ze blog of simon

Some notes on getting the second head on your i810 based PC here, I’ve got the CRT pipe working, but can’t get it to go to a higher res than the LCD at the moment

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Hotplugging USB Storage devices.

http://www.debian-administration.org/?article=126

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My last major requirement was decent hibernate & resume, the standard suspend to disk in 2.6.8/10 didn’t cut it, so I started on patching the kernel with stuff from suspend2.net, but it wouldn’t patch a debian’ised kernel source, or even any kernel source I tried to pull from kernel.org, then I remembered a post on debian-laptop about a some debian’ised suspend2 patches, some hunting through my inbox and I found it:

Hello, world.

I have just finished the first public (yet EXPERIMENTAL!) version of
the Debian software suspend 2 patch (www.suspend2.net). The patch
integrates with Debian’s kernel-package and modifies the
kernel-image in such a way as to automatically modify any initial
ramdisk and reinitialise swap partitions to preven data loss.

The patch currently supports Debian kernels 2.6.8 and 2.6.10. For
best results, use the latest kernel. I did most of my testing with
2.6.10 on i386. Patches for 2.4.2[789] and 2.6.11 are also included
but not tested. 2.4.27 does not currently apply to the Debian
kernels, but should be usable with vanilla ones.

Help in porting the patch to other Debian kernels would be greatly
appreciated. I am especially looking for an elegant way to support
Debian and vanilla kernels from the same source.

I am not going to upload the patch to unstable yet, but it has been
submitted to the Debian experimental archive. It will go into
unstable when I have received enough positive feedback and no
serious bugs exist.

At this point, I want to thank Nigel and everyone else who
contributed for the slick patch, which works very nicely. Also
thanks to Nigel for backporting the 2.1 version to the 2.6.8.1
kernel, which is going to be the standard 2.6 kernel for Debian
sarge.

If you want to give the patch a whirl, you can obtain it from the
following APT repository:

deb http://debian.madduck.net ~madduck/packages/stage/kernel-patch-suspend2/
deb-src http://debian.madduck.net ~madduck/packages/stage/kernel-patch-suspend2/

then install it:

apt-get update
apt-get install kernel-patch-suspend2

and then compile the kernel:

tar xjf /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.10.tar.bz2
cd kernel-source-2.6.10
make-kpkg –added-patches suspend2 … binary

Then, install the kernel-image and reboot.

Note that I did my testing using an initial ramdisk (basically the
plain Debian kernel with SUSPEND2 enabled). If you can use an
initial ramdisk, pass the –initrd option to make-kpkg and be done.
Without an initial ramdisk, you have to make sure to pass the right
‘resume2′ value to the kernel via Grub/Lilo, or whichever is your
bootloader. I plan to add a warning about this when I have more
time.

I suggest also pulling in the hibernate image (kernel images with
this patch will Recommend it). With UseSwsusp2 set to yes in
/etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf, just running ‘hibernate’ should
suspend the machine, and it should come back up without any more of
your doing when you start it again.

Even though I did all testing on my productive machine(s) and lost
no data (knock on wood), it’s probably best if you try it on
a less-important machine. Nevertheless, you can turn off
$CHECK_SWAP_PARTITIONS_ON_BOOT in /etc/default/suspend2 to prevent
the swap partition check. Make sure to read
http://suspend2.net/HOWTO-4.html#ss4.4 about this issue.

Have fun, feedback welcome.

– Please do not send copies of list mail to me; I read the list! .”`. martin f. krafft : :’ : proud Debian developer, admin, user, and author `. `’` `- Debian – when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!

It works a treat!
After you’ve built your patched kerel, grab the hibernate package from suspend2.net:

wget http://cp.yi.org/apt/hibernate/hibernate_1.05-1_all.deb

dpkg -i hibernate_1.05-1_all.deb

BTW, I rebuild my kernel’s slightly differently, I don’t do initrd or anything, so all I did was:

cd /usr/src/linux
make-kpkg –added-patches suspend2 –append-to-version -sm7-suspend2 kernel_image

I do this because I sm7 indicates that this is the 7th interation of tweaking settings for this laptop, and that the suspend2 patch has been applied, it makes the kernel namesa bit long, but easier to spot what I’ve done

Reboot using your new kernel, et voila! You’re ready to hibernate, get all your usual apps up and running (Thunderbird, Firefox, Word using CrossOver), fire up a shell, su to root and type hibernate, it rocks…

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My main laptop died the other day, I’ve had enough. It didn’t die hardware wise, a single file in the Windows XP Pro install got damaged & that was it. The machine was dodo like. After some checks with the Recovery Console and various F8 options (like don’t reboot on a crash so that I can see the error!) I discovered that the software hive from the registry was damaged, there were a couple of MSDN/TechNet notes on how to recover from this, including using the Recovery console to remove the existing hives & replace them with some backups from the original install, you can see more here.

I’d been getting increasingly frustrated with the laptop, it’s no slouch, a Fujitsu-Siemens S6120, 1.6Ghz Centrino, 1024Mb, 40Gb disk, but it took forever to resume from a hibernate. If you hibernated it whilst docked & resumed un-docked, it would crash. Firefox seemd to get more & more sluggish.

I know not all of these problems are Microsofts, but it’s urged me to try something different on the laptop, I’m a Network & Systems Specialist by day, I work in mixed environments, I look after alot of Sun/Solaris, Intel/Windows & Intel/Linux kit, my previous laptop (actually, the one I’m writing this on, another Fujitsu-Siemns, a B2130 this time) ran Debian/Woody for a long time, with alot of neat features working, like the touchscreen, bluetooth, gprs, masqmail, mutt & isync, jpilot, file syncing with unison over ssh, wireless with waproamd.

When work gave me the S6120, I thought I’d run it out of the box for a while to see how we got along, initially things worked well, I got PuTTY installed for remote access to *nix boxes, I got VMWare installed for a couple of *nix & Windows VM’s for playing & breaking things. I disovered some promsing software for keeping my Palm, Palm Desktop & my phone all in sync (MobileMaster, it works,mostly)and some other neat bluetooth/phone tools like Float’s FMA. When stuck on site in an office with no external internet access, I even managed to share the dialup line with collegues over bluetooth.

But resuming got slower, it would crash on resume every now & then.

It was time to see of Debian/Linux could give me a decent working environment for my current needs. I work for a medium sized high end software services company, I’m there IT manager, I also do “consultancy” for them, where then send me out on site & expect everything in the office to run as if I’m still there while I do the same for some other company

I need the following:

• Multiple network access methods (wired, wireless, gprs) all to work smoothly
• Offline Email
• Offline Network Shares
• VPN Access (currently we use SSH for crude but effective VPN access, IPSec is on it’s way, as is Citrix SG if I ever get a chance!)
• Proper wordprocessing & spreadsheet tools, this pretty much means Word & Excel, as we’re stuck in the “that’s what everybody else is using” rut.
• Encryptable disk space
• Cross platform encryptable USB stick support.

Easy huh?

It’s bed time, the rest of the story will have to wait until tomorrow…

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