One too many mornings

Mostly worked fine, but X was broken on reboot,

Reading /var/log/Xorg.0.log revealed the drivers were using X.org ABI 0.8 rather than 1.0

Turns out that the xorg drivers are not updated because their name changed.

This is easily solved by running

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-all

Also vncviewer complained about a font problem this is caused by the helvetica fonts being hard coded into vncviewer. Run this to stop it complaining

echo “*popup*font: fixed” | xrdb -merge

This problem is shared with debian

technorati tags:ubuntu, edgy, dapper, upgrade, xorg, fonts

Currently updating this work PC to edgy using apt-get the instructions using update-manager din’t work so perhaps I should hold off but the prospect of brand new packages I’ll never use is.. just.. too.. much.

The download will take an hour but the upgrade will probably take all morning with 1200 packages updated. The only problem I see is that I use a slightly patched kernel so I can use an unsupported serial port card. Here’s hoping.

technorati tags:edgy, ubuntu, linux

I’m in the process of putting debian sarge onto pootle, my little sony laptop. It previously had ubuntu warty on it but I think I’d rather run debian sid on it. So as a first step I’m migrating to sarge. Seems to be going OK, nothing terminal so far.

For the longest time, I’ve been backing up this weblog nightly. The fact I only write to it once a week not withstanding. Since moving to wordpress this has not been enough since the posts are held in a database which is outside of the web accessible area. Luckily Scott Merrill has written a plugin to backup the database and email it to me. Scott has also written a plugin to do this nightly so I can rest easy again.

Elsewhere, Dave Jones talks about rebasing his kernel each night. Inspired by this I’ve set up my PC to do nightly builds of all the exterity software branches I’m interested in. It then posts the built software to an internal website along with the buildlog. If there is a fail in the build it emails me the buildlog so I can fix the problem the following morning. It pays to be lazy.

boardmon monitors the temperature and fans of the scapa board. It logs the temperature and fan fails to a log file, reports high temps and fan fails to a manager, and shuts down the board on a high temperature. Other features may be added in due course. This little program was the first bit of new programming I’ve done in over a month. I’ve basically be testing and doing system analysis work during that time. It is nice to get to do the part of the job I enjoy most. And I am in such a better mood because of it. Maybe I need to pick up a debian package and start hacking on that in my spare time.

Spending this afternoon building and working out the dependencies for putting rrdtools on the gateway. I’m not usre how useful it is for reporting the problems we see in the field, but it is an interesting exercise.
It also makes pretty multicoloured graphs so it can’t be all bad

My free copies of ubuntu arrived today! Nicely packaged debian fun! It comes with an install CD, and live CD. Ubuntu will ship free CDs and is sponsored by canonical, Mark Shuttleworth’s software development company.

Just downloaded this little python script which makes blogging easier. As I’ve been so slack recently this is the ideal cure.

For the last few days I’ve been using CVS check-ins. It looks a lot like WinCVS and make the management of a large project like scapa much easier. So far my favourite feature is the nice graphical merge and annotate tool so one can see what changes have been made by whom.

Upgraded my work PC to breezy this morning. I don’t think it will offer much in the way of new stuff now that sarge is frozen. Hopefully tomboy and beagle will go into it though.