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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 […]
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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. […]
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Ratpoison, Conkeror
With the increasing complexity of modern user interfaces the number of annoying bugs grows. What is worse, number of long standing unfixed annoying bugs grows. The overall number of bugs grows and I’m able to do something only with a small part of them. Complex user interfaces have been being released without coming through a […]
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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 […]
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CUPS problems again
Well, not only proprietary drivers are crappy, they are just more crappy than anything else. Free software sometimes suffers from serious problems too. I use a dedicated virtual machine to manage my printing services. One of the reasons I’ve put it on a separate machine is stability: While software on my other machines is updated, […]
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digiKam
My long term observation about GNOME and KDE is that GNOME is stronger in desktop, while KDE is stronger in applications. One of the excellent KDE applications is digiKam. The most popular free image processing tool, GIMP, hasn’t succeeded to become a tool for serious work. Its lack of important features (such as 16-bit color […]
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Proprietary drivers and Linux
ATI graphics cards suck and I can’t recommend buying them. I’ve spent significant amount of time trying to get run their proprietary drivers on Linux and the conclusion is that the X.Org free drivers are dozen times better than those from ATI, despite 3D acceleration and TV-out don’t work with my ATI card. Effectively, my […]
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Linux becoming a mature operating system
Linux has always been a nice free and stable operating system. But from the user’s point of view it was somewhat primitive and lacking some basic features. Perhaps that was one of the primary reasons why GNU continued to develop another operating system, the Hurd. But things have recently improved a lot. By integrating FUSE […]
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AMD64 dual core as a power saving solution
One of the interesting features of the AMD64 X2 architecture is that its declared power consumption is not higher than of single core AMD64 processors running on similar frequencies. So if you perform significant amount of tasks that can be parallelized (e.g. running a build daemon), you can choose between two different advantages of the […]
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udev troubles finally solved
After spending total amount of several dozens hours of fighting with the infamous udev arbitrary device name assignment, I’ve finally won. Device name assignment is absolutely underdocumented and I was able to get it work only thanks to the kind people sharing their experience and knowledge on the net. For the record, after a lot […]