blog.gauner.org

A few minutes ago KDE 4.4 was tagged in the SVN. Soon the package maintainers will start building binary packages and hopefully they will arive in Debian sid soon. I can’t wait to try out the new Akonadi-powered KDE-PIM packages and the improved plasma shell.

Let’s see which other features will be presented in the release notes.

Just two links where you can opt-out from popular advertising networks: Google and NAI.

When I tried to mount an NFSv3 share from an Debian etch host I’ve got the error “mount.nfs: Operation not permitted”.

The solution was to force mount.nfs to NFSv3: mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=3 server:/share /mnt

Thanks to this post.

Since Linux-Vservers seem to be having a hard time in Debian and the Vserver maintainers probably aren’t going to go the same way as the OpenVZ maintainers who promissed to get OpenVZ in shape for Debian, it’s time to look for alternatives. If you want to stay with contextualization, a lightweight form of virtualization, there is only a limited set of options. According to KernelNewbies TechComparison of virtualization techniques there are only a mere three approaches which go for contextualization (also called containers).

There three are

• OpenVZ
• Linux-Vserver
• Linux Containers (LXC)

Since I have objections to OpenVZ, which, despite its cool features like live migration, are keeping me away from it, it’s time to look for LXC.

The one killer-argument of LXC is that it is mainline, meaning that is has been submitted to and accepted by the linux official kernel tree and doesn’t need any patches. So you can expect LXC to be fully usable starting with Kernel 2.6.29, which should be available in most stable distributions by now. To make full use of LXC you’ll need the userland tools as well. They are available from Sourceforge and as a Debian Package in squeeze (currently testing). However backporting them to lenny (currently stable) shouldn’t be hard since lenny fullfills all dependencies and it should only be a matter of installing the package from squeeze by hand.

So far LXC looks very promising but still a bit rough about the edges. I’m not going to present a more detailed howto here, yet. Please have a look at this five minute guide to LXC instead.

I’m working on the lxc-debian tools to improve them; have look at my git repository. I’m planning to write a Vserver to LXC conversion tool. Hopefully I can push my work upstream sometime. I really like to try to concentrate the work into one coordinated project.

If your curios about the development of LXC, you should subscribe to the LXC mailinglists lxc-devel and lxc-users at sf.net.

Update: Two more links regarding LXC. The LXC HOWTO and “LXC containers or extremely fast virtualization“.

There are many blog posts and howtos about setting up gitweb on the web. Unfortunately none of those seems to work for me. Either you can’t check out via http or it’s just not working.

Here is my configuration, which works for me on Debian Lenny. If you follow this instructions you’ll get a working gitweb Webinterface, checkouts via HTTP and git URLs.

First create a new directory to hold the git repositories. I’ll use the FHS compliant /srv/git:

mkdir /srv/git

Then create a new Apache 2 Vhost:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName git.example.net
ServerAdmin you@example.net
SetEnv  GITWEB_CONFIG   /etc/gitweb.conf
DocumentRoot    /srv/git
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/git.example.net-error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/git.example.net-access.log combined
HostnameLookups On
UseCanonicalName Off
ServerSignature Off

Alias /gitweb.css /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.css
Alias /git-favicon.png /usr/share/gitweb/git-favicon.png
Alias /git-logo.png /usr/share/gitweb/git-logo.png
Alias /git /srv/git

ScriptAlias /gitweb.cgi /usr/lib/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi
DirectoryIndex gitweb.cgi
<Directory /srv/git>
AllowOverride None
Options Indexes FollowSymlinks
Order Allow,Deny
Allow From All

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}         !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}        !-d
RewriteRule ^.* /gitweb.cgi/$0          [L,PT]
</Directory>
# for debugging rewrite rules
#RewriteLog /srv/www/git.gauner.org/logs/rewrite.log
#RewriteLogLevel 9
</VirtualHost>

In most tutorials you’re told to include the RewriteCond matching directories (!-d), but for me that broke pretty URLs, so I disabled it.

If you use lighttpd, check out this FAQ entry.

Now you’ll need to make some adjustments to /etc/gitweb.conf:

$projectroot = “/srv/git”;

# turn off potentially CPI-intensive features
$feature{’search’}{‘default’} = [undef];
$feature{‘blame’}{‘default’} = [undef];
$feature{‘pickaxe’}{‘default’} = [undef];
$feature{‘grep’}{‘default’} = [undef];
$feature{’snapshot’}{‘default’} = [undef];

# nicer-looking URLs (req. apache rewrite rules)
$feature{‘pathinfo’}{‘default’} = [1];

$site_name = “git.example.net”;
$my_uri = “http://git.example.net”;

# target of the home link on top of all pages
$home_link = $my_uri || “/”;

@git_base_url_list = (“git://git.example.net”);

Restart the Apache and checkout if your Vhost works.

Finally you can setup the OpenBSD inetd in /etc/inetd.conf add this line:

git     stream  tcp     nowait  nobody  /usr/bin/git-daemon git-daemon –inetd –verbose –base-path=/srv/git /srv/git

Now you’re done. Of course you need to install apache2, gitweb and openbsd-inetd but that should be clear

Go here or here for more information.

The Swiss Luftwaffe has released some impressing fotos of the A380 in front of the Matterhorn.
Here’s a teaser:

If you click on the image you’ll get a larger image. In the far right is the well known Matterhorn. In front is the A380 just above a F/A-18C Hornet from the Swiss Luftwaffe. In the background you see a part of the ski-region Zermatt-Cervinia. Just off the image on the left side would be the Klein-Matterhorn and the Gobba di Rollin. This is the starting point of the Theodulglacier. Nearby you can see some ski lifts and ski tracks leading to and from the Pleatau Rosa/Testa Grigia, which is the border to Italy.

Resizing LVM LVs is great, but how to do this with an encrypted partition?

umount /myfs
fsck.ext3 -C 0 -f /dev/mapper/myfs
cryptsetup luksClose myfs
lvextend -l+10 /dev/myvg/mylv
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/myvg/mylv myfs
cryptsetup –verbose resize myfs
mount  /dev/mapper/myfs /myfs
umount /myfs
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/myfs
resize2fs /dev/mapper/myfs
fsck.ext2 -f /dev/mapper/myfs
mount /dev/mapper/myfs /myfs

via linux.kernel.device-mapper.dm-crypt.

Kontact, a part of the Kolab project, has some very nice Groupware features that were presented on the MK09.

Fortunately most of these are very well usable even without a Kolab server.

Unfortunately these are not so well documented (or the documentation is not very easy to find).

When trying out these features in noticed that the groupware features will only work properly (at least with Kontact from KDE 4.3) if you access your mailbox via “Disconnected IMAP”. If you fail to do so you’ll probably get an “Write access denied” error.

Please note, that Kontact is very unstable sometimes, but again, this depends heavily on the version of Kontact/KDE you use. My experience is based on KDE 4.3 from Debian unstable.

Right, it is called unstable for a reason …

Due to simplicity I’ve always used pre-compiled OSM maps for my Garmin. Since they are only available for certain pre-defined areas there is a slight lack of comfort, since I did need to change the whole gmapsupp.img every time I’ve moved out of the loaded area. Today I tried mkgmap to comile my own set of tiles into a gmapsupp.img and it did work great. I took a map of germany and added some areas I did also want to visit. At first I couldn’t believe how fast mkgmap had processed the tiles, but the output was a valid gmapsupp.img and after transfering to the Garmin it did work flaslessly.

How to create your own gmapsupp.img:

- Grab the tiles you want. I used a routable map of germany as the base.

- Then I’ve added some additional tiles. Selecting those is assisted by this nice applet.

- Extract the downloaded files: gunzip *.img.gz

- And combine them using mkgmap: java -jar mkgmap.jar –gmapsupp *.img

This will result in a gmapsupp.img file that you can transfer to your Garmin.