I have purchased a new screen, and I have chosen an Acer AL2002W, mainly because of its low price. It is a 20″ wide screen, with a native resolution of 1680×1050 @60Hz. For now, it seems to be good value for money, and working with this screen is very confortable (I previously used a standard 4:3 17″ screen at 1280×1024). While configuring Xorg was painless (with both free nv and proprietary nvidia drivers), I still haven’t managed to get the framebuffer working with the native resolution of the screen. As vesafb doesn’t seem to be able to use a 1680×1050 resolution (hwinfo --framebuffer only gives 4:3 modes), I have tried to patch my kernel with vesafb-tng, which haven’t yield better results. While nvidiafb allows me to get a 1680×1050 framebuffer, it conflicts with proprietary nvidia driver, preventing it from being loaded. With the free nv driver, I can’t have the display centered both in console and in X (they both use the same mode, and the screen is able to stroe user modes at the condition the new display information habe 1Khz difference for horizontal frequency or 1Hz for vertical frequency or the syn signal polarities are different from the default modes). By the way, I have noticed that two of my laptops have the same Intel 915 video chipset, and one only is able to have a 1280×800 framebuffer (using the undocumented vga=0x362 code). I can’t understand the reason of this difference.

Since I upgraded my home server to Etch last week-end (a few hours before the official release was announced), I have noticed some strange behaviours on my Wordpress powered weblog. The issue only occured with the RSS feeds, which didn’t display the posts they were supposed to. I have just found the origin of the problem to be mod_cache which was enabled during the upgrade to apache 2.2 without I noticed it. I disactivated it at least temporarily, time for me to enquire how I can disable caching with specific mod_rewrite generated url. This was already discussed a lot. At least, I haven’t flooded Planet Debian!

My first review for Debaday (Debian Package of the Day) was published today. It is a short introduction to TinyCa, simple user interface to manage a small CA. I wanted to promote this tool, as it is exactly what I had been looking for for ages. PS: congratulations to Sam Hocevar for being the new DPL.

I made my first steps with SELinux today, on an up-to-date Etch system. So far, everything is running smoothly thanks to the Debian wiki, and to other distributions online documentation (namely Gentoo’s and Fedora’s). I have even bought a book on SELinux, which isn’t exactly what I expected, ie. a little bit too technical for beginners like me. My system is now fully working (hopefully securely) with SELinux enabled and enforced.

I have set up my first vserver to play with. I am very impressed how easy the process is! The performance on my Dell Inspiron 1300 seems very good as well. I have almost no experience with virtualization techniques, and was stuck to User-Mode Linux until today. According to the Wikipedia article, Linux-Vserver has many advantages compared to other tools due to the fact the virtual servers share the same system call interface and do not have any emulation overhead (I do obviously agree this can also be a drawback). I haven’t yet had the chance to study the security part in depth, this will be my main task this week, I will then be able to make the choice between UML and Linux-Vserver - I’m not yet ready for Xen. (more…)

In a previous entry, I explained how you can be assimilated to an Ubuntu developer without even being an official Debian developer, and of course without prior notice. I am now quite ashamed: I have just discovered that this was already discussed some time ago (read: months before my post), and led to the following results:

• If the package is in universe or multiverse, the Maintainer field will be set to Ubuntu MOTU Developers

• If the Maintainer field is modified, the old value will be saved in a field named XSBC-Original-Maintainer

However, packages where my name appears either in the Maintainer or in the XSBC-Original-Maintainer field still “belong” to me in Launchpad (see https://launchpad.net/~julienv/+packages for example).
However, I am not responsible for the bugs of these packages (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/~julienv/+assignedbugs) Now that my blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, I ask it again:

Am I supposed to look on Launchpad for bugs reported against the packages I maintain in Debian?

Obviously, if a bug wasn’t reported by a Debian user, it might mean nobody suffers from it, but fixing it could avoid future bug report anyway (except if this particular bug is very specific to Ubuntu). In order to improve the Debian maintainers’ work, I think it would be great that the PTS integrates the bugs in Launchpad in a simple way. This would allow us to easily subscribe to the bugs, and eventually get a notice if the bug is fixed, or at least allow us to be aware of the issue.

I was surprised to read my name in yesterday’s edition of the (now monthly) Debian Weekly News. I have been quoted thanks to my question on debian-mentors@l.d.o about when a maintainer may close an unreproducible bug report. This particular bug was closed a few days after, as it was due to a misconfiguration on the bug reporter’s machine. Thank you joey!

I have recently noticed that the sound output of my (nearly) 3 months-old Dell Inspiron 1300 is broken. I am pretty sure it is something like a bad contact. As I use this laptop mainly as a media box, I cannot leave it in this state. I thus wrote to Dell Support team on Thursday evening, less than 5 days before the end of the 90 days warranty. They called me back yesterday morning to confirm they have received my request, and I received an e-mail yesterday afternoon asking me to do some further tests. I think I will have to sent the laptop back and wait for ages until it comes back. As it obviously runs Debian, I will also have to set up the original system back on it, which will oblige me to re-install the whole system after repair. Cheap is not always good.

Thanks to Mako, my weblog (at least part of it) is now syndicated on Planet Debian! I thus ought to introduce myself: I’m Julien, 28 years old, living in the North East of France. I already (co-)maintain a bunch of packages in the official archive, and try to actively report bugs. I also used to acting as a translator for the French l10n team, which I will resume once time allows it. I may plan to enter the New Maintainer process in the next couple of months. I take this as an occasion to thank all my sponsors and co-maintainers (Christoph, Free, Cl ment, Micah and Lo c) for their interest in working with me and for their patience. I hope being on Planet Debian will allow me to better integrate into the Debian community.