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Release Dates for Debian

Mark Shuttleworth has written an interesting post about Ubuntu release dates [1]. He claims that free software distributions are better able to meet release dates than proprietary OSs because they are not doing upstream development. The evidence that free software distributions generally do a reasonable job of meeting release dates (and Ubuntu does an excellent […]

Making Linux DVDs

Anthony Towns writes about using an improved version of jigdo to download CD/DVD images [1]. His improvement is basically to pipeline operation for better performance.

Jigdo (the Jigsaw download) is a tool to download a set of files and then use them to create a CD or DVD image [2]. The idea is that most […]

Motivation and Perspective

Patrick Winnertz writes about the demotivating effect of unreasonable delays on joining the Debian project [1].

While I agree that things need to be improved in terms of getting people in the project in a timely manner (the suggestion of providing assistants seems good), I don’t think that anyone has a good reason for being […]

Resizing the Root Filesystem

Uwe Hermann has described how to resize a root filesystem after booting from a live-cd or recovery disk [1]. He makes some good points about resizing an LVM PV (which I hadn’t even realised was possible).

The following paragraph is outdated, see the update at the end: Incidentally it should be noted that if your […]

Software Development is a Team Sport

Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “its not like commercial fishing where many hands are used to pull in the net at the same time“.

I think that software development for any non-trivial […]

Debian Work and Upstream

Steve Kemp writes about security issues with C programs [1]. It seems obvious that if you are going to do something that is overly tricky (such as anything related to setuid programs) then you should have a good knowledge of what you are doing. Steve goes a little further and suggests that anyone who doesn’t […]

Athlon Memory Problems

I had an old Compaq Athlon 1GHz system that seemed to be broken. It would display random things on the screen from the BIOS and fail the boot, it looked like a motherboard problem. Fortunately before I gave it away (I give away all my broken machines to members of my local LUG who want […]

Linux Resource Controls

Using the “ulimit” controls over process resource use it is possible to limit RAM for processes and to limit the number of processes per UID. The problem is that this often is only good for accidental problems not dealing with malicious acts.

For a multi-user machine each user needs to be allowed to have two […]

Write Intent Bitmaps

When previously writing about how I partition disks [1] I mentioned that I use smaller RAID partitions than the maximum size to reduce reconstruction time in the event of a crash.

Linux software RAID has a feature known as write intent bitmaps which means that every time some data is about to be written the […]

IDE DMA and Flash

I’ve just been working with a Flash device used as /dev/hda (the root filesystem) for a router. The aim is much the same as with my idea of using an EeePC as a router [1]. The client in question may consider the EeePC for future deployments but are concerned about the ability of ASUS to […]