Martins Blog

Usualy, after logging out from the desktop (like from KDE), the display manager (kdm in a usual KDE setup) appears again prompting for a new login. On one of my machines this is not a case for a while now. Instead of returning to the kdm login screen I end up in a virtual terminal for text input. Since this machine is most of the time simply shut down after use, I didn’t really look into the problem until know.

The problem is well know. It’s for example documented in bugs 295743, 432521 in Ubuntu’s launchpad, bug 253987 in the Gentoo bugzilla, bug 18028 in the freedesktop.org bugzilla and this thread in the German-speaking sidux forum.

The guilty party for causing the problem seems to be the X-Server that can not be properly reset. Not all X-Servers are buggy but at least the SiS-X-Server is (in my case it’s crashing with “SIS(0): Unable to map IO aperture. Invalid argument (22)”) and the Intel-X-Server was. So the solution would be to fix the X-Servers. However, this is not done yet, even though the bug is quite old.

Lucky us, a workaround exists. Telling kdm with "TerminateServer=true" in kdmrc (see the kdm documentation) to terminate the X-Server instead of restarting it, resolves the issue.

If you apply this workaround, be sure to check the entry in your kdm file after each upgrade of kdm. It might me overwritten through the upgrade mechanisms.

Whether Marvell got the name for it’s ARM compatible CPU core from the Hindu god of destruction or off the character from the Mortal Kombat game series, I don’t know.

However, the Sheeva CPU core is the heart of Marvell’s System-on a-Chip design called Kirkwood and around that they built a complete computing device the size of a wall wart and called it the SheevaPlug. Eintrag weiterlesen »

This can be done astoundingly easy with only a single command – well, not including the sorting. I’m just writing about it since it took my quite a while to figure out how to do this and later on I had to say that even though I knew that dpkg-query exists but since I liked to dig around in the packagestatus file by myself I never really had a use for the command. Well, now I have.

dpkg-query --show --showformat='${Package;-20}\t${Status}\t${Installed-Size}\n' | sort -k 5 -n|grep -v deinstall

does the job. And afterwards it’s quite easy to kick out the big packets you never heard of or even used …

KDE ist heute in der Version 4.0.0 freigegeben worden. Man darf den Release noch nicht als vollwertigen Ersatz für die Version 3.5 verstehen, sehr wohl aber als Beginn eines neuen Zeitalters für die grafische Oberfläche unter Linux. Packete liegen bereits im experimental Zweig von Debian.

Actually, this task is fairly easy, just install the appropriate kernel headers. A small manual for the exact steps can be found here.

Der Notebookmarkt ist einfach nicht mehr zu überblicken, alle paar Tage werfen die Hersteller neue Modelle auf den Markt. Heute gekaufte Hardware ist morgen schon nicht mehr aktuell und übermorgen Schnee von gestern.

Diese Binsenweisheiten in Kauf genommen machen es einem etwas leichter bei der Auswahl eines Mobilgerätes. In den einschlägigen Geschäften kann man sich dann noch einen Eindruck davon machen welche Größe und welches Gewicht einem genehm ist und dann heist es schnell zugreifen, bevor man es sich wieder anders überlegt.

So bin ich an den Asus A8JP gekommen, obwohl ich sagen muss, das letztendlich dieser Thread im Forum von HardwareLuxx und Christian Rothländers Seite über den fast baugleichen A8JS unter Gentoo Linux den Ausschlag gegeben haben.

Wie man das gute Stück ordentlich unter Linux (Kubuntu) einrichtet, erzählt dieser “lebende” Artikel.
Eintrag weiterlesen »

Did you update WordPress with Debian’s 2.0-1 package and now you only get the message

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.

when turning your browser to your blog?

Well, this seems to be an old bug that somehow did not make it into the Debian package. Check out Ticket #1496 at trac.wordpress.org, where reason and fix are described.

Actually, the fix is quite simple: Just add an

if ( !dl('mysql.so') )

before line 50 (the one that dies with the error message) in wp-settings.php and your blog is running again.

Since version 0.6 apt is checking for packages signatures. If signatures are not known to apt errors like in the following example are produced.

W: GPG error: http://debian.hinterhof.net unstable/ Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A0E41455F530F04D
W: GPG error: http://kempele.fi ./ Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 76755C2ABD7736A8
W: GPG error: http://www.tux.org sid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY BB5E459A529B8BDA
W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.nerim.net sarge Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907
W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.nerim.net etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907
W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.nerim.net sid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907

The signatures are included in the Release files, as the error message suggests. So if the public key is not known to GPG the above error messages are produced.

Getting everything right with signatures and apt seems to be still confusing to a lot of people including me. This article and the comments to it at Debian Administration gives an overview but also proofs that there is still need for more detail. Especially the connection between the package debian-keyring and apt and how the keys should enter /etc/apt/trusted.gpg are still quite unclear to me. Furthermore, at the time of writing this apt-key still seems to have some consitnecy bugs as described here. I believe there is still some development going on.

However, here’s how I got GPG quiet again. It’s basicly finding the keys on a keyserver or in a file provided by the keyholder, importing them into GPG and then exporting and piping them into apt-key. It should work with the keys after the NO_PUBKEY warning.

A good example is the repository at http://debian.hinterhof.net. Max Vozeler, the repository maintainer says:

I sign both repositories using key 1024D/F530F04D Automatic Signing Key (debian.hinterhof.net) (asc) which is signed with my Debian key 1024D/B7CDA2DC Max Vozeler (asc).

You can get the key by either asking a keyserver

#gpg --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys F530F04D

or getting the file containing the key

#wget http://hinterhof.net/debian/archive-2005.asc
#gpg --import archive-2005.asc

Now you need to get the key into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg by using

#gpg --armor --export F530F04D | apt-key add -

Now GPG should not be complaining about this repository again.

Actions for the other repositorys are the same. Christian Marillat has some comments about his keys here. Some more comments on package signing are in the Securing Debian Manual.

Most likely the lines in /etc/modules.conf are not ok.

This is due to an error in /etc/modutils/alsa which is a symlink to /etc/alsa/modutils/<ALSA-Version>.

Look into /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/examples/modules-<ALSA-Version>.conf
for an example setup.

This year MediaWiki found it’s way into Debian. So last night I thought I could set up this nice piece of software on my home machine.

Installing the package is no problem. But setting up the wiki fails with a ‘Couldn’t connect to database’. Unfortunately you don’t see the errors (that would be “Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client” as I found out later) reported by MySQL.

The cause of this problem is, that MediaWiki (or in fact this is probably the MySQL extention in PHP) does not support the new authentication protocol in MySQL 4.1 and above and thus fails to connect. If you are running MySQL out of Sarge you should not be affected by this problem. However, testing and unstable hold 4.1.X at the moment of writing.

The problem is described at meta.wikimedia.org (curiously on a Mac OS X related page) further down the page, marked in red, and a solution can be found in the MySQL Reference manual at “A.2.3. Client does not support authentication protocol“.

I chose the third approach described in reference.

1. I changed the password for the DB root.
2. I ran the wiki install with the DB root password given. This creates the database and sets up the database user before it fails when the database user tries to access that database.
3. Now I also changed the password of the newly created database user and ran the setup again. Giving a root password is not necessary any more. This time the setup runs thru smoothly and the wiki is set up and reachable.