• Linux Containers

    Until recently I was a relatively satisfied Linux VServer user. But when I upgraded to Debian 6 about half a year ago, OpenAFS aklog stopped to work inside the guests. There were always problems with running OpenAFS clients inside VServer guests but this time I couldn’t find any workaround. I had to solve the problem and […]

  • Smart phones one year later

    When I was looking for a new mobile phone and looked at smart phones more than a year ago, I’ve found there has been no working smart phone equipped with a truly free operating system providing rich set of applications and nice development environment. It seems there happened at least two important changes in this […]

  • Lessons from Sharp Zaurus

    There are areas where free software community fails. Not for technical reasons or lack of resources, but because of management and strategic planning incompetence. Once I got an idea to get a Linux handheld. There were two models available at the time: Sharp Zaurus and Nokia tablet. The Nokia tablet didn’t have any keyboard so […]

  • Smart phones

    My old mobile phone becomes a bit unreliable, so I look for a new one. Perhaps a smart phone would be useful, but I’m not interested in proprietary and virus prone OSes without available source code and lacking good development tools and community support. Given these constraints there are at most two options: Google Android […]

  • Another udev discovery

    After very long time I’ve finally found how to make my two USB keyboards and mice accessible under constant file system names. Here is the trick: ACTION!=”add|change”, GOTO=”keymouse_end” SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}==”03″, ATTRS{bInterfaceProtocol}==”01″, ENV{ID_CLASS}=”kbd” KERNEL==”mouse*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0067″, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0458″, SYMLINK+=”input/mouse-genius” KERNEL==”event*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0067″, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0458″, ENV{ID_CLASS}==”kbd”, SYMLINK+=”input/keyboard-genius” KERNEL==”mouse*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”071d”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”045e”, SYMLINK+=”input/mouse-ms” KERNEL==”event*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”071d”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”045e”, ENV{ID_CLASS}==”kbd”, SYMLINK+=”input/keyboard-ms” LABEL=”keymouse_end” I can boot without […]

  • Using three monitors

    I’ve been using two monitors with two graphics cards on my computer for long time. I’ve got another spare old CRT monitor so why not to utilize it? I connected it to a free VGA port on one of the cards and started experiments. Compared to the two independent graphics cards setup, using two monitors […]

  • Installing pdaXrom

    Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 is shipped with its own Linux operating system based on Qtopia. The system is not bad, it is stable and although it requires some updates to become really usable, it provides nice PDA environment covering many areas of use. But it suffers of some problems: it’s incompatible (as it uses Qtopia instead […]

  • Booting Debian from a USB drive

    I’ve recently installed Debian etch distribution on an external USB hard drive. I was positively surprised how smooth the installation process was and how well the resulting system worked. Especially Czech environment was complete and well set up for the Czech speaking user without any need of further adjustments. The release managers and the debian-installer […]

  • CUPS 1.2 finally working

    About a week ago, I’ve upgraded CUPS from 1.1 to 1.2 on my print server. I know one should never touch a working CUPS installation, but as Debian 4.0 is based on CUPS 1.2 I’d have to make the upgrade sooner or later anyway. Of course, after the upgrade my printing stopped working as usually. […]

  • Multiseat finally working

    When I upgraded my computer, I wanted to make it available to my family even when I’m sitting in front of it (this happens most of the time). Natural way to allow this is to connect additional terminals to the computer. The simplest, cheapest and power saving kind of terminal consists just of a set […]