To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

Kumar brought in some daal roti. Amin announced that he was a gujju and a Patel. Alpesh glanced at him derisively, for he was the only other Indian. Harish told a story about the fishmonger, and Ankit launched into a tirade about his mother's chapati. That may have been all that happened, .

Past wednesday, a new Saturn electronics store opened it's doors right next to the railway station of Brugge (Bruges). To celebrate this, they had several real bargain deals, among which an Asus Eee PC 900 to be had for 129 EUR.

Thing is, the advert wasn't really clear which Eee 900 type it was, and it was contradictory even: the netbook was said to be equipped with the Atom N270, and at the same time the CPU clock speed supposedly was 900 MHz. The latter being the speed of the earlier models that had a Celeron Mobile CPU.
So I called the store and asked for some explanation. The person on the other end of the line, a guy named Kevin, confirmed that it had indeed the Atom N270, yet at the same time ran at 900 MHz and not the usual 1600 MHz. Errrr ?

Well, this is a bargain deal, so that's why it's running at a slower speed. Sure, I know the N270 normally runs at 1600 MHz, only this netbook doesn't.
Yeah right.

I was offered to have one netbook be put aside for me, because they were supposedly running nearly out of stock.
Since you simply cannot find any netbook over here for under nearly twice it's price, I still considered it a good deal. Even if would be the old Celeron model.

I was slightly tempted to ask if it would be possible to have one with Linux rather than the Windows XP version they offered, but as the answer was clear from the outset I refrained to do so.

So after work I drove to the shop, picked it up, and returned home. As thursday evening is swimming evening, I only had time to briefly power it into the bios when I returned home. There I saw confirmed what I suspected, it was a Celeron Eee 900 and not a revision with the Atom.
Saturn really should learn to educate their support staff better.

Still, I'm not unhappy that I bought the netbook it should provide sufficient speed for most things I have in mind to use it for.
Now all I have to do is put a modern OS on it.

If you use a script to do some customisations run via preseed/late_command then don't do it the following way:
d-i preseed/late_command string cp /hd-media/do-tib-stuff.sh /target/tmp ; in-target /tmp/do-tib-stuff.sh ; rm /target/tp/do-mystuff.sh!
That way you'll never notice, if your script run successfully as its exit code is eaten by the removal. When running several late-commands always use && to chain the commands, so if one command fails the processing will stop and the installer will show you a nice message that indeed something went wrong.

As an aside to yesterday s Another Network Begins note, I should mention that one of the challenges of running any inter-business project is paying for it. It surprises some people that many great cooperative projects are running on very small budgets, whereas it looks like some Social Enterprise groups are awash with cash. How can this be, when it still looks like cooperatives are stronger financially than social enterprises? A written answer in Parliament on Monday suggests one possible reason: Co-operatives UK and The Plunkett Foundation together get 164k of Cabinet Office funding, while the Social Enterprise Coalition alone gets 488k and there are other SocEnt groups on the pay list. Once again, I m surprised by the way the Labour and Co-operative government is behaving, like I was on the way the real help initiatives exclude cooperative partnerships, while being open to both private sector employers and social enterprises. I m all in favour of intervening in markets, but this doesn t feel like it s making things fairer. Three strikes, funding social enterprise in preference to cooperatives would a Conservative or Liberal Democrat government really be worse?

This evening I tested some Noise Canceling Headphones (as described in my previous post [1]). I first tried the ones on sale at Brookstone [2], they were the on the ear type so there was never a chance that I would buy them but they seemed like good ones to test. I wore them for about 10 minutes while I walked around the store looking at all the electronic stuff that s on sale. I noticed that they were much more effective at filtering low frequencies and regular sounds. So for the Christmas music that was playing the music was mostly filtered just leaving the sound of the singing. Also I was able to talk to the guy who worked there and hear him clearly when the noise canceling was turned on this can be considered a bug or a feature depending on your planned use. When I listened to electric fans the sound of the buffeting air was filtered just leaving the high pitched bearing noise. It is well documented that there is a hissing sound from noise canceling headphones and sometimes a feeling of pressure. I didn t hear any hissing but it did feel a little different when I turned on the noise canceling. After 10 minutes I didn t feel in any way uncomfortable, so I could probably survive an entire flight while wearing such headphones. I can highly recommend the customer service at the Brookstone store in Menlo Park. The guy who was working there was totally helpful, even by US standards his customer service was really good. Sometimes when you make an unusual request (such was wanting to try the merchandise for an extended period of time) the staff aren t particularly enthusiastic, but I had no problems at Brookstone! After Brookstone I went to a Bose store and tried the Quiet Comfort 15 noise canceling headphones [3]. The Bose store conveniently had a device configured to emulate the sound of a jet engine to demonstrate how the QC15 stopped that. I was quite impressed with that. I did feel that the QC15 was a little light for my taste, I would rather have something bigger and heavier with thicker padding to improve the passive resistance to sound. But I expect that many people would like it to be small and light as it s designed for travel. I visited a Sony store a couple of times, but no-one seemed able to serve me. I ll go there again some time when they are less busy. Finally I have to note that I have received a significant number of comments suggesting ear-bud type devices. I suggest that anyone who doesn t mind wearing such things should consider ear-bud type devices. But as I can t stand such things I will continue my search for over-ear headphones. I may end up just buying the Bose QC15, they seem to be good enough and not really expensive.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/03/noise-canceling-headphones/
• [2] http://www.brookstone.com/
• [3] http://www.bose.com/controller?url=/shop_online/headphones/noise_cancelling_headphones/index.jsp

Caution: Latin American rant ahead. With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:

• English: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• Spanish, Galician, Basque, Quechua:
• Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l l
• French:
• Italian:
• Dutch:
• German:
• Swedish:
• Danish and Norwegian:
• Icelandic:
• Finnish: (apparently, the untypable are only used in loan words)

But not in:

• Portuguese: I can't type or (no dead_tilde)
• Guaran : I can't type g (no dead_tilde).

It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population). The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde. I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop. However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde. For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as:

• Polish: I can't type , only
• Czech: I can't type , only
• Romanian: I can't type , only

But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaran , and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

This post is about Barbara Liskov, for the Ada Lovelace Day. Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However, this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement. She's the creator of the CLU programming language, a language created in the mid-70s, that we would find crufty and ugly nowadays, but that with its strong emphasis in abstraction, the use of clusters (basically equivalent to what we call classes today) and iterators, was to become the rock foundation of Object Oriented Programming. Apart from that, she worked in the design of a timesharing operating system, called Venus; designed another programming language, called Argus, that was oriented to distributed applications, and also set the foundations for much of what is currently done as distributed computing. Aged 70, she's currently still working at MIT, as the leader of the Programming Methodology Group, researching ways to tolerate byzantine faults. For all this work, she received the John von Neumann medal in 2004, and the Alan Turing award in 2008. All in all, what I find the most inspiring of all her life, is the fact that she was able to pursue her career, working on a new way of creating programs, while she was also a wife and a mother; and that today, aging 70, she's still researching, leading a group, and working towards making computing better.

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Biggest, in terms of money involved, piece of equipment is a nice piece of glass to put in front of our camera. Since my wife had been using a Canon SLR since forever (and we stayed with that when moving from the EOS 300 to the current EOS 40D), the choices to upgrade from the kit EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 basically have been:

• EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM: since it's been announced with the 18Mp 7D it should be quite good on the 10Mp 40D. Newest design, certainly one of the best IS on Canon, true wide angle.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM: The old trusted one. No IS, but a constant f/2.8. Narrowest zoom range of the lot. A real tank, at almost 1kg.
• EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM: The other full frame L lens. Not quite as big, longer, but only f/4.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS USM: including waiting for it to be announced and available, of course.

In the end I got the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM, because the EOS 40D is no high ISO monster (we don't plan to upgrade immediately.) Also: I bought the Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX (11-16mm, f/2.8) a while back and we're quite happy with that so wide-angle is covered. And since we're often shooting indoors (family and other events), f/2.8 is a big plus. On the tele end, there's quite a gap from the 24-70 to the old EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM [age of the page to reflect the age of the lens ;-) ] but then the latter is probably the next lens to be replaced anyway. Since I only got 24-70 I can not directly compare these lenses. But after a few early tests I think I'm happy with the 24-70: while it seems to be a bit soft wide open at 24mm and at 70mm, it seems to be very sharp center to edge even at f/2.8 when used in the 35-50mm range. (Note that the 40D is a crop sensor camera, so I'm nicely using the sharp center area of a lens designed for full frame!) Yes, it's huge, so for casual walking around the 17-85mm will probably still get some use. Time will tell. And since it can, potentially at least, be used on a a EOS 5D Mk II, I now have another gadget to covet. Although this would mean giving up the Tokina 11-16mm. Anyway, not for quite some time yet... (The test also included the venerable EF 50mm f/1.8, Mk I, and I must say I'm quite surprised how sharp that one is in the f/4 to f/11 range.)

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks... First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him! So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

After getting a new disk for my Popcorn Hour A-110 device I had to copy all partitions from the old disk onto the new one so I do not have to reinstall some applications and reconfigure everything.

After searching the web and trying to find a free alternative to Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, preferably not using a boot disk on its own (I did not want to backup my workstation after all, just a simple partition to partition copy between two SATA disks) I gave up and decided to do the copying manually.

So I fired up gparted to do the partitioning, did a right click and... I noticed that gparted supports copy/paste. Being curious about what this could potentially do I gave it a try. I marked partition one on the old disk, did a copy, went to the new disk and clicked on paste - and guess what, gparted did what I was looking for.

Putting a long story short: you can copy whole partitions using gparted's copy/paste mechanism and even resize them whilst doing so. I am somehow ashamed I did not notice this feature earlier, having been a gparted user for a few years now and I can imagine I am not the only one who missed that.

So we pretty much gave up on the condemned house. The more we hear about it, the worse it looks. Our agent got some paperwork on the red-tagging today. Apparently the large room out the front used to be a car port, and enclosing that was done without a permit. There's also a standalone room out the back that has had a bathroom added without a permit. Apparently the owner is getting fined $2,500 a day by the city until it's either brought into compliance or reverted. No idea if that's actually being paid, or who's responsibility it would become in the event of a sale, so we'll just quietly back away from that whole mess and pretend it never happened. Sarah was poking around Redfin again last night and found this property, for less than what the condemned house was going for (granted, this is a condo, not a house). We got our agent to show it to us today, and we really liked the look of it, so we're going to put an offer in on it and see what comes of it. We have to spend about three hours with our agent tomorrow morning going through paperwork. Wee. It certainly seems like a good time to be buying. Interest rates are low, the AUD is high against the USD, and prices are down.

I ve been investigating the Ext4 filesystem [1]. The main factor that is driving me to Ext4 at the moment is fsck times. I have some systems running Ext3 on large filesystems which I need to extend. In most cases Ext3 filesystems have large numbers of Inodes free because the relationship between the number of Inodes and the filesystem size is set when it is created, enlarging the filesystem increases the number of Inodes and apart from backup/format/restore there is no way of changing this. Some of the filesystems I manage can t be converted because the backup/restore time would involve an unreasonable amount of downtime. Page 11 of the OLS paper by Avantika Mathur et al [2] has a graph of the relationship between the number of Inodes and fsck time. Ext4 also has a number of other features to improve performance, including changes to journaling and block allocation. Now my most important systems are all virtualised. I am using Debian/Lenny and RHEL5 for the Dom0s. Red Hat might back-port Ext4 to the RHEL5 kernel, but there will probably never be a supported kernel for Debian/Lenny with Ext4 and Xen Dom0 support (there may never be a kernel for any Debian release with such support). So this means that in a few months time I will be running some DomUs which have filesystems that can t be mounted in the Dom0. This isn t a problem when everything works well. But when things go wrong it s really convenient to be able to amount a filesystem in the Dom0 to fix things, this option will disappear for some of my systems, so if virtual machine A has a problem then I will have to mount it s filesystems with virtual machine B to fix it. Of course this is a strong incentive to use multiple block devices for the virtual machine so that a small root filesystem can be run with Ext3 and the rest can be Ext4. At the moment only Debian/Unstable and Fedora have support for Ext4 so this isn t a real issue. But Debian/Squeeze will release with Ext4 support and I expect that RHEL6 will also have it. When those releases happen I will be upgrading my virtual machines and will have these support issues. It s a pity that Red Hat never supported XFS, I could have solved some of these problems years ago if XFS was available. Now for non-virtual machines one factor to consider is that the legacy version of GRUB doesn t support Ext4, I discovered this after I used tune2fs to convert all filesystems on my EeePC to Ext4. I think I could have undone that tune2fs option but instead decided to upgrade to the new version of GRUB and copy the kernel and initramfs to a USB device in case it didn t boot. It turns out that the new version of GRUB seems to work well for booting from Ext4. One thing that is not explicitly mentioned in the howto is that the fsck pass needed to convert to Ext4 will not be done automatically by most distributions. So when I converted my EeePC I had to use sulogin to manually fsck the filesystems. This isn t a problem with a laptop, but could be a problem with a co-located server system. For the long term BTRFS may be a better option, I plan to test it on /home on my EeePC. But I will give Ext4 some more testing first. In any case the Ext3 filesystems on big servers are not going to go away in a hurry.

• [1] http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto
• [2] http://ols.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/mathur-Reprint.pdf

Melissa was complaining that I was being nice for the wrong reasons. Several responses came to mind but I instead focused my attention on the man insisting that I had not paid for use of the sushi buffet. Technically, he was correct, but as I had just now learned of the sushi buffet's existence from him, I did not consider this to be a problem by any stretch. Condescendingly, he attempted to give me an out. Perhaps I took a piece of sushi without realizing it and would like to suddenly remember right at that moment. He seemed unconvinced by my denials. I asked him why exactly he thought I had taken sushi from his precious buffet. Melissa became increasingly more fretful. I was losing patience with both of them, and I was tempted to ask her where her husband was just to cause an explosion, but I knew that that probably was not the right way to escape this situation. Fahd passed by, and was no help at all.

I got a new computer at home a week ago and finally got around to assemble all the parts. Which wasn t as easy as expected, especially fitting the CPU cooler was a hard fight. Specs For the curious, here are the specs:

CPU

AMD Phenom II X4 965 (4 3.4 GHz)

Mainboard

MSI 790GX-G65

Graphics

ATI Radeon HD 3300 (on-board)

RAM

8 GB, DDR3

Hard drives

2x SATA 1.5 TB (by Western Digital)

Ubuntu installation For testing and having a first look, I installed Ubuntu karmic koala (amd64). Installation went like a breeze, everything was detected and worked out of the box. Well, kind of graphics performance was dreadful. Which was kind of expected. Debian installation I originally thought about using Debian only inside virtual machines or change roots. Still, Ubuntu does not really feel like the real thing . So I went to install Debian, aiming at a sid/unstable installation. The first boot using the official squeeze snapshot netinst image (Binary-1 20091128-11:21) went fine. Up to the first prompt: No input was possible. Probably a problem with the USB keyboard I had connected (Logitech wireless). Out of curiosity I tried the graphical installer, which did not even get so far. It was stuck in an endless loop trying to start an X11 server. So I dug for a PS/2 connected keyboard and had more luck. I got to the point where the installer searches for the CD-ROM drive. As I did not want to dismantle my old system yet, I used an external USB DVD/RW drive. This was not detected by the installer so I was unable to continue installation. I guess, the NIC driver was also on the disc so no ethernet either. Today I installed the DVD burner into the tower and had more luck. It still amazes me how easy it is to create my default storage setup using d-i (LVM on RAID). However, the installer failed to reread the partitions after I created two on each drive, interestingly telling me about /dev/sda2 being busy. Perhaps a left-over swap partition from the Ubuntu install? Anyway, after running fdisk manually and writing the same partition table again, I was able to continue. The remaining d-i steps went fine, with just a nuisance: I was asked for the console font setting twice. And I had no idea what it was asking of me, AFAIK UTF-8 should be fine for all possible uses. I selected # Latin1 and Latin5 western Europe and Turkic languages. Not that I will see the console unless Xorg fails to run After having the base system running, I rebooted without selecting any more software, partly because I knew that the resync on md1 will need restarting after booting into the new system. The new system booted fine and I called aptitude to install build-essential, Xorg and both KDE and Gnome desktops. This pulled in MySQL via akonadi-server (ouch!) and I was asked for a MySQL root password. Seriously, I don t care, this is a desktop system. I tend to forget the password anyway and the last time, root was able to reset it. So I just hit Enter, leaving no password set. This lead to the installation asking me two more times for the password, which really sucks given that the server is only used by Akonadi for whatever reason and the last time I looked, it creates its own MySQL configuration. Albeit my old system is 8 years old, the new system still seemed slower. Which of course is due to disk latencies, given that /dev/md1 was being synchronized in the background. Anyway, I was eager to test the desktop experience and started gdm. X came up fine, but again I had no mouse and no keyboard (USB mouse, keyboard connected as well as PS/2 keyboard). I also was unable to switch to a VT, so I logged in remotely and rebooted the new system. After the reboot, hal obviously picked up the input devices and X11 worked fine now. At this point, I stopped as the sunday almost passed already. Summary: Debian installation still needs some improvements I think. Maybe our distribution is just too stable, after all my last install is 3 years back due to a disk crash Relevant Debian bugs

• #558679: My installation report with some logs included.
• #558681: Nagging about MySQL root password.
• #558686: Failure to reload partition table.
• #545933: No USB keyboard support
• #315553: Installation from optical drive on usb fails (but this is for kernel 2.4)
• #558691: No keyboard and mouse after fresh installation of xserver-xorg.