Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in: They were automatically detected Partitions/File Systems understood Desktop systems would prompt for actions The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were: [Read More]

OpenXenManager

OpenXenManager cleared the NEW queue and is now available in the archive. What it is: rrs@champaran:~$ apt-cache show openxenmanager Package: openxenmanagerVersion: 0.r80+dfsg-1Installed-Size: 3051Maintainer: Ritesh Raj Sarraf rrs@debian.orgArchitecture: allDepends: pythonDescription: full-featured graphical management tool for xen using xenapi OpenXenManager is a graphical interface to manage XenServer / Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) hosts through the network . OpenXenManager is an open-source multiplatform clone of XenCenter (Citrix)Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxenmanager/Section: adminPriority: extraFilename: pool/main/o/openxenmanager/openxenmanager_0.r80+dfsg- 1_all.debSize: 396322MD5sum: 64df482dac6b99bc3403bcc0740f8718SHA1: 9c746f524c3c29eb88de7ae702c96cbca162f577SHA256: 454641eb26c57ba35ad573a3a8493ac6dbd82f7920c8b926049ef892724147e0 [Read More]

Offline Package Manager - apt-offline

//autoplay off Your browser does not support the video tag. A copy of this article is also available here This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline. [Read More]

File System corruption and Recovery

So this is the 2nd time I ran into a problem like this again. My FAT32 file system on the external USB HDD, all of a sudden, started reporting: 00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFNLogical sector size is zero. I had been taking a lot of care to ensure that I don’t run into situation like this. No body likes losing data. The good part is that I’ve been lucky enough that, even without backups (now who’s gonna backup a backup disk), I have recovered all my data. [Read More]

Console Gaming - Sony Playstation 3

I have been thinking of this topic for some time. I am a happy owner of the old Phat PS3 Model. At one time, I use to do a fair amount of gaming on my computers. So when Sony marketed the PlayStation 3 product, it was cool to see a machine that did: Gaming Movies, Music, Pictures Blu-Ray Ran Linux I convinced myself to buy a PlayStation 3, that I’d use it for playing with Linux apart from gaming. [Read More]

CM7

CyanogenMod does list Samsung Galaxy S in its list of devices, but given that it is marked experimental I was not very confident of trying it out. But yesterday, I took the plunge. Even though experimental, the ROM is pretty good. And the Cyanogen goodness just makes it awesome. This ROM (also being AOSP GingerBread) is Super Fast. So in a day of use, my impressions: Battery performance has turned out to be better than what I was used to. [Read More]

Basic RAM Information

While upgrading the memory (RAM) of my notebook I did a lot of study as to what exact kind of RAM would my notebook use without problems. By the end, while I finalized on what RAM I need for my notebook, I had compiled a small document on Basic RAM Information courtesy Crucial® FAQs. I hope this guide to be helpful to you but with no warranty though. :-) Do I have to buy the same size upgrade as the memory module currently installed in my computer or can I mix different sizes? [Read More]

SystemTap in Debian

The latest kernel upload (2.6.32-16) brings goodies to SystemTap in Debian. This version has added support for kprobes, on which systemtap has a major dependency, for many of its features.

Most of the systemtap instrumentation should work now and all of this will be part of the Squeeze release. Instrumenting the kernel modules still needs some work (DBTS: #555549) but can be done.

apt-offline

It all started long back when I worked for a giant computer manufacturing company. Certain IT policies led fo the need for an Offline APT Package Manager

While I got it working for a long time, I didn’t have the aggression to polish and push it for general usage. Thanks to my friend appaji, [apt-offline](http ://apt-offline.alioth.debian.org) (a.k.a pypt-offilne) is now part of Debian.

Evolution Newsgroup UI

I’ve been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I’ve also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the user), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME. Probably, many would disagree. [Read More]