linked the aptitude docs ..

.. as I regularly tend to forget, I linked the aptitude docs on http://subsignal.org/aptitude.

the enhanced search option you can find directly here:
The aptitude Search Term Quick Guide !!eleven!

now, use it.
then, fun

what is the station url format in shell-fm?

using the nice and fantastic shell-fm player, the last-fm player in your beloved terminal,
you might wanna know which channels you can listen to and preferably in which
format you have to enter them.

All I found over the interwebz are here:

lastfm://user/${user}
lastfm://user/$USER/recommended
lastfm://user/$USER/playlist
lastfm://user/${user}/loved
lastfm://user/${user}/personal
lastfm://usertags/${user}/${usertag}
lastfm://artist/${artist}/similarartists
lastfm://artist/${artist}/fans
lastfm://globaltags/${globaltag}

Hehe, meanwhile crawling through the omniscient dump, I just found another friendly
cli player lastbash (homepage) and wikipedia article. neat.

can haz this channels e.g.:

lastbash "lastfm://globaltags/jungle"
lastbash "lastfm://globaltags/glitch"
lastbash "lastfm://user/phaidros7/neighbours"
lastbash "lastfm://artist/Salmonella Dub/similarartists"

now: fun!

atheism is stoopid!

squeeze still has no jack support in libportaudio an amd64, ..

.. which is needed to use mixxx with jack

# apt-get source portaudio19  
# apt-get build-dep portaudio19

# cd /portaudio19-19+svn20071207/debian

remove ENABLE_JACK = no from line 48
ENABLE_JACK must be explicitely set to "yes"

# nano debian/rules

# dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

# cd ../
# dpkg -i *.deb

mixxx still doesn't detect jack for me, stay tuned. Does work now!

(no) fun! (yet)

10 commands for installing latest nvidia on squeeze

# echo <<EOF >> /etc/apt/sources.list \
deb http://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib \
deb-src http://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib \
EOF

# echo 'APT::Default-Release "testing";' >/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00defaultrelease

# aptitude update
# aptitude install module-assistant nvidia-kernel-common build-essential
# m-a clean nvidia-kernel-source
# m-a purge nvidia-kernel-source
# m-a prepare
# aptitude install nvidia-kernel-source/unstable
# m-a a-i nvidia-kernel-source
# aptitude -t unstable install nvidia-glx nvidia-libvdpau1 nvidia-settings nvidia-libvdpau1-ia32 nvidia-glx-ia32

fun!

install debian from usb stick

# wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-amd64/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
# sudo umount /dev/sdb1
# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdb1

plug stick out / in.

# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-504-amd64-netinst.iso
# mount

see where stick is mounted.

# cp debian-504-amd64-netinst.iso /media/Debian\ Inst/

happy installing!

OpenWRT on Xen patched, up and running

Thanx to jow and thomas h., we have now working support for Xen in OpenWRT!
see the following changesets for what is done:

• Changeset 19608 - [package] base-files: add /dev/hvcX to hotplug common rules
• Changeset 19610 - [x86] add Xen DomU subtarget
• Changeset 19611 - [package] kernel: add xen kmods
• Changeset 19612 - [x86] make console port editable through menuconfig, gzip ext2 images, add suitable defaults for Xen

So you now can choose x86 as target with Xen as subtarget.
nice. we give back to the connected funk-haeusers!

locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

now and then this happenes to me on a new machine. usually I just set
LC_ALL, LC_LANG & LANGUAGE like this

root@gargamel:~# cat /etc/profile.d/locale 
export LANGUAGE = "en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"

still it complains about missing default locale. so we hafta do this:

localedef -v -c -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8 

because usually en_US is probably defined.
we r done. we give back to the connected funk-haeusers!

mkcd - mkdir & cd directly into it

phaidros@42:~/ #$ echo 'mkcd() { mkdir -p "$@" && cd $_; }' >> ~/.bashrc
phaidros@42:~/ #$ . ~/.bashrc
phaidros@42:~/ #$ mkcd /path/to/a/new/folder/
phaidros@42:/path/to/a/new/folder/#$ echo "Well done :) !"

Little, easy, damn useful.
We give back to the connected funk-haeusers!

finding obsolete conffiles

when updating from lenny to squeeze, one will face two major upgrades of the system:

• grub becomes grub-legacy and is superceeded by grub2

for people not wanting to convert yet as not everything is supported yet, this can be postponed if desired.

• sys-rc is being accompanied by innserv

a new, faster system for booting (it looks even faster than upstart to me). its upgrade might fail for some packages on the system not being --purged but just --removed.

getting a list of obsolete conffiles is as simple as

dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' | grep obsolete

if you're absolutely sure you dont need any of the old stuff (possibly including your own customisations) you might also do

dpkg --purge $(dpkg -l|awk '/^rc/ {print $2}')

which will simply purge all removed but not purged packages.

List all packages containing the words route or routing in their description:

aptitude search '~drout(e|ing)'

List installed packages that are not official Debian packages:

aptitude search '~S~i!~Odebian'

List packages installed from experimental:

aptitude search ~S~i~Aexperimental

List packages with 'ruby' and 'gtk' in their names:

aptitude search 'ruby gtk'
aptitude search ~nruby~ngtk

List installed packages that depend on bash:

aptitude search ~S~i~Dbash

Purge all packages that have been removed except for their config files:

aptitude purge ~c

atheism is arrogant

xm console not working (blank)

on some xen domUs I recently figured that the xm console didn't come
up. so investigating the issue I found out that you gotta set the
tty in the machine's config like this:

extra       = 'xencons=tty1'

but still I get a blank screen instead of the login. solution is simple,
for systems still having an inittab (eg. debian) look for the following
line:

nano /etc/inittab

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1

for systems which utilize upstart already (ubuntu) look for another file:

nano /etc/event.d/tty1

start on stopped rc2
start on stopped rc3
start on stopped rc4
start on stopped rc5

stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6

respawn
exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

makes the xm console work on all my machines again.

if you are using virtualbox and seeing this:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
0:6
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU

or the like, it could be you are trying to run an *buntu server kernel.
just enable PAE/NX for the vm guest. this should solve the issue.

freebsd bootloader repairs et al

to repair ie grub on freebsd (or to overwrite the disk the box is running on, etc..), the system will complain about doing so.

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16

will let you shoot yourself in the foot nevertheless (make the mbr writable).

make deb from cpan

simple:

dh-make-perl --build --cpan $module
dpkg -i $module.deb

preparing the guest system

you need to put following

1. /etc/preinit

   • add "mknod /dev/hvc0 c 229 0"
   • before "exec /sbin/init"

2. /etc/inittab

   • add "hvc0::askfirst:/bin/ash --login"

in the domU.conf, aside the usual settings:

• disk = ['tap:aio:/path/to/openwrt-x86-ext2.fs,xvda1,w']
• root = '/dev/xvda1 rw'
• extra = "console=hvc0 init=/etc/preinit"

building debs from source

make sure to have deb-src entries in your sources.list[.d]

among the installed packages should be at least

build-essential debhelper fakeroot autoconf automake

add more if necessary (like dh-make, quilt and so on)

get the dependencies right:

sudo apt-get build-dep $package

get the sources and build them:

sudo apt-get -b source $package

for manual adjustments, leave out the -b and in the package source dir, do

fakeroot debian/rules binary

after changing whatever you wanted different.

ikiwiki setup notes

heres a cklist should i create another iki instance. just assuming the vcs would be svn this time.

deciding for

• one or more webroots: as one repository is rendered into html by ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki-setup it can also be rendered somewhere else with a different setupfile, ie one is a wiki (some ppl call it backend) and another one will be rendered into plain html just to look at. (some ppl call it "cms" but this is way nicer to use than a cms. also, its lightyears faster)

/$webroot/$instance(wiki)
/$webroot/$instance(dumb)

and then

(moar)

finally,

ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup-$instance
ikiwiki-makerepo svn ~/wikis/$instance/src /wotevr/svn/repos/$instance

done.

as I did, you might also wonder if mailman is capable of running on multiple domain names with a single instance.

yes it is, easy. configure mailman for your default host and for the next ones, just add the following line to /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py

add_virtualhost('lists.yourdomain.org','lists.yourdomain.org')

add a vhost for your webserver to point http://lists.yourdomain.org to the mailman. nicely you can add now (with the sooperdooper password) new lists via webif.

now the wondering point: your new list will still be listed on the webif of the default mailman host. I tried to patch mailman, as I remembered it was not a feature offered upstream. by reading the code, I just wondered, that there is a comparison alread done if the list belongs to the web url. well, all you need to do is changing the web_page_url variable of your new list of the virtual domain, because by default all new lists belong to - who guessed - default host. easy thing:

bin/withlist -l -r fix_url listname -u lists.yourdomain.org

well, now it just shows up onlt on the webif of the vhost it belongs to, ez, eh?

ubuntu stable sucked, so I just went alpha!

grep -r jaunty /etc/apt/sources.list* | grep -v "^#" | gawk {'print $1'} | sed 's/:.*$//' | xargs sed -i 's/jaunty/karmic/g

set all used apt sources from jaunty to karmic.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade    

for a t41p (or other harware using Rxxx ATI card) follow the instructions here: https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

get your card running. nice, latest DRI, and works. (don't forget to:

aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-ati

)

I then again got troubles with supend/hibernation. so tetzlav pointed me once moar to uswsusp.

sudo aptitude install uswsusp
s2ram -f -p -m

for suspend to ram.

s2disk

for suspend to disk. roxx!

and, well, still splash was buggy. kick it. now I got radeonfb used for 1440x1050 on console

nano /boot/grub/menu.list

add the following to the line with #defoptions (do not remove the '#', remove all other vga= or video= settings)

vga=835 video=radeonfb

so, that to work, you must edit /etc/initramfs/modules. just add

i2c_algo_bit
fb_ddc
radeonfb
fbcon

fb_ddc is used to detect the screen resolution, i2c is needed by it. radeon, of course ..

now get your changes into place

sudo update-grub
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

reboot, see, suspend, wake up .. \o/ ..

about

this blog features tech tips, sometimes done in the spirit of technical thugging. its name was inspired by stuff that can be done with a FLT.
hoping to be of any practical use, this blog contains info about things someone did to get some stuff done.

if any of the things here inspire you to shoot yourself in the foot, you are welcome to do so but don't come complaining except when trying to help.

you get what you pay for, and it's free.