Hello
The last version (1.247, available in Debian unstable as libconfig-model-perl) of
Config::Model provides a brand new model for
/etc/LCDd.conf. With this model, you can edit or validate your
lcdproc configuration.
To edit this configuration the first time, you will have to run:
config-edit -application lcdproc -force
The
-force option is required to load the file the first time. (because the default LCDd.conf file contains configuration options for
all drivers, even though only one them if usefull).
You will get this screen:
config-edit on lcdproc configuration
In this screen, you can setup the driver for your adress with a right click on Driver parameter. Once youv e selected the driver and clicked on store , the driver will be listed in the left part of the window so you can tune the parameters of this specific driver:
editing imonclcd paramaters
In this screen, I ve turned the backlight off and added a small note to remember why. This small note will be writted in a comment in
/etc/LCDd.conf.
Once all required modifications are done, it s time to save the configuration file using the menu entry
File -> save
Now, let s see the resulting file (which is a bit long due to the amount of comments in the original
LCDd.conf file):
## This file was written by Config::Model
## You may modify the content of this file. Configuration
## modifications will be preserved. Modifications in
## comments may be mangled.
# LCDd.conf -- configuration file for the LCDproc server daemon LCDd
#
# This file contains the configuration for the LCDd server.
#
# The format is ini-file-like. It is divided into sections that start at
# markers that look like [section]. Comments are all line-based comments,
# and are lines that start with '
#
# The server has a 'central' section named [server]. For the menu there is
# a section called [menu]. Further each driver has a section which
# defines how the driver acts.
#
# The drivers are activated by specifiying them in a driver= line in the
# server section, like:
#
# Driver=curses
#
# This tells LCDd to use the curses driver.
# The first driver that is loaded and is capable of output defines the
# size of the display. The default driver to use is curses.
# If the driver is specified using the -d command line option,
# the Driver= options in the config file are ignored.
#
# The drivers read their own options from the respective sections.
[server]
# Where can we find the driver modules ?
# IMPORTANT: Make sure to change this setting to reflect your
# specific setup! Otherwise LCDd won't be able to find
# the driver modules and will thus not be able to
# function properly.
# NOTE: Always place a slash as last character !
DriverPath=/usr/lib/lcdproc/
# Tells the server to load the given drivers. Multiple lines can be given.
# The name of the driver is case sensitive and determines the section
# where to look for further configuration options of the specific driver
# as well as the name of the dynamic driver module to load at runtime.
# The latter one can be changed by giving af File= directive in the
# driver specific section.
#
# The following drivers are supported:
# bayrad, CFontz, CFontz633, CFontzPacket, curses, CwLnx, ea65,
# EyeboxOne, g15, glcdlib, glk, hd44780, icp_a106, imon, imonlcd,
# IOWarrior, irman, joy, lb216, lcdm001, lcterm, lirc, lis, MD8800,
# mdm166a, ms6931, mtc_s16209x, MtxOrb, mx5000, NoritakeVFD, picolcd,
# pyramid, sed1330, sed1520, serialPOS, serialVFD, shuttleVFD, sli,
# stv5730, svga, t6963, text, tyan, ula200, xosd
Driver=imonlcd
# Tells the driver to bind to the given interface
Bind=127.0.0.1
# Listen on this specified port; defaults to 13666.
Port=13666
ReportLevel=3
# Sets the reporting level; defaults to 2 (warnings and errors only).
# ReportLevel=3
# Should we report to syslog instead of stderr ? [default: no; legal: yes, no]
# ReportToSyslog=yes
# User to run as. LCDd will drop its root priviledges, if any,
# and run as this user instead.
User=nobody
Foreground=no
Hello= Hello
Hello= LCDproc!
GoodBye= GoodBye
GoodBye= LCDproc!
# The server will stay in the foreground if set to true.
# Foreground=no
# Hello message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# Hello=" Welcome to"
# Hello=" LCDproc!"
# GoodBye message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# GoodBye="Thanks for using"
# GoodBye=" LCDproc!"
# Sets the default time in seconds to displays a screen.
WaitTime=5
# If yes, the the serverscreen will be rotated as a usual info screen. If no,
# it will be a background screen, only visible when no other screens are
# active. The special value 'blank' is similar to no, but only a blank screen
# is displayed. [default: on; legal: on, off, blank]
# ServerScreen=no
# Set master backlight setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# backlight for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Backlight=open
# Set master heartbeat setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# heartbeat for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Heartbeat=open
# set title scrolling speed [default: 10; legal: 0-10]
# TitleSpeed=10
# The "...Key=" lines define what the server does with keypresses that
# don't go to any client.
# These are the defaults:
ToggleRotateKey=Enter
PrevScreenKey=Left
NextScreenKey=Right
ScrollUpKey=Up
ScrollDownKey=Down
# ScrollUpKey=Up
# ScrollDownKey=Down
# If you have only 4 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
# NextScreenKey=Down
# If you have only 3 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
[menu]
# You can configure what keys the menu should use. Note that the MenuKey
# will be reserved exclusively, the others work in shared mode.
# The following works excellent with 4 keys or more.
MenuKey=Escape
EnterKey=Enter
UpKey=Up
DownKey=Down
LeftKey=Left
RightKey=Right
[imonlcd]
Protocol=0
OnExit=2
Device=/dev/lcd0
# My fishes dont like the glow
Backlight=off
DiscMode=0
You will notice a few things:
- Comments from the original file in section [server] and [menu] were kept
- Unused drivers sections are gone
- The fishy note about backlight was saved as a comment above the backlight parameter
If you need to update the file, you will have to run:
sudo config-edit -application lcdproc
The
-force option is no longer needed.
If you don t like to click, you can run:
config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save
For instance:
config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save 'server driver=imonlcd - imonlcd Device="/dev/lcd1" '
Further reading
If you want to know more about lcdproc model, you can view:
Under the hood
I was too lazy to write myself the models of all drivers (about 3500 lines for them all). All models were generated from the LCDd.conf template file provided by lcdproc project. This
blog explains how this was done.
But the result is far from perfect. Event though LCDd.conf comments give a lot of semantic information, parameter types could be better adjusted and some of the examples provided in LCDd.conf confuse the model generator.
So the current comments are good, but not enough.
In the future, we could decide on better structural conventions for the comments that would give users the information they need and give a model generator enough information to generate better models.
This will hopefully be the topic of yet another blog
All the best
I ve taken the plunge, and converted my blog from a venerable but largely
unmaintain(ed able) blosxom setup that I ve had since 2005 (OMG!) into a new
and shiny Jekyll-backed system. The main benefits are that I m more
comfortable hacking away at Jekyll (being written in Ruby), and my blog post
submission no longer requires me to e-mail my blog posts to myself to put
them up (that was just an artifact of how I set it up all those years ago,
but it had worked so I wasn t willing to change it just for the sake of it).
Jekyll s superior (for me) hackability has reaped dividends already I ve
put together a home-grown comments system, which fulfils my primary
requirements of being as close to completely statically-generated as it s
possible to be (about 10 lines of PHP is the only dynamic content), and
doesn t involve JavaScript or putting my blog comments in the cloud .
So as Alpha 2 approaches, I find myself working towards porting the alternate installer/d-i to the pandaboard to support the netboot installer. There's not a lot of documentation that describes the internals of d-i, nor what bits are platform specific.
I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don t know where to start. Let s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked.
The Debian website has a 
You re a volunteer, you re not doing stuff for Debian because someone told you so. You must have some intrinsic motivation and the ultimate motivation is usually that you re enjoying what you re doing.
So what are you enjoying and/or what are your motivations ?
Find something to do
At this point you have a generic idea of what you d like to do but you re still missing a concrete objective. Let s try to find one, we ll explore several ways to do this.
Scratch your itch
The best objectives are those that satisfy your own needs. Here are some examples:
If you don t have a specific itch to scratch, you might want to focus your work on a specific team. Head over to 
You can concentrate your work on a specific package even if you re in a team, it s often a good idea. But I list it separately because not all packages are team maintained and you might want to help maintain a package where there s a single maintainer currently. I leave it up to you to find a way to select a package that interests you
Then head over to the package tracking system: 
However, these RAID volumes are in a pretty awkward spot for installers and bootloaders: inside a running Linux environment they look like software RAID which cannot be depended on for booting, but at boot time they look like hard disks which cannot be looked under the hood.
I recently got a new desktop machine which has one of these motherboards, and fortuitously my old desktop I was replacing had the same size disks so I had 4 disks and the option of using a RAID setup. Apparently I m a sucker for punishment because I went for a RAID 10 (that is two RAID volumes made up of two-disk mirrors (the RAID 1 component), and then those two volumes are combined via striping (the RAID 0 component). This has the potential for pretty nice performance: in principle any read can come from one of 2 disks, and every 64KB (the stripe size) of linear data will switch to the other mirror set, giving a nice boost. Writes need to write to 2 disks always, but every 64KB worth of data will alternate mirror sets, also giving a boost.
Sadly we (Ubuntu) aren t ready for this yet: there are two key bugs that make this layout almost impossible to install into. This blog post is for my exo-memory, I want to be able to figure out what I did next time around 
I'm coming as well! Really looking forward to meet the people from Debconf9 again. Also people from the Games Team and the buildd and kfreebsd folks. And ideally there will be some more people interested in (Common) Lisp as well, we'll see
... is now working.
It isn't finished yet; there are still some loose ends. But at least
it works; if you combine 
I am involved in developing something coined as the 
For some years, tech media has tried predict when Linux have reached
momentum for ordinary users. That current or next year was to become
I have bought a 
I've taken a tiny step towards getting together
a prototype toolset for developing an initial development iteration
of the NAS functionality of the FreedomBox.
Here's what I am trying to do:
I ll arrive on July 20th and stay until the end of DebConf.
See you all there soon!
Two weeks ago, I updated the packages containing the BioPerl modules
Some error messages can be confusing at times. Most of the error strings do not appear very often and developers thus tend to use very terse description of the underlying problem. In other cases the architecture of the software makes it difficult to pin-point the real problem because the part that displays the error is several layers above the one that generated the initial error.
This is for example the case with this error of dpkg: