RESEARCHUT

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.

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. Thanks to M. Ziebell for submitting the patch.

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. For users using it on Microsoft Windows, please ensure that you have the SOAPpy library installed. It is available on pypi.

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. If anyone would like to help, please reach out to me. We need to use the new debbugs.py module. And it should be cross-platform.

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. The packages may not be in top notch shape, but FCoE as a technology, itself did not see many takers. The popcon stats are low.

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. While I ’d thank all contributors who have helped make this release, a special thank you to Stefan Huber. Stefan found/fixed many issues, did the messy code clean up etc.. Thank you.

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. But the device was impressively precise in monitoring my sleep.

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.

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. The individual devices, when plugged in, while on battery, inherit the power settings from the USB controller
• start-stop-programs: add support for systemd. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Replace hardcoded path to udevadm with “which udevadm”. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Honor .conf files only. Thanks to Sven Köhler
• Make ‘/usr/lib’ path configurable. This is especially useful for systems that use /usr/lib64, or /lib64 directly. Thanks to Nicolas Braud-Santoni
• Don’t call killall with the -g argument. Thanks to Murray Campbell
• Fix RPM Spec file build errors

The Debian package will follow soon. I don’t intend to introduce a new package for the GUI tool because the source is hardly 200 lines. So the dependencies (pyqt packages) will go as Recommeds or Suggests