Debian Developer

Finally, I am proud to be officially part of one of the most successful and well organized Free/Open project, the Debian project.

I would like to thank everyone who have worked with me. I would also like to thank my Advocate Giridhar and my AM Pablo. It was and is really awesome working with you guys.

Debian PS3 Installation

It is holiday time and so finally time to installing Debian onto the Sony PS3 box. The installation was smooth as most of the stuff is already documented. The Debian Installer has all the support needed, to install onto the Sony PS3. As of now the only thing not working perfectly is the boot loader. It seems to be taking default is the kernel that was booted last. Even if I change the default in /etc/kboot. [Read More]

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.

New GPG Key

Given the recent switch to a stronger key by everyone, here’s mine. The old key that I’ll still keep using till I get the new key signed by a good amount of people. pub 1024D/04F130BC 2003-08-18 Key fingerprint = CF0F EDEF 1052 83D2 62A4 0549 E118 62EA 04F1 30BC uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf rrs@researchut.com uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) rsarraf@netapp.com uid [jpeg image of size 52128] [Read More]

Compressing Backups

Once upon a time CPU power was low. In those days, what we have today, was termed to be Super Computers. Thanks to tough competition and great engineering, we now have CPU in the range of Gigahertz and multiple cores. But on Destkops/Laptops, do we really have applications that utilize the ability of these processors ? So I thought about making these powerful CPUs to do some work. There are different views about Backups. [Read More]

Backups && Recovery

Backups Most of the users using computers have a very high dependency on it. Day-by- Day, our data is getting digitized. Everything is getting into electronic formats ( Movies/Pictures/Music et cetera). If you are one, you know how important it is to have a backup. Lately, I haven’t been using Microsoft Windows on a daily basis. So I’ll comment on Linux here. The definition of Backup can be different. People like backing-up only the Important data. [Read More]

Another Debian Merit

So there was a recent thread on the Destop Architect’s forum, where Dan Kegel discussed the idea of silent upgrades (for Security, at least). I for one, am not very fond of the idea. Updates/Upgrades (Security or Features) are something which should be done with some Human Intervention. But still it is not an idea to be completely ruled out. Free Software is about choice. There definitely are use cases where Silent Updates look a good choice. [Read More]

Debian Lenny - Reviews and Comparison

Now that Lenny is released, we see a lot of reviews around the world. I think most of the reviewers do an unfair comparison for Debian. I followed Heise Online’s review and see that they are comparing Lenny to Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE. IMO, the philosophy behind Debian Stable is very different than that of Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu. Fedora/openSUSE are more focused to bring you the latest and greatest. The same applies to Ubuntu (Excluding the LTS release). [Read More]

Debian Lenny Released

Amazing Moments
Debian Lenny has been released.

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Go, grab now.

Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset

So my friend game me a cute little birthday present, a Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset. Making it work under Linux was not very difficult but still has to catch-up in terms of utils. To make the headset work, I just had to run a scan on the Linux host, and get the hw address and specify it in .asoundrc. pcm.bluetooth { type bluetooth { address = xx.xx.xx.xx.xx description “Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset” [Read More]