It’s been a while since I’ve posted and the reason for posting was none to thrilling. Installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my primary desktop, I only realized after the fact that the partition I chose to format for the new install was my home directory from the previous install. I guess I was just a little bit too anxious. Not losing anything too important thanks to Dropbox and my massive media partition, I decided it was important that from now on I keep remote backups of my home directory. Repurposing my old laptop whose video card has been flaky seemed like the perfect choice so I fired up Ubuntu 8.04 desktop on that machine and configured its secondary hard drive to be for backups only. I followed this nifty tutorial here: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html. The only modifications I had made were in the cron script which I put $LPATH before $RPATH because rsync takes SRC and then DEST as parameters in that order making the script run improperly. Using a static IP for the server laptop on my router guarantees that as long as the box is up and running, I’ll have a nightly backup of everything in my home directory.

About 2 months ago I purchased parts for building my own desktop. The goal was to build a powerful desktop workstation for $500 while keeping in mind that this box will become a server in the next couple of years. Dedicated graphics was an unnecessary expense for such a machine. All I need is to power dual monitors smoothly so decent onboard graphics card saved me money there. Turns out this was not a great idea in the long run.
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For both Keryx and GSoC 2009′s WinLibre, we were in need of a Python port of dpkg’s version comparison algorithm. Instead of hacking together some new code, I decided to port dpkg’s algorithm straight from C++ to Python. The end result? A clean and simple algorithm that is capable of comparing quickly and accurately along with returning results in standard Python sorting function format (-1 for less than, 0 for equal, 1 for greater than). This function can be used on a list to sort versions with the [].sort() function. Very handy and being written in pure Python makes it an excellent choice for cross-platform apt tools like Keryx as well as apps like WinLibre who use the same versioning system as Debian.

Check out the code here: http://bitbucket.org/excid3/winlibre/src/tip/wpkg/vercmp.py

Trying to get my USB modem to run in Virtualbox turned out to be more trouble than I suspected. The reason? All the USB devices were grayed out when I went to give the Guest OS the modem. With a bit of Googling I came across the answer.

First, the user must be part of the vboxusers group. You can check this quickly by running cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers and checking to see that your user is in the last section of the resulting string. Here is what mine looked like:

chris@chris-desktop:~$ cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers
vboxusers:x:116:chris

Take note of the 116 here. This is the group id number or gid. We need this to enable usb for that group. For Debian, virtual filesystems (which usb is) is taken care of in /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh so we are going to need to edit this file:


chris@chris-desktop:~$ su
Password:
chris-desktop:/home/chris# nano /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh


Now you’re going to want to go down and find a line that looks like this: domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs -onodev,noexec,nosuid. All we need to do is to append 2 options to this line: devgid=116,devmode=664. This allows us as members of vboxusers to mount usbfs/usbdevfs inside Virtualbox. Your line should look similar to the following with 116 replaced with the id number of your vboxusers group:

domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs -onodev,noexec,nosuid,devgid=116,devmode=664


There you have it! Give your Debian box a quick reboot and you’re set.

Home for the summer means coming back home to dialup. I built a desktop computer for work and needed internet connectivity, even though the best I can get is dialup at home. I’ve got a Zoom 3095 USB modem and I am running a dual boot of Debian and Windows XP.

Being the Linux user that I am, working from Windows XP consistently was not much of an option so I set out to get Gnome-PPP installed on Debian. I used Keryx to gather the packages for me. The Zoom modem’s USB entry in lsusb was:

Bus 002 Device 005: ID 0803:3095 Zoom Telephonics, Inc.

The modem was detected properly with Debian and connected fine.

The problem I’m facing is that the modem’s transfer speeds are very slow. It’s basically a 14.4 kb/s connection at best. Installing the dgcmodem driver from linuxant.com did nothing to improve the speeds I am getting. Does anyone have a fix? I’m a bit stumped at the moment for what to do.

For now I’ve setup a WinXP VM in Virtualbox and am using the modem through it. Kind of a pain but certainly easier than using two computers for work.