krono

ls -1 *.wav | while read FILE; do sox "$FILE" -r 22050 "NOVO/$FILE" compand 0.001,0.15 -28,-inf,-24,-24 -0.3 0 0 resample -qs; done

sed -e 's/#.*//' -e 's/[ ^I]*$//' -e '/^$/ d'

…so I don’t have to think of it again.

Simply wonderful.

I don’t have to get it from testing and “break” my stable box with mixed trees!

Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

Add to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=etch-backports
Pin-Priority: 750
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Add to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00Cache:
APT::Cache-Limit "33554432";
APT::Default-Release "etch-backports";

Do:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

htmldoc --size a4 --linkstyle plain --webpage --no-jpeg --tocheader ... --tocfooter ... --top 0 --bottom 20 --right 20 --left 20 -f book.pdf *.html

Just checked:

imp@extweb:~> uptime
2:34pm up 674 days 3:03, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.11, 0.09

Minimal sources.list configuration.

/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib

When updgrading, stable versions of packages need to stay on stable. unstable versions are usually newer, so they overwrite stable versions if this is not properly handled with using Pin-Priority as stated below. If not explicitly requested, “apt-get install” installs stable version of a package.

/etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

To install f.e. unstable version of a package with dependencies from unstable as well (preferred method, AFAIK), do the following:
apt-get install package -t unstable

To install the same package, but to resolve it’s deps from stable:
apt-get install package/unstable

So, I am about to replace the Linux distro on my desktops, on my laptop and desktop machine, so I’m considering my choices… Debian-based is the way to go, so it’s either Debian or Ubuntu.

I wouldn’t go pure, vanilla Debian because of it’s “correctness” (ok ok, I can add other repositories to the system, but it simply doesn’t feel… “native” enough?). I’ve tried Kubuntu, but it simply didn’t feel polished enough; it felt like Ubuntu’s bastard child, management wise (Adept, KDE based apt frontend, crashed on me several times, dist-upgrade from 6.10 depended on some GTK stuff which wasn’t installed automagically, so I had to figure out “by hand” what to install — more info on that on my Launchpad bug report, etc).

That lead me to try Gnome-based, good ol’ Ubuntu, and I have to say that so far, few glitches aside, it looks good. I haven’t used Gnome for some time now and it seems really nice. Gnome itself and Nautilus, as a file manager, really feel snappy and stable. Gnome Terminal looks nicer than before and more usable.

Anyway, as a regular nitpicker, few downsides. First, LILO didn’t install properly (Grub was complaining about residing on XFS, which is a no-no, eh?), so I had to manually edit lilo.conf, only to find out that some vital options are left out, such as “prompt”, “lba32″ and “compact”, framebuffer “vga” line, too, and I had to add the timeout… Hmm, some really pretty much expected stuff? Why are they left out? Beats me. Then, in fstab, vfat partition had fs_passno = 1, so it was checked on every boot. Onward to Gnome itself. Ugly, anti-aliased fonts? Unlike KDE, Gnome Font preferences don’t include an option to exclude some font size ranges from anti-aliasing, so everything is anti-aliased. Ok, I edited it by hand only to find out that the fonts that came with Ubuntu look terrible when not anti-aliased. I installed MS fonts and… what? They look ugly, too? Hmmm… I remember that Freetype has some bytecode interpreter option that makes those fonts look just like in Windows, but it is, to quote Freetype site, “potentially patent infringing”, so it’s disabled by default in Ubuntu… Damn that correctness. I found on Ubuntu forums a source for bytecode interpreter-enabled version of Freetype, so I installed that and FINALLY fonts looked BEARABLE. Then, the system doesn’t have Adobe Flash player installed as default. Ok, I can understand that, that perhaps in the licence it doesn’t allow automatic installation, or even inclusion in some other form like a Linux distro, but SuSE somehow managed to pull it off: the installer asks you whether you want to install that plugin nicely.

That’s it for the first thoughts, more on Ubuntu later (perhaps) heh.

Oooooh, WHAT THE FUCK?

Used the config file from 2.6.17, did a “make oldconfig”, answered to 20-sh questions (about new stuff), only to find out that it panics because it can’t find root FS..!? Hmm, booted the old kernel, did menuconfig, only to find out that CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PIIX was moved to another option tree and wasn’t properly selected as “Y” from the old config, so SATA wasn’t available. When I fixed that, I found out that NAT and most of previous iptables functionality (from the previous kernel) simply.. wasn’t there. After some Googling, I found out that the kernel devs made a major reorganization of the option trees, for some unknown reason (to me at least). The jump was almost like from 2.4 -> 2.6..

Crazyness! Lunacy!

Solved a nasty configuration error on Postfix with only virtual users/domains where a domain was listed in $mydestination, causing mail received for that domain to be treated as local and for local user delivery instead of virtual. Whoops. Learning new stuff every day…