RESEARCHUT

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. The problem is that the term Important is very volatile. What is important to X is not necessarily important to Y.

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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. With a carefully crafted policy, this could really help achieve the ultimate goal that Dan was looking after. Closing down vulnerabilities asap.

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). These are releases where they are targetting users as Beta Testers. And that’s good. It brings a good final Stable Release product. But comparing Debian to them is not really correct.

Amazing Moments
Debian Lenny has been released.

Go, grab now.

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”
}
}

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IMO, Linux Distributors should seriously think about Role Based Operations for their distributions.

Every linux user is going to be using his copy of the distribution in a different way. But from the distributor’s point of view, it should boil down to:

Desktop Users

Laptop Users

Server Users

Currently, some of the distributions apply this thought only to packages. For example, Ubuntu rolls out a desktop flavor and a server (generic) flavor of its kernel package. I think the distributions need to think broad and realize that NOT One Size Fits All.

It was about 2 AM , some day in June 2008 , when I caught the taxi from Chinatown, Boston, MA to head to my hotel room in Waltham, MA.

It was the same day Celtics went victorious over Lakers in the Basketball match. I was lucky to see the people cheering and celebrating the victory. Everyone was shaking hands with others. I didn’t feel that I was a visitor there.

I created pypt-offline with the hope that it’d be useful for people who don’t have an internet connection but would still like to enjoy Debian. Enjoying Debian is about enjoying its Package Manager, APT. I don’t have any data to show if pypt-offline is in use by anybody. I too, use it rarely, when at my hometown. But I hope people who use it, find it useful.

At my hometown, I use internet service from my friend’s ISP. I have a 10kb/s connection at home. That’s slow.

Most people who’ve bought laptops, would see a pre-installed version of Windows, for which they’d have already paid. Recently things have changed but still for the majority of the laptop models available, Windows is the most commonly used option.

I own a Dell XPS M1210 which too came pre-installed with Microsoft Windows XP. Since the machine was low on hard-drive space, I had to eventually knock-off all Non-Linux partitions to make more space. Recently I was able to swap my Seagate SATA Laptop Drive (160 GB) with the one that was shipped with the Laptop. This made me rich in disk space. So, being a small PC gamer, I decided that I do want to have a copy of Windows XP installed on my machine. And why not, I already have paid for it and own a license.

Thanks to Pierre Chifflier , Debian now has setroubleshoot packaged. The good thing about setroubleshoot is that it gives you a very user friendly message about the SELinux violations that occur on your box while you were doing something.

Now that something is very difficult to define (at least for Debian). My day job requires me to work on the RHELdistribution which has very good SELinux policy defined (Same is the case with Fedora). Here’s a list of things which Debian’s SELinux policy lacks and that RHEL/Fedora’s doesn’t