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Debian with root on LVM on an USB drive
June 2nd, 2008 :: Permalink

I was getting root file system not found errors when booting etch from a USB disk. As it turns out that the boot ramdisk did scan all devices for LVM partitions before USB drive detection was finished.

By adding rootdelay=10 to the kernel boot options the system will wait for ten seconds before activating LVM partitions giving the USB subsystem enough time to activate all devices.

by bd in debian
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Nokie E61i and exim4
February 29th, 2008 :: Permalink

Debian’s exim4 uses gnutls which has a feature that will not allow my E61i to use STARTTLS (see #438137) . Perhaps stunnel can help here …

Update: To advertise PLAIN authentication with exim4 for connections origination from localhost I used the following statement in my plaintext authentication configuration (broken into several lines for better readability):

server_advertise_condition =
 ${if or
  {
   {!eq{$tls_cipher}{}
  }
  {
   eq{$interface_address}{127.0.0.1}}
  }
  {yes}{no}
 }

That way plaintext auhentication is allowed for TLS sessions or unencrypted sessions originating from localhost.

Using stunnel and a default ssmtp configuration I can now send mails from my mobile phone.

by bd in E61i, debian
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Thunderbird 2.0 and Enigmail
August 6th, 2007 :: Permalink

After my upgrade to Thunderbird / Iceweasel 2.0 Enigmail was no longer working (see 427591). Seems like something mixed up the versions of installed add-ons. I fixed it by removing Enigmail, starting and stopping Thunderbird and reinstalling Enigmail.

by bd in debian
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Iceweasel and Scalix
January 26th, 2007 :: Permalink

The webmail frontend of Scalix only supports certain browser types which it checks using the User Agent string supplied by the client. Due to debians move to iceweasel this fails.

With the help of a plugin called User Agent Switcher you can use these settings to make things work.

by bd in debian, firefox
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Brother HL-8 PS and cups
January 19th, 2007 :: Permalink

I finally managed to get my old printer - a Brother HL-8 PS - working with cups. Head over to openprinting.org and download the PPD there.

by bd in debian
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Firefox 2 and tabs
December 4th, 2006 :: Permalink

And again an upgrade changed the UI. Each tab has its own close button, the one on the far right, closing the active tab is gone. If you like me liked the old behaviour better go to about:config and change browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3.

For more helpfull hints go to lifehacker.com

Update: It seems like there will be more options I’ll tweak, for example set network.dns.disableIPv6 to false, network.protocol-handler.external.mailto to true and network.protocol-handler.app.mailto to icedove

by bd in debian, firefox
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Samba, netbios alias and SP2
July 19th, 2006 :: Permalink

After adding this to my smb.conf

smb ports = 139

XP with SP2 could again locate my samba server via its alias.

by bd in debian
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X.org 7, Sid and ATI
April 22nd, 2006 :: Permalink

Here is an HowTo on upgrading X.org from 6.9 to 7.0. The ati drivers are getting uninstalled due to dependency problems, but they work fine: #362087, #362485

by bd in debian
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sudo and {http,ftp}_proxy
April 11th, 2006 :: Permalink

The current debian sid sudo package is very restricitve when it comes to environment variables, even http_proxy and ftp_proxy are unset. Thus

$ sudo apt-get update

will fail. You can exclude these specific variables from beeing unset by running

$ visudo

and add this option

Defaults env_keep=”http_proxy ftp_proxy”

by bd in debian
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X.org and ATI working again
March 12th, 2006 :: Permalink

The modular X CVS HEAD sources fixed the freezes with my ATI card. Build instructions are here.

Update: I got my german keyboard working again through the following steps. I am pretty sure that some of them are redundant.

Creating some links (xorg is installed beneath /opt/xorg-cvs):

$ cd /etc/X11
$ ln -s /opt/xorg-cvs/share/X11/xkb .
$ cd /usr
$ ln -s /opt/xorg-cvs X11R6
$ cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
$ ln -s /opt/xorg-cvs/share/X11/xkb .

Editing /etc/X11/xorg.cfg

...
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"

Option "CoreKeyboard"

Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbKeycodes" "xfree86"
Option "XkbTypes" "default"
Option "XkbCompat" "default"
Option "XkbSymbols" "de(pc105)"
Option "XkbGeometry" "pc(pc105)"
EndSection
...

And running this:

setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout de -variant nodeadkeys
by bd in debian
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Too Cool for Internet Explorer