Debian-Blog

**http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=proprietary%20medicine &ia=ahsmd

proprietary medicine ** _n. _
 A medicinal compound whose formula and often mode of manufacture are owned by an individual or a corporation under a trademark or patent. 

The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright (C) 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

This is a topic which has gotten me wondering about what the practices are, that governments in different regions follow. And on what grounds.

I recently acquired a [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.cnet.com/products/lenovo- yoga-2-13-inch/). While, at the time, the Yoga 3 was available, I decided to go for Yoga 2 13. The Yoga 3 comes with the newer Core M Broadwell family, which, in my opinion, [doesn’t really bring any astounding benefits](http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/lenovo-ideapad- yoga-2-13-3-p18512/test.html).

The Yoga 2 13 comes in mulitple variants worldwide. Infact these hardware variations have different effets when run under Linux.

My varaint of Yoga 2 13 is:

Another of my articles for self. Writing it down on the website is much better than pushing it on a 3rd party social site. Your data is yours.

My site runs on Drupal. Given I’m not a web designer, it is not my core area. Thus I’ve always wanted to have minimal engagement with it. My practices have paid me well so far. And I should thank all the free tools that help do that. I like to keep a running snapshot of my website on my local laptop, to keep it handy when trying anything new. This means that the setup has to be almost identical to what is running remotely.

This article is for self, so that I don’t again forget the specifics. The last time I did the same setup, it wasn’t very important in terms of security. gitolite(3) + gitweb can give an impressive git tool with very simple user acls. After you setup gitolite, ensure that the umask value in gitolite is approriate, i.e. the gitolite group has r-x privilege. This is needed for the web view. Add your apache user to the gitolite group. With the umask changes, and the group association, apache’s user will now be able to read gitolite repos.

One of the great things about Debian is the wide range of kernels it supports can run. This gives the user the flexibility to not spend time on the common userland stuff. For example, most apps, package management and system admin tasks are common across all Debian platforms.

These platforms may not be optimal at par to Linux, but still, choice is good.

For long, I had used Debian GNU/Hurd, only on a KVM hypervisor. Recently being involved in VirtualBox maintenance, I’ve almost beeing using VirtualBox for all my virtualization tasks. So it was time to try out Hurd on VirtualBox.

Looking at the PTS entries, I realized that it has been more than 2 yrs, since I pushed the first Apport packages into Debian.

We have talked about it [in the past](http://www.researchut.com/blog/report- bugs-with-apport-3), and do not see a direct need for apport yet. That is one reason why it still resides (and will continue to) in Experimental.

Even though not used as a bug reporting tool, Apport can still be a great tool for (end) users to detect crashes. It can also be used to find further details about program crashes and pointers to look further.

I am pleased to announce the release of apt-offline - 1.6

This release is mostly a bug fix release, which every user should upgrade to. It also fixes a major bug in the way we limited the validation of GPG integrity, for the APT repository lists ( Thank you Paul Wise ).

Also, In the last release, we migrated from custom magic library to the python shipped ctype python-magic library. That allowed some bugs to creep, and hopefully now, all those bugs should be fixed. A big thanks to Roland Summers for his bug reports and continuous feedback.

Dear Lazy Web,

I have an [HP Envy J104TS](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/envy- touchsmart-15/specs.html) laptop. Recently I saw an interesting message in the kernel log.

[99360.969652] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.

Does anybody know what firmware is it referring to here ? I don’t think the current set of firmwares shiped by linux are involved in battery related information. Is it the BIOS ?

[95474.561491] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
[95474.803578] r8169 0000:0f:00.0 eth0: link down
[95474.803627] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
[95474.933797] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
[95477.111599] wlan0: authenticate with 00:03:7f:fe:00:02
[95477.127389] wlan0: send auth to 00:03:7f:fe:00:02 (try 1/3)
[95477.129315] wlan0: authenticated
[95477.131352] wlan0: associate with 00:03:7f:fe:00:02 (try 1/3)
[95477.133605] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:03:7f:fe:00:02 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=3)
[95477.133686] wlan0: associated
[95477.133703] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
[99125.123138] device vethNLAABF entered promiscuous mode
[99125.123377] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): vethNLAABF: link is not ready
[99125.188568] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): vethNLAABF: link becomes ready
[99125.188615] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered forwarding state
[99125.188631] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered forwarding state
[99140.239301] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered forwarding state
**[99360.969652] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.**
[99361.729291] NMI watchdog: enabled on all CPUs, permanently consumes one hw-PMU counter.
[99361.864205] EXT4-fs (dm-2): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,data=writeback,commit=0
[99361.905210] EXT4-fs (sda6): re-mounted. Opts: data=ordered,commit=0
[102236.267648] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered disabled state
[102236.556452] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered disabled state
[102236.557476] device vethNLAABF left promiscuous mode
[102236.557483] lxcbr0: port 1(vethNLAABF) entered disabled state

Linux has improved many many things over the last couple of years. Of the many improvements, the one that I’ve started leveraging the most today, are Control Groups.

In the past, when there was a need to build a prototype for a solution, we needed hardware.

Then came the virtualization richness to Linux. It came in 2 major flavors, KVM ( Full Virtualization ) and Xen ( Para Virtualization ). Over the years, the difference of para vs full, for both the implementations, is almost none. KVM now has support for Para-Virtualizaiton, with para-virtualized drviers for most resource intensive tasks, like network and I/O. Similarly, Xen has Full Virtualization support with the help of Qemu-KVM.

We are almost at the end of 2014. While 2014 has been a year with many mixed experiences, I think it does warrant one blog entry ;-)

Recently, I’ve again started spending more time on Linux products / solutions, than spending time focused on a specfic subsystem. This change has been good. It has allowed me to re-cap all the advancements that have happened in the Linux world, umm… in the last 5 years.