OK, after a mainboard replacement by HP, I have my AMD64
HP Pavilion DV6000 (DV6615ea) back and a quick update has given me working wireless! The last remaining obstacle has gone - the most recent 2.6.24 kernel update includes working support for the Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02) in the b43 kernel driver.
a little tip
When connecting this laptop to the mains for a recharge, plug into the mains before connecting the mains lead to the laptop itself. I have a strong suspicion (but it is no more than that) the repair was caused by a power spike from a dodgy extension cable. Plugging into the extension without the other end being connected to the laptop isolates such spikes.
Necessary support
$ uname -a
Linux dwarf 2.6.24-1-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Mar 27 16:52:38 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ dpkg -l 'linux-image-2.6*'
linux-image-2.6-amd64 2.6.24+13
linux-image-2.6.24-1-amd64 2.6.24-5
Wireless config
The first dmesg output showed a useful tip:
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
YOUR FIRMWARE IS TOO NEW. Please downgrade your firmware.
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
Use this firmware tarball: http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
Use this b43-fwcutter tarball: http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-009.tar.bz2
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR: Read, understand and _do_ what this message says, please.
Unpack the b43-fwcutter and call
make. Execute
./b43-fwcutter ../broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta.o, remove any existing firmware in
/lib/firmware/b43/ and replace it with the content created by b43-fwcutter.
Reboot to load the updated firmware into the kernel and your amber wireless light will flash blue.
sudo iwlist scan then shows the available access points and network-manager is able to connect without problems.
I'm posting this from the HP laptop over wireless.
Summary: this laptop should be eminently supportable in Lenny
After all my doubts and all the hassle, providing you use 'noapic nolapic' and the support of the Debian-Installer for Lenny.
Fundamental fact: non-technical people can't or won't read mail bounces.
They (the bounces) are far too technical. Most people, even if they could
understand them intellectually, most won't even try to read them. Their input
channel gets jammed, their parser shuts down, whatever you want to call it.
Obviously, this is extremely frustrating, especially because I take care that
my spam filter never drops mail but always rejects it so that the sending mail
server can generate a proper bounce.
Proposed solution (and don't tell me this can easily be scripted in mutt.
The people I'm talking about wouldn't even recognize mutt as an email program
if they'd ever see one): Index all outgoing Message-Id's. When a bounce comes
in for a known message, don't display it but display some kind of locally
generated, friendly substitute with a direct 'correct address and re-send'
button and a clickable link to the original message.
Emacs
Installing Debian on your Eee PC is even easier now, as the option to 
Learning that the Linux Professional Institute offered a chance for taking exams at a reduced price during this year's FOSDEM, I decided to take a shot at the level 1 exams.<br />
I was fairly occupied in the period before FOSDEM when I took that decision, but given that I've been using Linux heavily for over a decade, and after reviewing the objectives, I figured that I should be able to pass it without specific preparation.<br />
<br />
Yesterday I received an email that indeed I did, so now I am officially a Junior level Linux professional .<br />
I guess I should take a look at getting LPIC-2 sometime. 
I thought the spanish region of Extremadura had 4 million inhabitants and 200000 computers running GNU/Linex, a custom Debian distribution. 
I had an "Aha!" moment today when I came to a Wittgensteinian realization that while the sense of a piece of code corresponds to the formal behaviour of that code, the meaning of the snippet is the set of possible contexts where this code could be used. This idea has changed my view of teaching programming (I have been teaching Python in a 
UI fonts of OpenOffice.org Writer and XFCE thunar are really not the same
... years of seeing this ugly font and being force to scale the OpenOffice.org UI display to 80%.
I just found the solution!
All his related to a X settings: Xft.dpi. People are suggesting around to set it to 96 or something like that. I just decide to use the one i can find xdpyinfo (does it make sense?) and send the result to X settings using xrbd.
Here is the script $HOME/bin/xfce4-xft.sh:
In my 
Obviously any human being can recognize satire. There is obvious motivation on behalf of SCO’s PR department (correct me if I am wrong on where this comment originated; I did just some basic Google lookups, and also, this is a PR tactic known as “dead agenting”) to ignore the fact that this was clearly a satirical review. I would say, “perhaps SCO doesn’t understand why it is criticized,” but I believe it is obvious that they know why people are being critical and satirical of their company and their efforts.
I would like for everyone to think, for a moment, about how things could be if SCO didn’t take the litigious strategy that they have taken over the past 6 years. SCO UnixWare could have remained a successful product, and could have in reality become a major asset to the open source world. SCO could have been the good guys here, but instead they chose a path of litigation instead of innovation.
In the Open Source and Free Software world, innovation is what is seen as important. Companies may be in some sense rival to each other, but when it comes down to it, everyone appreciates and respects the work that everyone else contributes to the ecosystem. When people do not contribute in a positive way, or worse, betray their peers like SCO has done, it opens them up for criticism.
As I see the situation, I think that SCO’s current tactics as a company represent those of someone who is paranoid. People who are paranoid attack first, instead of defend their position. So, while I am sure this is a pointless question, I believe it must be asked anyway: “What would SCO UnixWare have been like if they did not take a litigious strategy against Linux users?”
If you look at it like this, it doesn’t really matter if we’re right, or SCO is right on who has the basic cases (well, it does, but we all know how that’s going to come out anyway).
Why does SCO keep pursuing a strategy of litigation when the feasibility of this strategy is at best, unknown? To some extent, I think it is now a matter of morale. After all, it’s bad if you have to admit that the strategy you have taken for the last six years, was wrong. In some ways, you could say that SCO’s current strategy is cult-like.
Furthermore, if any SCO people are interested in doing an interview about this whole matter, I encourage you to comment back, and I’ll be happy to publicize SCO’s viewpoint of this. It’s only fair.
An email saying that 
on 2007-04-03 I applied to become a Debian Developer; that means that
today's my first anniversary of being in the New Maintainer process.
So, if you are a 
Since about half a year now we have a fibre to the home connection. This means that two fiber lines terminate at a box in our living room. It is a blown fibre which means that a tube is buried to your house, after which they use air pressure to put the actual fibre from the house to the POP. There are two fibers: one for bidirectional data (IP), and one that does nothing more than carry the analog cable TV signal. We started out with only the internet facility but now have so-called triple play: phone, analog tv and internet connectivity.
The results are in: I find it to be just as good or better than the previous offerings: phone from KPN, tv from Casema or internet from Surfnet. But there's nothing revolutionary. Phone and tv just provide the same service over a different medium. The internet connection is with the standard of 24 Mb/s more than fast enough for any day to day use and an upgrade to 50 Mb/s is pending. A real improvement is that the upstream speed is just as high, very useful when uploading photos, packages or the text of this blog post.
One drawback is that they only provide one IP address instead of 32. Also, the service provider (XMSnet) does seem to be a bit stuck in the late nineties with an unfriendly help desk telling you that your situation is impossible , and bad billing, There are plans however to open up the line to other providers in the future.
So for now it's just a convenience bundling of services, but nothing really ground breaking. Let's see what the future brings.
For a long time I wanted to play with IPv6, but I never liked any of the tunnels I saw. This evening I started wondering if my Cisco 837 ADSL router cannot handle some form of tunnel.
I’ve been using an EEE PC since december, and people keep asking me if they should buy one. So here are some things you should know before making a decision.
Screen
The screen is small, but that’s OK. I couldn’t find many applications that didn’t work in 800×480. And for the remaining ones, you can usually use hacks such as running the app in a larger virtual desktop. Not ideal, but it works. Regarding usability, it’s not a too big problem. Jut expect to use many apps maximized, and use scrolling and virtual desktops a lot. (Important note: Xmoto doesn’t work!!)
Keyboard
The keyboard is probably a bigger problem than the screen (I hadn’t expected it to be a so big problem before buying the laptop). Every other keyboard seems to have HUGE keys after typing on the EEE PC keyboard. But with some training, you can type quite fast, even if probably not as fast as with a full size keyboard. The layout of the “special” keys is quite good (esp. the PgUp/Down, Home and End keys on the arrows. I should remap my other keyboard like that).
Battery, power consumption
One big problem with the EEE PC is that it consumes a lot of power while sleeping (using suspend to RAM). If you leave it sleeping for more than a few hours, expect the battery to be empty. That really sucks, especially since suspend to disk isn’t really a good option on such a device. Another problem related to power is that charging the battery is quite slow.
SDHC card reader
If you want to expand the storage capacity of your EEE PC with the SDHC port, choose your SDHC card carefully. There are only a few cards that work. The other ones will cause write error (they will work in read-only mode, so I’m using an external card reader to write, which sucks). A list of supported cards is available in the EEE PC manual.
Random Q&A
Q: I don’t have a laptop. Should I buy it?
A: If you want to do a lot of real work on it, it’s probably not a very good idea. There are faster (but bigger) laptops at around 450-500 EUR. They are probably a much better option. The EEE PC is perfect as a the second laptop you only bring to places where you want to stay connected, read email and surf on the web (like conferences and meetings).
Q: Does the VGA output works well?
A: Yes. And it uses an Intel video card which works like a charm with xrandr. I already gave several presentations and classes using it. The laptop can output 1280×1024 (maybe 1600×1200, not sure). The only problem is that you will only have the top-left part of your slides on the laptop’s screen, because of the smaller resolution there. Annoying if you plan to read your slides.