Yet Another Linux Blog

Stumbled across this one today: Make The Move. I really like the design and the verbiage, and of course, the link to the The Open CD.

Today I stumbled across a bugzilla report even more ridiculous than any I’ve ever seen.

Here was my previous favorite bug report: Add Print option to main context menu.

Here’s my new favorite bug report: if rpm exits in mid-transaction, the RPM data base can be left in an inconsistent state

Notice how no amount of agreement on the user side, and no amount of begging to write this two-line patch and no amount of ridicule can get to some of these developers. “NOT A BUG!” they say. “WONTFIX” they say.

I guess the main reason that these things upset me is that the problems are not technical in nature, but emotional or political. There’s no good technical reason to not do what the users ask for, but some guy with some clout in the project decides it won’t be done, and that’s that. What are we supposed to do, fork the software over something so silly?

I ran across a nice link that addresses a pet peeve of mine: iso-date.

If more people used international standard date formats, the world would be a better place.

Here’s a very nice writeup about Vista’s “costs”, which I found through the always excellent CryptoGram:

Peter Gutmann: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

I have to admit that I only read through about the first third of the whole thing, but even that should be enough for the average person to be convinced to not use Vista.

Today I had a question pop into my head: “what’s the equivalent for `chkconfig` on Debian?” As usual, a Google search revealed that I was not the only one: chkconfig for debian?. update-rc.d is close to chkconfig. I most commonly use `chkconfig - -list` on RH machines to look at the service settings, but there’s no equivalent update-rc.d argument. However, a look at the update-rc.d manpage reveals:

Please note that this program was designed for use in package maintainer scripts and, accordingly, has only the very limited functionality required by such scripts. System administrators are not encouraged to use update-rc.d to manage runlevels. They should edit the links directly or use runlevel editors such as sysv-rc-conf and bum instead.

I’ve used Boot Up Manager (BUM) on Ubuntu before and came away unimpressed, mostly because it was a clunky GTK thing. sysv-rc-conf is what I really want. It’s still not quite the same as chkconfig because chkconfig is text-based while sysv-rc-conf is ncurses-based, but it’s close enough.

Summary: want `chkconfig` for Debian? `apt-get install sysv-rc-conf`!

I’ve been annoyed at the interlacing artifacts when I watch DVDs on my Linux box, so I experimented with some settings. On my machine (Ubuntu 6.06.1, proprietary nvidia drivers), the gxine “deinterlace” option seems to do nothing. I installed mplayer from the repos, and checked mplayer’s settings. The default value also doesn’t help, and neither do “-vop il” or “-vop dint”, but “-vop lavcdeint” clears them up like a charm! You do get a slightly different artifact at the edges due to an averaging of the color values, but it’s much better than the “comb effect”.

mplayer -vop lavcdeint dvd://

This article is a great guide to setting up a corporate directory using OpenLDAP. Ti Leggett’s article at Linux Journal.

(This post was in “draft” stage for months, but I don’t have anything else to add.)