apt-offline 1.5

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

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]

Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Fibre Channel over Ethernet ( FCoE ) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks (or higher speeds) while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol. The specification was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards T11 FC-BB-5 standard published in 2009 (As descripted on Wikipedia) I just orphaned the FCoE packages for Debian. I don’t really have the time and enthusiasm to maintain FCoE any more. [Read More]

Laptop Mode Tools 1.65

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]

Basis B1

Starting yesterday, I am a happy user of the Basis B1 (Carbon Edition) Smart Watch The company recently announced being acquired by Intel. Overall I like the watch. The price is steep, but if you care of a watch like that, you may as well try Basis. In case you want to go through the details, there’s a pretty comprehensive review here. Since I’ve been wearing it for just over 24hrs, there’s not much data to showcase a trend. [Read More]

Windows 7 Profile Synchronization

Lately, for my day job (to be more efficient for the time I spent), I am required to use Windows, back again. :-) It is great to be back. By back, I mean using Windows for some of the workflows. All these years, I’ve been using Linux based tools (Debian, Kontact | IceDove, Konq | Chromium | IceWeasel etc) to get my job done. It is great to try back Windows for some of the workflows. [Read More]

Laptop Mode Tools 1.64

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]

Power consumption on Linux 3.10

The power consumption on the Linux kernel 3.10 is pretty bad. On kernel 3.10, with the follwing config, the PowerTop results are: # # Timers subsystem # CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON=y # CONFIG_HZ_PERIODIC is not set CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE=y # CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL is not set CONFIG_NO_HZ=y CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y PowerTOP v2.0 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunables The battery reports a discharge rate of 28.0 W The estimated remaining time is 23 minutes Summary: 1785.5 wakeups/second, 0. [Read More]

I am so indebted to the community

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]

RESEARCHUT

[rrs@learner ~] tar -axvf researchut-1.2.0.tar.bz2 && ls