I was low on disk space for photos and music, so in a whim I bought a “Verbatim SmartDisk NAS External Harddrive” from where I usually buy blank media. It had a decent size, it wasn’t expensive and it supported NFS. The first thing I did was to reformat the drive as ext3 in stead […]

I’ve been using dpkg, apt-get and apt-cache for a long time, but since I got a new laptop with a fresh install of Debian testing I have been playing with new toys. One is aptitude. I found the curses-based interface obnoxious, but after some time I came to like the command line interface. It has […]

This site is absolutely great for finding the right drivers and checking hardware compatibility: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/index.cgi Just paste the output of lspci -n into the form and it’ll tell what is supported and by which drivers. It couldn’t be easier.

Debian has updated their signing keys so apt-get update produces errors like these: W: GPG error: http://mirrors.dk.telia.net testing Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F W: GPG error: http://mirrors.dk.telia.net unstable Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F […]

I’ve just installed Debian Sarge on a HP Proliant DL320 without a hitch. It is a Xeon 3.4GHz hyperthreaded with 1Gb ram and a single SATA disk. I booted it via PXE since it has no optical drive and no floppy and ran the installation from there. The basic system works perfectly, with a stock […]

While moving all my sites to Apache2 and PHP4.4 on a Debian server, I ran into a few problems. Not sure why, though. All pages on all blogs came up blank and there was absolutely nothing in the Apache error log. A test showed that the server returned zero bytes. I ran the install.php script […]

So Gnome 2.8 finally made it to Debian Testing, more or less. In the end I got most of the packages from Unstable. I have mostly noted two visible changes, though there are many more. The most visible is without doubt the automatic handling of removable media, though the combination of hal, udev, hotplug and […]

There are currently some bugs in gcc related packages in Debian testing. They won’t install because they contain files owned by other packages too. The errors are: (Reading database … 77290 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace gcc-3.3-base 1:3.3.4-6sarge1.1 (using …/gcc-3.3-base_1%3a3.3.4-6sarge1.2_i386.deb) … Unpacking replacement gcc-3.3-base … dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/gcc-3.3-base_1%3a3.3.4-6sarge1.2_i386.deb (–unpack): trying to […]

My kernel upgrade rampage has hit my home server to day. It was still running the kernel installed by the debian netinstall cdroms I had used, so the amount of available modules were rather scarce. Most of the motherboard is based on the Intel ICH5 chipset, not that different than the Intel ICH4 chipset on […]

I have stumbled into this a few times, so I’d better write it down. Here is how you get a kernel source tree setup for compilation of drivers under Debian, assuming you’re using a Debian provided kernel package. The information is shamelessly stolen from Martin List-Petersen: Lets assume you’ve installed kernel-image-2.x.y-z-arch. It could be kernel-image-2.4.25-1-386 […]

This site is run by Nucleus CMS, and this is just to recapitulate how it was set up. It wasn’t all that hard, but it might be useful to remember. First step was to create the blog in Nucleus which is straightforward. Second step was to clone the grey skin and two templates, and edit […]

I bought a Soltek Qbic EQ 3401M computer to use as a cheap home server. A low noise level was one of my main priorities, since the computer must on at all times, while being located in my home office where I work every day, and the Soltek delivers what they promise. The machine is […]