Sometimes I’m not quite fond of my Debian Linux. Recently I could barely help myself from putting my head in the cement mixer.

What you want:
Two harddisks, software mirroring for /boot and /, crypt for everything but /boot

Lilo can boot from raid (it latter turns out that this is not quite the case.. it depends).

How does this look practically?

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  Target
/dev/sda1               1         249     2000061   fd  [ /dev/md0 [ /dev/mapper/swap    [ swap  ] ] ]
/dev/sda2   *         250         257       64260   fd  [ /dev/md1                       [ /boot ]   ]
/dev/sda3             258       10217    80003700   fd  [ /dev/md2 [ /dev/mapper/dm-root [ /     ] ] ]
/dev/sda4           10218       30515   163043685   fd  [ /dev/md3 [ /dev/mapper/data    [ /data ] ] ]

(Analog for /dev/sdb)

The problem?

:/# lilo -v -v
LILO version 22.6.1, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2004 John Coffman
Released 17-Nov-2004, and compiled at 03:22:31 on Aug  1 2006
Debian GNU/Linux

pf_hard_disk_scan: ndevs=2
  0800  B1DB62EC  /dev/sda
  0810  BAC32241  /dev/sdb
device codes (user assigned pf) = 0
device codes (user assigned) = 0
device codes (BIOS assigned) = 3
device codes (canonical) = 3
Fatal: Inconsistent Raid version information on /dev/md1

Hit the jump for some more config file excerpts & the solution.

OpenVPN Installation laesst Windows unkontrolliert neustarten? Die TAP Treiber lassen sich im Abgesicherten Modus problemlos per Geraetemanager loeschen.
Danach versucht es mal mit diesen: http://openvpn.se/bb/viewtopic.php?t=911

Nero Installation endet in einem BSOD aber eigentlich wollt ihr nur was brennen und braucht den ganzen Multimedia Ramsch nicht? http://www.updatepack.nl/

Daemon Tools 3.33 starten zwar auch in Build 5728 noch, aber die CD Laufwerke fehlen? Dann solltet ihr den CD Treiber C:\Windows\System32\drivers\cdrom.sys mal durch die Datei aus Build 5600 ersetzen ;) http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/t13932-just-tried-406-on-vista-5728.html

Ach ja, falls ihr fuer eure root Partition einen Schluessel mit mehreren Zeilen (Zeilenumbruch) ausgewaehlt habt, das kann das Debian init Script nicht -- also nicht verzweifeln beim Versuch den Schluessel einzutippen, es geht einfach nicht (auch nicht von externen Medien!).

Und es geht doch!
http://hikarin.jp/m2/archives/2005/05/movable_type_an.html

This is an excerpt from the MT code.

sub mt_new {
    my $cfg = $ENV{MOD_PERL_API_VERSION} && $ENV{MOD_PERL_API_VERSION} >= 2 ?
        Apache2::RequestUtil->request()->dir_config('MTConfig') :
        $ENV{MOD_PERL} ?
        Apache->request->dir_config('MTConfig') :
        $MT::XMLRPCServer::MT_DIR . '/mt.cfg';
    my $mt = MT->new( Config => $cfg )
        or die MT::XMLRPCServer::_fault(MT->errstr);
    #$main::server->serializer->encoding($mt->config('PublishCharset'));
    # we need to be UTF-8 here no matter which PublishCharset
    $main::server->serializer->encoding('UTF-8');
    $mt;
}

In the second to last line, the $main::server breaks it (the variable isn’t initialised). I can see how the CGI script would initialise $::server, but the mod_perl handler?! Are there any other means I can access this “server” thingy from within MP?

Please make sure to tell me when you have any thoughts on the matter!

Thought it was impossible?

Use these lines in your /usr/share/apache2/ssleay.cnf:

for requests:

[ req ]
req_extensions          = v3_req

[ v3_req ]
subjectAltName          = critical,DNS:site1.com,DNS:site2.net

for self signed:

[ req ]
x509_extensions         = v3_ca

[ v3_ca ]
subjectAltName          = critical,DNS:site1.com,DNS:site2.net

Then you can use apache2-ssl-certificate or openssl on that.

If you want to know more, google for subjectAltName ;)

Did you come here looking for Nei’s Web Dump — a few patches or Irssi scripts? adv_windowlist.pl? Irssi for Windows?

You can now find the content on http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/ in a steamlined appearance. Something’s missing and you’re sure it was there earlier? Tell me about it!

Sorry about that.

There is one behaviour on Windows’ which I much prefer over Linux:

You can use the key Ctrl+<Action> to navigate between word boundaries, for example Ctrl+Backspace to delete the last word. This/is/especially/useful/when/editing/the/URL.html because it provides an easy means to delete back to the last /.

Unfortunately, on Linux, the only accepted boundary seems to be whitespace characters, so this is not very practical.

For my command line shell (zsh), I have changed this default behaviour with the command

WORDCHARS=${WORDCHARS//[&=\/;\!#%\{]}

This means that the characters &=/;!#%{ will also be recognised as valid word boundaries.

Unfortunately, Firefox does not allow such a fine grained control. Fortunately, you can at least bring the Windows Firefox behaviour to Linux. Here’s how:

1. Go to about:config
2. Search for layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation
3. If it doesn’t exist, right-click and choose New > Boolean
4. Set layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation to true

Enjoy.

As someone who likes the linux virtual console and only delves into X when there are no more framebuffer programs available for doing what I want, ever since everything switched to unicode/utf8 something had been bugging me:

My font was lacking glyphs, such as «, ↑ etc.

And my programs would only show � in their place or nothing at all.

So I went through every single console font I had on my system, only to find out that other fonts were then missing such crucial glyphs like the ` and ’ which are pretty commonly used in the man-pages.

Hit the jump to learn about a workaround.

Now we have this typical scenario here where you need to install your boot loader. Into the MBR. And you’re running Debian. Plus, you decided to format your / as xfs.

The whole procedure is kind of like magic. Let me start of by telling you about the problems:

1. Debian has patched grub-install in such a way to call xfs_freeze to freeze your file system. Unfortunately, that means your file system will be frozen and all programs will block until you unfreeze it.
2. Well I’m actually clueless about the exact reason, but the Debian grub-install will still hang even if we fix #1.

Hit the jump for the ultimate “this works for me and I don’t know if it works for you” guide to installing grub with an xfs /

Now I had /DETACHed my favourite IRC client BitchX http://www.bitchx.org/ like usual, and wanted to reattach.

So I sat there at my ^A:screen scr-bx and I could watch a window popping up and vanishing again.

Upon closer examination, it looked like this:

ailin@eleanor [3]% scr-bx                                                     ~
attempting to wakeup pts-7
error reconnecting to pts-7
zsh: exit 1     scr-bx
ailin@eleanor [4]% _                                                          ~

What followed was a rm -r .BitchX/screen* as well as a mv .BitchX .FukcX, and then an sudo aptitude purge bitchx; with some kill BitchX<Tab> inbetween -- everything without too much influence on above message of rejection.

BitchX:

/alias xmms2 /exec -out echo \$(xmms2 info|grep title\\\|artist|sed -e "s/.* = //"|tr "\n" ";"|sed -e "s/\(.*\);\(.*\);/spielt \2 von \1 mit xmms2/")

SILC:

/alias xmms2 /exec - -out xmms2 info|grep -E artist\\|title|sed -e 's/^.* artist = / von /' -e 's/^.* title = /spielt /'|tr '\n' '|'|sed -e 's/\\(.*\\)|\\(.*\\)|/\\2\\1 mit xmms2/'

Different escaping rules, joy :)

Just a short note on Opera http://www.opera.com/

It has occured to me several times now that this website was missing the whole background colour in Opera (the background was all gray).

Effectively, the <div> that serves as the main container already ended at the header!

The cause of this has of course always been an error on the human side: me forgetting to escape < properly with &lt;.

So if you ever notice your background missing or a div ending earlier than it is supposed to, check your website for stray <!

I must say, Internet Explorer and Firefox cope much better with this.

Target of flame: Gaim 2.0 http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

A quick look at the the facts: Gaim doesn't allow you to send your messages with <Ctrl>+<Enter> anymore. The reason?

to reduce the clutter in the User Interface

Hatred! Oh how this crap annoys me. In Firefox, Gnome, everywhere on Linux it seems the user needs to be freed from this "superfluous choice" and the interface needs to be "free of clutter".

Has anyone of you ever looked at the Firefox Preferences dialogue? The Gaim one? (It's better than the Firefox one by the way.)

Instead, the Gnome crowd goes on to replace crucial usuability settings with cryptic configuration-file only settings that are impossible to use for the novice user. I seem to remember having even read a post by Linus Torvalds rejecting Gnome for this oversimplification crazyness which is cutting away features from the user.

Compare also my post about navigating between words in the Firefox address bar which is only reachable via a hidden setting in about:config.

Here's how to fix this deficiency, the ugly way (hacking dirty config files):

… and red, black and white interference. unichrome via cle266 graphics.

Today with the help of Reimar Döffinger I finally got around to be able to use mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ in X11.

I think I’ve been using this box for several years and always switched to the console in order to be able to watch a video — cvidix (console vidix) had been working fine all along. The next thing I’ll attempt is to compile this mplayer for firefox plugin, I guess.

(The next thing that happened wasn’t me compiling mozilla plugins, but that I typed out my entry and then tried to run mplayer -vo gl mf://*.jpg which resulted in a total system freeze and loss of entry. Thanks mplayer! Bah.)

To get mplayer working on X11, the first thing I needed to do was to install the svgalib http://www.svgalib.org/ kernel helper module as is briefly mentioned in the mplayer docs at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/output-trad.html#vidix

After downloading and compiling the svgalib_helper, after a modprobe svgalib_helper and make device in the svgalib-1.9.*/kernel/svgalib_helper directory as well as moving the svgalib_helper dir into the mplayer source and recompiling the vidix drivers I was set up.

Now I could run mplayer with xvidix, but all I’d get would be a green window without video!