As most of you are probably aware, there is a slight defect with European and French iPod maximum volumes. (You could also say a cap or limit.)

Fixing however is simple:

The following instructions apply to 3G, 4G, mini, color iPods.

Copy the iPod firmware to your disk:

dd if=/dev/sda of=ipod_fw count=1536

Apply some magic:

perl -Mbytes -p -i -e's"(?<=\x08\x00\x9F\xE5\x38\x01\x90\xE5)(.)(.)"$2$1"s' ipod_fw

Send it back to the iPod:

dd if=ipod_fw of=/dev/sda

Gracefully have it reload the firmware:

eject /dev/sda

Enjoy!

To undo, just repeat once more.

(You have to send your regards to nusse for this, he made me write it down.)

Since recently switching from the open source to the binary VIA Xserver, I always had an annoying gray bar near the upper left corner of my screen. It would go away by switching to a text mode framebuffer and back to X though.

One hack would have certainly been to automate that switching after X has started, but it turns out that this gray bar is actually a shadow of the text mode cursor… guess proper initialisation isn’t VIA’s strength or something?

So instead, I added the following line to my /etc/init.d/entrance script:

@@ -43,6 +43,7 @@ case "$1" in
                export PATH=`pam_getenv -l PATH`
        fi
        set -e
+       /usr/bin/setterm -cursor off>/dev/tty9
        $DAEMON
         fi
        echo "."

This turns off the text mode cursor. Seems to be working fine so far.

If you are trying to use SSH inside a debian-installer session, you might run into some problems...

• With the installer from lenny, ssh will complain about a missing libz.so.1.

  I couldn't find this file anywhere on the media, it is missing.

  You need a libz.so.1 from somewhere, so copy it to a USB stick or something.
  

• Using the installer from sid, tring to ssh anywhere might result in the message "You don't exist, go away!"

  If you get this message, make sure to install libnss. (I only had to do this using the newt "install", not with installgui.)
  

When installing from something involving an ISO image, d-i will load the wrong loop module and later on setting up loop-aes will fail.

After generating enough randomness, you will receive the message "An error has occured while configuring encrypted volumes", and the syslog shows

partman-crypto: ioctl: LOOP_SET_STATUS: Invalid argument, requested cipher or key length (256 bits) not supported by kernel.

To fix this problem, first proceed to the partitioner and select encryption with loop-aes. That will make d-i unpack the necessary files to lib/modules/*/updates

Now switch to a console and modprobe -v -r loop (this is a rmmod replacement.)

You will probably need to umount the cd image first: umount /cdrom
(Now try again: modprobe -v -r loop)
Then cd to lib/modules/*/updates and insmod ./loop-aes.ko
(this will load the right loop module for use with loop-AES!)
You might want to remount your cdrom:
mount /hd-media/*.iso /cdrom -o loop
(Alternatively, you can Esc out a few times in d-i and select the autodetection from the main menu again.)

Now you should succeed in setting up loop-aes.

(This problem should be fixed in one of the next debian-installer versions.)

First of all, crypto needs to be done using newt ("install", not installgui). This is a known limitation of debian-installer and documented somewhere on the d-i website.

Secondly, when installing from something involving an iso image, d-i will load the wrong loop module. If that is your case, please make sure to read loop-aes "not supported by kernel"?.

Unfortunately, the debian-installer doesn't want to let you encrypt your root with loop-aes even if you have an unencryped /boot

Once you have arrived at the partman-crypto screen and set up your crypto devices, the next thing you need to do is patch debian-installer to not bitch about having / on loop-aes.
This can be done by modifying a file in /lib/partman/check.d/ and removing the check (thanks to fjp@#debian-boot for the pointer.)

If, after generating enough randomness, d-i fails with "An error has occured while configuring encrypted volumes", check the article "loop-aes 'not supported by kernel'".

Otherwise, the install should now go through fine.

Finally you'll want to chroot into your new system, and come up with some loop-aes initramfs hooks so that your system will be bootable.

You can use those in the loop-aes-utils debian package source as a starting point:

apt-get source loop-aes-utils
tar xzvf *.tar.gz
cd util*
gunzip < ../*.diff.gz | patch -p1
grep -R debian initramfs

and execute the commented lines.

However, they are broken, so fix the bugs in these scripts!

You will also want to add a feature to these scripts so that it reads your key from a removable media.

Remember: the "key" in your encryption is your keyfile. The passphrase is just an additional blocker, but if your keyfile gets in the wrong hands, your security is more than halved!
This means that you absolutely don't want to keep the keyfile in the initrd (where it would be stored in plaintext).

Lastly you will probably want to regenerate your initrd so that the system becomes bootable:

mount proc proc -t proc
update-initramfs -k $(ls lib/modules) -u
umount proc

Confirm reboot in the debian-installer

Enjoy