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.

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...

 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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

Several days ago, I wanted to make a backup of my home directory to an external HDD connected with USB, and decided to use the "rdup" utility. "Rdup" is a set of commands to manage multiple generations of backups of a certain directory.  What caught my eyes was its feature to make hard links between the generations automatically to save disk space. In order to accomplish a typical backup task, rdup's three commands should be combined appropriately.  But if your backup goes to a local storage straightforward daily, a shell script 'rdup-simple' gives a shortcut to the task like: # rdup-simple /home/mine /media/BACKUPHDD/mypc/ Because rdup is provided as a package in Debian, its installation was also very simple.