Can't believe I have to write script to be able to mute/unmute with aumix. It's strange cause there is MUTE option in interactive mode, so I don't know why there is no such option in command line.

Speaking about text-mode mp3 player. I'm using moc (available in archive) and its main advantage over orpheus is that it is NOT a frontend, so it can easily rewind/forward songs. Try it ;)

Wheeee!
I hope ftp-master is going to accept these packages soon. Thanks to everyone involved in preparing new version of Eclipse for Debian!

I've finally bought notebook. It's Compaq Presario V2000, Pentium 1,66GHz Centrino, 512MB of RAM and 80GB disk. The most funny thing is that I couldn't install sarge on it. Running installation with 2.4 kernel caused oops of kernel, while running it with 2.6 worked quite well but ethernet card didn't work, although it was detected nicely.
Anyway I started from woody, then sarge and now I've got sid on it. Everything seems to work nice (I didn't try suspend-to-something yet, but it's not so important for me). I had to use hotplug for my Intel 2200BG wireless card. The only thing which makes me scared is:

(root@lapik)~#lsmod   wc -l
109
(root@lapik)~#

I've never had so many modules and it's mainly because hotplug tries to detect everything on startup. Do we have some hotplug replacement? Something which could be used only for loading firmware to wireless card.
Sound card works with i810_audio modules, so I suppose that's not alsa, but oss. Couldn't figure out yet what's wrong with alsa modules.
Anyway I'm quite happy the way Linux works on my new toy ;)

I didn't want to migrate to 2.6.x kernels, since I really don't like its current development approach, but unfortunately I had to, because my usb cable for mobile phone works only with this branch.
So from now I'm not-so-happy 2.6 user ;)
At least now I can exchange data with phone, so Debian logo is now on the screen.

I've just uploaded Warzone 2100 packages to my people.debian.org account.
If you liked Starcraft or Total Annihilation games, give Warzone a try.
Beware that these are preliminary packages and they aren't policy compliant yet, there are some problems described in ITP, but they work fine for me.
Any feedback is welcome.

This time it's free of ads for everyone (no need to register).
It's still free as in beer, but on some slow machines launching Firefox could take ages, so it's pretty good alternative.

And while I rejoice, fEnIo mourns his loss. It is always terrible to loose a loved one. I send XXL Hugs your way.

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody. But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out, that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable. But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose. So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/ But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

I doubt it... how often did you swear at guys that designed something?
Sometime I think that the guy that invented something extremely stupid and uncomfortable should be convicted to use it during rest of his life.
How long did he think before he figured out that the best place for headphones jack in my laptop would be front side of it? Now plugging there anything is very, very, very awkward and I really don't like wires around my navel using laptop while laying in bed.
Well... maybe it's some marketing hack, cause now I wonder about buying usb/pcmcia sound card ;)

When I bought notebook I had to find out some use for previous box. It was great opportunity to test etch installer (and my Polish translation at the same time) so I did it several times using miscellaneous settings. Eventually it was time to find out some real use for this box. I decided to try out some non-Linux port of Debian. The most stable and actively developed seemed to be kFreeBSD.
I installed it about month ago. I must admit it works great despite some initial stability problems related to buggy mount, quickly workarounded with help from people from #gnu-kbsd channel. (thanks!)
I use it mainly as a backup machine and small www server, but since it handles it without a hitch I'm probably going to make it also print and Samba server.
I was sceptical to GNU userland used with non-Linux kernels, but admittedly we're getting closer and closer to the day when switching between kernels would be piece of cake ;)

(fenio@kfbsd)~#uptime
 15:36:57 up 21 days,  6:23,  1 user,  load average: 0.23, 0.08, 0.04
(fenio@kfbsd)~#

As you can see it works. It lays in one of my wardrobe, without the case and unplugged from any external devices. I couldn't remove graphic card due to some weird BIOS limits, so it has some PCI card worth less than the beer I'm drinking now ;)
Here's its photo. Sorry for quality, but I don't have any camera around, so it's made with my cellphone.

If someone wondered if non-Linux Debian ports are worth try, then I have to say YES, THEY ARE!
Using this opportunity I would like to thank everyone involved in their development. Keep up the good work!
Now it's time to give a try to Debian GNU/Hurd... have to start gathering the hardware for that ;)

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

fEnIo learnt an important lesson about the kernel firmware loader: it (usually) does not work as expected for non-modular drivers. The reason is that the request_firmware() interface is synchronous. Since it's usually called in the initialisation section of drivers, the userspace firmware loader is not available yet if the calling driver is built-in in the kernel. The request_firmware_nowait() asynchronous interface was designed to replace it, but most drivers have not been ported yet. When a driver calls request_firmware(), a uevent is sent by the kernel to udev over a netlink(7) socket, requesting that a specific file is uploaded. udevd runs /lib/udev/firmware.agent, a simple shell script which will look for the $FIRMWARE file in a few directories and then copy it to the designated place in the driver $DEVPATH in sysfs. If the driver is initialised before userspace is started then the loader will not be available, and the request will fail. A possible solution is to run udev in the early userspace environment (initramfs), but just compiling the driver as a module is usually simpler.

Did anybody try to use ipw2200 driver included in recent kernels?
I found out that most recent version of kernel includes this driver so I decided to switch from self-compiled 2.6.14.4 and ipw2200-source package for module to new version of kernel and driver compiled in it.
Unfortunatelly such compiled kernel can't find firmware either in /usr/local/lib/firmware nor /lib/firmware, although according to /lib/udev/hotplug.functions these directories are checked and firmware seems to be ok cause works fine with 2.6.14.4.
Is it at all possible to use this driver compiled in kernel (not as a module)?

And while I rejoice, fEnIo mourns his loss. It is always terrible to loose a loved one. I send XXL Hugs your way.

As usual something sorrowful has to happen at the beginning of the year, when I'm hopeful that's going to be better year than previous. Today my dog has been knocked down and that f*cking driver didn't even stop to see what he made.
Radar was only four year old and now unfortunately he's six feet under :(
I miss you Radar.

That'll be about World Cup 2006 in Germany.
Poland has Germany, Equador and Costa Rica in its group. It's always hard to play with an organizer of cup, but maybe we can at least draw with them. Rest of teams seem to be within our range, but at previous cup we disregarded potentially weak teams and didn't promote to second round ;)
Good luck to every competitor!

I've just uploaded sponsored package libpam-encfs. With it it's possible to have encrypted home directory, which will be mounted during login.

I'm working on new fuse (filesystem in userspace) packages and I really wonder if I should simplify their postinstallation procedure as it was mentioned in #337572. That would make my life much easier, cause there's quite many bugreports against undefined behaviour of post-debconf tasks, which are pretty hard to track for me. In fact I suppose that most users simply accept default answers so asking them about anything seems to be overhead.
Let's assume I will remove these superflous questions... now the problem is that if someone answered for them in some previous installation then I could leave unneded group and some config files on their systems. On the other head removing this group could even lead to nonworking system because of one of these bugs: #307624, 307627, 306281.
I'm quite confused what to do now. Both solutions have some advantages and disadvantages. First one at least could lead to less bugs in the future. Hints welcome.

Can't believe I have to write script to be able to mute/unmute with aumix. It's strange cause there is MUTE option in interactive mode, so I don't know why there is no such option in command line.