Tools

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.67. This release has many important bug fixes, and everyone is recommended to upgrade. Of the many, one important fix is to, more reliably check for Device Mapper based devices, which is common these days with Crypt and LVM. For the summary of changes to quote from git log: 1.67 - Thu Jul 2 17:05:07 IST 2015 * Relax minimum window size to accomodate low res screens * Fix variable name to comply with our "constants" assuptions * Get more aggressive in power saving for Intel HD Audio * Account Device Mapper devices * Add swsusp freeze support * Switch battery-level-polling default to True * Detect ethernet carrier, early and relibaly * changes the boolean setting *_ACTIVATE_SATA_POWER to a customizable *_SATA_POLICY, with backward-compatible defaults and documentation Thanks Yuir D'Elia PS: On a side note, over the years, Linux’s power savings functionality has improved a lot, all thanks to its use in the mobile worlds. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools at version 1.66. This release fixes an important bug in the way Laptop Mode Tools is invoked. Users, now when disable it in the config file, the tool will be disabled. Thanks to bendlas @github for narrowing it down. The GUI configuration tool has been improved, thanks to Juan. And there is a new power saving module for users with ATI Radeon cards. [Read More]

I am very pleased to announce the release of apt-offline, version 1.5. In version 1.4, the offline bug report functionality had to be dropped. In version 1.5, it is back again. apt-offline now uses the new Debian native BTS library. Thanks to its developers, this library is much more slim and neat. The only catch is that it depends on the SOAPpy library which currently is not stock in Python. If you run apt-offline of Debian, you may not have to worry as I will add a Recommends on that package. [Read More]

apt-offline 1.4 has been released [1]. This is a minor bug fix release. In fact, one feature, offline bug reports (–bug-reports), has been dropped for now. The Debian BTS interface seems to have changed over time and the older debianbts.py module (that used the CGI interface) does not seem to work anymore. The current debbugs.py module seems to have switched to the SOAP interface. There are a lot of changes going on personally, I just haven’t had the time to spend. [Read More]

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools , at version 1.65 This release took a toll given things have been changing for me, both personally and professionally. 1.64 was released on September 1st, 2013. So it was a full 9 month period, of which a good 2-3 months were procrastination. That said, this release has some pretty good bug fixes and I urge all distribution packagers to push it to their repositories soon. [Read More]

I just released Laptop Mode Tools @ version 1.64. And am pleased to introduce the new graphical utility to toggle individual power saving modules in the package. The GUI is written using the PyQT Toolkit and the options in the GUI are generated at runtime, based on the list of available power saving modules. Apart from the GUI configuration tool, this release also includes some bug fixes: Don’t touch USB Controller power settings. [Read More]

As someone who learned computers on his own, I always acknowledged the value that the Free Software movement has brought. The accessibility of these topics, which are only supposed to be part of text books and schools, is available for anyone and everyone who has the resource and passion to do it. But this past week, 2 things made me pretty impressed with the maturity and quality of work that we do. [Read More]

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. [Read More]