Debian-Blog

I recently switched to a ThinkPad W530 laptop. It is a fairly recent machine with the following hardware config:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz
• 8 GiB RAM
• nVIDIA Optimus
• Samsung SSD Drive

On the software front, I decided to take my chances. Hence:

Hello World. This is the follow-up to the last [2](http://blog/report-bugs- with-apport) updates on the state of apport in Debian.

A lot has changed since the last update on Apport. Currently, in Experimental, we have version 2.6.1-2. With this version, and going forward, there will be no hacks to make it work for Debian. Thanks to Martin Pitt, with his assistance, Apport now has a very basic crashdb in place for Debian. The Debian crashdb provides Apport the interface to interact with the Debian BTS.

This is a follow up to the previous post regarding Reporting bugs with Apport

Apport, version 2.2.3-2, has been pushed to experimental. There were some nice feedback that led to some more changes that I will talk here.

**Opt out: **As a developer, if you see the volume of reports to be annoying, you have the option to opt out of apport reports. To do this, you should specify the XBS-Apport: No field in your package ’s control file. When your application crashes, apport first checks for that field in your package’s description and acts based on what you chose.

So yet another bug reporting tool. :-)

When I prepared Apport for Debian, I wasn’t sure how it will look going forward. If you look at the current one lying in experimental, it just detects your crashes and pops up in your systray. It doesn’t have the mechanism to interact with BTS.

So, like the title of this post says, this is the first worthy feature for Apport in the context of Debian.

Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.61, has been released and will land up soon for Debian. This is the version that would be targetting Wheezy.
This release includes many bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.

This is mainly a bug fix release. Some parallel module execution approach has been used which could show runtime improvements.

Changelog:

1.61 - Thu May 17 17:44:26 IST 2012
* Handle devices with persistent device naming. This fixes the issues where
you don’t have a disk referenced by a block name, the commit= value was
completely skipped
* Fix issue where hdparm skips SSDs for power management
* Add parallel execution for the modules. In theory this should speeden up the
execution. See git commit log comments for details
* Add support for non-deafult customized settings
* calculate design_capacity_warning on machines/arches where it is not readily
available

Now these are the kind of moves that needs to happen more often. Whether this will cause a negative impact on the overall market, and the further invention of drugs (including patent control), but the affordability of the medicatoin to an average citizen is a great move.

The typical Chemotherapy can be on an average of 22 times. When summed up with the dosage (somewhere around 250 mg IIRC), the cost comes to approx: (22/4) * 15000 = 82k, which now, will be affordable at 27k.

In the 3.x days of KDE, there were some wonderful applications. One of them I still admire, is kscope. Recently, I stumbled upon this blog entry and thought of sharing my living with kscope.

The move from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a big one. During that move, the kscope author decided to port kscope to a Qt only application. That is what we have as the latest kscope, 1.9x version. But, on personal taste, it is not as good as the 1.6x series.

Many of the SAN components in Debian have me involved. So I think out to give an update on what the state of SAN would be in Debian Wheezy.

Open-iSCSI : Just uploaded a newer version to experimental which eventually will crawl into testing. It should fix all release goals for Wheezy. Please give it a good test

iscsitarget : Same goes here. This one is already in testing. Please test. It has some bugs reported, all in needinfo, as they haven’t been easily reproducible or reported complete.

apport just cleared the new queue and is now available in experimental. For those who do not know what apport is:

Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

• Many crashes are not easily reproducible.

• End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc.

• A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.

• There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.

• Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.

Apport is a system which

[Read More]

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: