Hide in the fog

Today, i decided to do some updates on the server. So i updated debian, wordpress and removed roundcube. The reason for removing roundcube was that i screwed the roundcube upgrade. Instead of roundcube, i installed Hastymail. So far, i like it a lot, since it is cleaner and faster then roundcube.

After struggling around with OpenSolaris 2008.11, i have decided to install some new shiny sort of ubuntu. So i downloaded the 64 bit version of linux mint version 5 (which is based on ubuntu hardy) and upgraded it to intrepid (and the corresponding felicia). I needed the 64 bit version not only due to the 6GB RAM in my computer,  but also due to some performance gains, which i recognized especially in the calculation of large matrices.

Recently, after listening to a talk by Detlef Drewanz, i spent two whole days installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 from www.opensolaris.org. I was astonished that my NVidia card worked out of the box with all the fancy 3D stuff. But then i tried to get more involved into costumizing my installation. And there the trouble began:

The first installation on my work pc was fine but the user i created was not in the root group/profile. So i had to reboot into single user mode and change the /etc/user_attr file. Just add “;roles=root” to the user in order to achieve a “su -” and gain root rights. (I don’t know if this is a good idea from the security point of view?) Updates and other installations worked smoothly on that pc.

But why is the (default) user “jack” still existing after the installation? This, in my opinion, could lead to severe security problems?

But i also wanted to try out OpenSolaris at home. So i installed it on my home pc and found out, that my US-Robotics WLAN (zyd driver) adapter was NOT working. Drivers are avaible but needed to be compiled, which was not possible because of missing internet connection. (What was first the egg or the chicken?) So i thought i could connect a old router, with dd-wrt configured as client bridge, to the ethernet port. Full success under Linux. But full failure under OpenSolaris 2008.11, because the Attansic network device was also NOT working. Drivers are avaible here but i was unable (due to missing documention!) to install the binary modules. I also could not compile the source, due to missing development environment, which is due to the missing internet connection.

So, i’m giving up on OpenSolaris until the frustrated userbase is big enough, that Sun (and others) will create a usable OpenSolaris edition, which includes at least all possible network drivers and a good documentation project. A dvd edition of OpenSolaris with a whole development environment would also be great.

Hello,

My lovely wife and I where on vacation to Berlin. There, we watched the great show “Glücksbringer” starring Dr. Eckart von Hirschhausen. If you get a chance to see him, go for it. It is really fun and contemplative at the same time.

I also bought a Asus eee PC 1000H, which came with Windows XP and a 160GB HardDisk. The battery life is really good. It kept up running more than 4 hours hard work. Back home, i installed Ubuntu (eee PC edition?) on that tiny little thing. Now i rellay have a toy to play with.

After some time, i managed to get GNOME Photo Printer back online again. The links to the packages remained but the website link has changed. You can find the newest versions at the right menu-bar under projects and GNOME Photo Printer.

Also, i removed the german description of how to use gimp for making panoramo pictures. The description was outdated and there exist some good programs (hugin and Panorama Tools) which will assist the user by creating panorama views.

Hello world!

After leasing a new server (at vlinux.de) almost a month ago, i now had the time to do the administrative tasks. I was installing WordPress, setting up courier-imap in order to get the Roundcube webmailer running.

Everything works perfectly so far. There are some small details left and i hope i can setup the opensource projects, which i’m working on, back again as soon as possible.