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xbacklight, squeeze and my NC10

bd — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:22:36 +0000

I recently updated my NC10 from lenny to squeeze. After that xbacklight stopped working:

$ xbacklight -set 50
No outputs have backlight property

Looks like the solution is to upgrade to the latest BIOS (11CA, available from samsungpc.com).

I created a FreeDOS USB stick with information available from Smörgåsbord and fdos.org, copied the BIOS to it, bootet from the stick and successfully flashed my NC10.

Now xbacklight works again.

Lenny NetworkManager Patch

bd — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:36:11 +0000

NetworkManager in Lenny writes it’s PID to /etc/resolv.conf:

### BEGIN INFO
#
# Modified_by:  NetworkManager
# Process:      /usr/bin/NetworkManager
# Process_id:   2869
#
### END INFO

This leads to etckeeper displaying a change every reboot:

This patch to the debian package stops NetworkManager from writing the INFO block to /etc/resolv.conf.

Alternatively, there is a backports package for lenny with an updated version of NetworkManager.

Debian with root on LVM on an USB drive

bd — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:33:49 +0000

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.

Nokia E61i and exim4

bd — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:51:24 +0000

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.

Thunderbird 2.0 and Enigmail

bd — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:53:19 +0000

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.

Iceweasel and Scalix

bd — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:35:11 +0000

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.

Brother HL-8 PS and cups

bd — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:12:10 +0000

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.

Firefox 2 and tabs

bd — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:03:16 +0000

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

Samba, netbios alias and SP2

bd — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 17:29:01 +0000

After adding this to my smb.conf

smb ports = 139

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

X.org 7, Sid and ATI

bd — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 09:25:00 +0000

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