf [Service] ProtectSystem = no ProtectHome = no PrivateDevices = no PrivateTmp = no cat /etc/systemd/system/dovecot.service.d/99-ns.conf [Service] ProtectSystem = no PrivateDevices = no PrivateTmp = no root@myhost:/# grep -v '#' /etc/systemd/system/pdns.s...

 Back in 1990's, it was common practice to share one home directory between many UNIX servers using NFS. But it is not in these days. But I have become to want to share my home directory between two different Linux machines: One is  a Debian GNU/Linux installed as a primary OS of a dual boot machine,  and the other is a virtualized Linux box within the Virtualbox running under the Windows 10, a secondary OS of the dual-boot. They have different display resolutions and pointing devices. These differences led me to an annoying problem: if you open GNOME desktop environment, display and pointing device setting became broken. Today's GNOME desktop environment stores most of the settings to the files under $HOME/.config directory. But if you share $HOME/.config between two machines, the stored configuration for a particular machine may become incompatible with other machines with different display resolutions and pointing devices. Indeed, my GNOME desktop has become unusable. ...

Figaro's Password Manager 2 was my favorite password management tool. It is GTK2-application to preserve and manage your pairs of ID and password secretly with cipher. To my regret, its Debian package was orphaned many years ago and I thought it was time to switch to another password management tool. But besides finding a good alternative choice, I had a big problem: migration. Figaro's Password Manager 2 does have data export function, but only in special XML format. If you want to move your data to a different application, you have to change the format of the data even if the application can import the data. As my next password management tool is KeePass2 or KeePassXC , I need a XML to CSV data converter. So, I have been developing the conversion tool very slowly and finally, completed. Today, I published it on GitHub , which I named fpm2_csv . The history of the code is quite embarrassing, but very few people in the world would be interested in it, that doesn't matte...

A couple of months ago, I installed Microsoft Teams app in my Debian buster machine for a online meeting. The application worked fine, but it always started up automatically when launching the GNOME desktop environment. The behavior is quite annoying for me, because it take quite long time for the desktop to be ready for my normal use with the machine being rather old and its storage is HDD. But I couldn't find the settings or properties within the gnome-control-center setting items.  Today I find another way to stop automatic launch of the Teams app. Applying the patch below to the ~/.config/autostart/teams.desktop file would work fine: 12c12 < X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false --- > X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true Thanks to those blogs and articles: Gnome Desktop Entry Format extensions - bootlegged documentation ArchWiki 自動起動

 On December 6, Debian 11 installer alpha 3 has been released. As I wanted to install Debian to my new laptop machine Panasonic CF-SV9, I tried it. The result: fine. Debian 11's Gnome desktop environment is running on my new machine now. I am keeping pre-isntalled Windows 10 pro, and the machine is  Windows and Linux dual booting machine. The installer seems matured, inspite of its version name. But there is one drawback remaining. The circular pad built-in is not working correctly inspite of xorg synaptics input device settings written in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It may be caused that the graphic is now under control of wayland, in place of  Xorg server in my buster machine. If you want to follow me, please take care of Windows 10's  BitLocker. It will demand recovery key after your installation of Debian. Take some backups of the recovery key before hand.

Just a report of a hardware device usage for reminder.   EPSON EP-977A3 is a multi-functional peripheral for personal use once sold in Japanese market.   It has color printer, color flat-bed scanner, USB memory RW capability with USB and both wired and wireless LAN connectivity.  With the simple-scan software, whose package name is 'simple-scan' in Debian 10, I am able to scan documents from the flat-bed scanner of EPSON EP-977A3 connecting with my Debian box with an USB cable.   But when I tried to start scanning on the control panel of the scanner device, I got error with a message saying "The computer is not ready". I guessed if the scanned package for that purpose and installed it. Still, I got the same error message. Hmm... I need more research.

I own a quite old laser printer, Canon LBP-350 sold in Japanese market. It has both Centronics parallel port and USB port. I used to connect it and my Linux desktop machine with the parallel port, but my current main Linux box does not have parallel port. So, I once tried to connect the laser printer with the current main box using USB, but it didn't work. Today, I tried again , but it didn't. I checked how the Linux box was seeing the printer over USB bus using lsusb command as follows: # lsusb -t /: Bus 07.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ohci-pci/2p, 12M /: Bus 06.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ohci-pci/3p, 12M /: Bus 05.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M |__ Port 2: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=usb-storage, 5000M /: Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ehci-pci/5p, 480M |__ Port 3: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 480M /: Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/14p, 480M |__ P...

When I'm home, I use fiber-optic line with a dedicated old small router (YAMAHA RT107e) for access to the Internet. But I recently became anxious about the router. If it fails, how can I survive until I get another one? So, I tried to connect my Debian desktop PC to the fiber-optic line without the router. The PC have to talk to the other side of the line with PPPoE but I did not know how. In my PC, the Network Manager manages network configuration. So, I had to configure the Network Manager to utilize the pppoe like : nmcli connection add ifname eth0 connection.type pppoe username USERNAME password PASSWORD

Now I'm on a vacation trip around Europe since June 6. I have been to Munich, and Rome. I enjoyed sight-seeing and popular museums there. It was great experience in my life. Now I am in Cluj-Napoca in Romania and joining to the open source software's community event 'DrupalDevdays Transylvania'. Yes, it's on Drupal, one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) released under open source license. Actually, I am new to not only Drupal but also to CMS. So, this is a good chance for me to get in touch with its comprehensive information and community members. Today's keynote session showed the history of CMS and the one of the possible directions coming to CMS market place. The keywords were non-web media and decoupling between front-end and back-ends. https://cluj2019.drupaldays.org/keynote-the-fourth-wave-of-the-content-management-system Another eye-catching session was 'The stage of Drupal 9', showing the life cycle of the current ...

I believe it's a lap-behind topic, but I came across with an idea that Git local repositories can be connected with each other over P2P network, in place of a centralized bare repository. And as I expected, several developers have already proposed such an idea and implemented some software: GitTorrent: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ Gitchain: http://gitchain.org/ .  I know almost nothing about them, but they seem to be fascinating. I wonder they could have caught more eyes since Microsoft acquired Github last year.

I am now trying to write a small web application in PHP for my personal use. It reads a file encrypted with my GnuPG public key, decrypts it, and shows the content in pretty HTML format. Because PHP natively supports many GnuPG wrapper functions, I only wrote codes to call those wrapper functions. By the GnuPG's nature, you have to provide the pass phrase before decrypting the file to retrieve the secret key . I configured up my application running with my user ID under user-dir directory, i.e. ~/public_html, within apache 2.4 prefork process. This setting requires Apache 2 PHP module as well as mod_ruid2, which enables apache handlers to run under the user-dir. When I ran my PHP application  supplying my key ID and its pass phrase as the form input elements on my desktop browser, an unusual pop-up window came up. It is not the browser's one, but the keyring manager's window on my desktop environment.  It surprised me because normal web applications don't do such ...

For some reason, I have started learning PHP development. Yesterday, I downloaded a new version of Eclipse PDT, which is called Photon. For I would like to experience the IDE's debugging support, I installed PHP's xdebug module with the Debian package before hand,  I extracted the Eclipse distribution tarball below the /usr/local directory, and launched it. It seemed work fine, but when I tried several functions of "Debug" menu, some didn't. I could mark a breakpoint in my very short PHP script, but I could not run the script nor make it stalled on the breakpoint. Instead, the eclipse show me a dialog box with an error message related to gObject. Today, I downloaded the prior version, Oxygen, of Eclipse PDT, and did the same thing as yesterday. Yes, "Debug" menu functions seemed to work fine this time. I guess my desktop environment of Debian 9 (Strctch) is not ready for the latest version of the Eclipse SWT, but I think it is the way the Debi...

I have been using an Android smart phone for several years, and I'd like to introduce one of my favorite application on it. It is Vespuuci . You can edit the portion of OpenStreetMap 's map data where you are at with it. It's very cool!

The last new year holidays was more than a month ago. it was a good chance to make a major version upgrade on my PC. I upgraded my laptop PC from Debian 8 (Jessie) to Debian 9 (stretch). During the upgrade, I did encountered several times, but no serious trouble. I started to enjoy the lightdm login console showing up with the Debian 9 new theme. But when I booted it without AC power supply, the boot sequence ended in strange way. The lightdm did not show up. Instead, a black screen remains with many error messages. I searched for a hint in the log files in /var/log directory, and found that the root file system was mounted in read-only mode. With this hit, I search for any hints around the world and found a similar problem in the bug database in http://bugs.debian.org/ It seemed to imply that laptop-mode-tools package was involved. In order to test whether the laptop-mode-tools is involved in my case, I installed tlp package which conflicted with laptop-mode-tools. With tlp instead of...

I am using my laptop PC (Panasonic CF-N9) with MATE desktop environment based on Debian Jessie, and the network connection is managed by Network Manager software. Recently, the Network Manager started to ignore the wireless LAN device and the wireless LAN connection became unavailable. Here is the snipped kernel log. I guess this is telling me what had happened behind the scene. Once this log was generated, the wireless LAN device seems to disappear during the PCI device detection process of the kernel. Has the wireless LAN device within this PC broken? May 14 22:05:35 gingitsune kernel: [10135.794350] ------------[ cut here ]------------ May 14 22:05:35 gingitsune kernel: [10135.794370] WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 1833 at /build/linux-AY4Gs5/linux-3.16.43/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/pcie/trans.c:1265 iwl_trans_pcie_grab_nic_access+0xe0/0xf0 [iwlwifi]() May 14 22:05:35 gingitsune kernel: [10135.794372] Timeout waiting for hardware access (CSR_GP_CNTRL 0xffffffff) May 14 22:05:35 ging...

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.