Debian-Blog

For Debian Jessie, the version of apt-offline available is: 1.5.1. This version has had some [issues](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=apt-offline;dist=unstable).

My very 1st backports is available in the form of [apt-offline 1.7 for ](https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/apt- offline)[Debian](https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie-backports/apt- offline) Jessie Backports. For Debian Jessie users, this should fix most of the issues.

Today is an auspicious day. For those who know (or follow) the Hindu religion will be familiar; Today is Maha Shivaratri

On this day, It is great delight for me to be able to release Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.69

This release adds on many bug fixes and some enhancements. There is a new module (disabled by default) for cpuhotplug. The release tarball also includes a basic PolicyKit file for convenience, that packagers can use for the Laptop Mode Tools Graphical Configuration Interface. Apart from the policykit file, the graphical invocation script has been slightly fine tuned to work under pkexec and sudo. Some defaults have been tuned based on user requests - This should improve in situations where your External USB Mouse/Keyboard used to suspend after idle time periods.

Having moved to a new place, now at times, I also have to deal with power outages. As heat increases, the power outages will be much longer and more frequent. So much, that UPS and Power Inverters run out. Such are ideal times to measure idle power consumption for my laptop.

Here’s what my default (and idle) OS looks like. It should be standard to most “typical” users. Some minor odds could be apport, dnsmasq, and maybe, tor. Also, thanks to systemd, there are some native services which are now converted to socket activation based ones. There’s also Laptop Mode Tools for userspace power savings. But huge thanks to Intel’s work in making the kernel more power efficient. With things like Runtime PM and Intel P-State , we can now define, default and aggressive power-savings modes, helping conserve more power.

I very recently met someone, and we had a good productive discussion on the features and (long standing) bugs of the Linux kernel. No doubt, Linux is the most featureful kernel in the market. Is also a lot appealing given its breadth of platform support.

Of that discussion we had, it led about Linux’s behavior in tighter stressed scenarios where there is a lot of contention among the core subsystems. From the conversation, I got the feedback that perhaps the issue is no more valid. My conclusion was I must have missed out on the fix because I haven’t really spent any Engineering Lab time in recent past.

In trying to improve the WiFi service in my house, I recently dug out my old Linksys WRT54G Router. It is a 802.11 bg router, which can do 54 MBPS. Currently, I use a TPLink based router, with a DD-WRT community firmware, which claims is 802.11 bgn and can do 300 MBPS. The overall wifi signal isn’t adequate, so I thought of using the old router as a repeater.

The default Linksys VXWorks firmware does not have the bridging capabilities, so it was time to flashback, again, the dd-wrt image onto it (The last time I did, I eventually had to revert back to the stock firmware because my ISP claimed that the router was giving too many packet drops). Being an old device, and me being lazy, I did not pay much attention to the exact steps; and ended up bricking my router, wherein it wouldn’t give me the Management Console to flash a new firmware; nor would it give me the old VXWorks firmware interface. All it gave was a White Screen of Death and an active IP connection.

I’ve wanted to blog about this for a while. So, though I’m terrible at creating video reviews, I’m still going to do it, rather than procrastinate every day.

In this video, the emphasis is on using Free Software (GNOME in particular) tools, with which soon you should be able serve the needs for Desktop/Laptop, and as well as a Tablet.

The video also touches a bit on Touchpad Gestures.

I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading list (Thanks to rss2email, now I can hold the list longer, than just marking all as read). And one item from last year’s end worth spending time was Thunderbird.

Thunderbird has been the email client of choice for many users. The main reason for it being popular has been, in my opinion, it being cross platform. Because that allows users an easy migration path across platforms. It also bring persistence, in terms of features and workflows, to the end users. Perhaps that must have been an important reason for many distributions (Ubuntu) and service providers to promote it as the default email client. A Windows/Mac user migrating to Ubuntu will have a lot better experience if they see familiar tools, and their data and workflows being intact.

For Debian Jessie, the multipath support relied on sysvinit scripts. So, if you were using systemd, the level of testing would have been minimal.

At DebConf15, I got to meet many people whom I’d worked with, over emails, over the years. With every person, my ask was to use the SAN Storage stack in a test environement, and report bugs early. Not after the next release. This applies also to the usual downstream distribution projects.

If you have a modern laptop, you must be having a touchpad with multitouch capability, in hardware. But on the software front, it must be crap.

And if you’ve always craved for having support for those multitouch gestures, you must have been following the X/Wayland development.

From what I’ve known so far, libinput is the successor to all older input support in X/Wayland. But it does have some conditions at this time. Like: Multitouch Gesture is only available in Wayland, not in X. Similarly, if you use GNOME/Wayland , not all RandR functionalities are available in Wayland, that are there in X.

When I bought my [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.researchut.com/blog/lenovo- yoga-2-13-debian), I had great plans. I wanted a device, that I could use both, as a laptop, and also as a tablet. The path hasn’t been easy. But then, no path in Free Software against Freedom and Privacy has been easy. The choice is left to us, the users.

I had been a long time KDE User. With KDE’s decision to have different UIs for different form factors (plasma active, plasma netbook, plasma desktop), it was now time to try something different. I had 2 choices to explore: Unity and GNOME. But given that Unity is not feasible in Debian, the obvious first option to explore was GNOME. And I guess my timing was perfect. I started with 3.14 which showed great promises about touch support, followed by 3.16 and now 3.18. There ’s still a long way to go, but GNOME definitely is in the right direction and improves impressively with each release.