swfdec-mozilla, which I had added hoping to get Cooliris working (no such luck — didn’t work with flashplugin-installer either). No flash now, but also no load when browsing the web. (And no burning sensation from the laptop.)
Just a short note on getting a minimal Asterisk environment installed on current versions of Debian and Ubuntu:
aptitude install asterisk m-a a-i zaptel modprobe ztdummy
Also add ztdummy to /etc/modules so it gets loaded when the system starts.
If the m-a command is not found, install the module-assistant package.
I’ve been always a fan of the robust upgrade procedure documented in the Debian release notes, which has worked without problems even over ssh to remote machines. This has made upgrading very painless (at least since sarge — I haven’t used Debian actively longer than that).
Yesterday I ran into a problem, though, which was only saved by having remote console access. I have a system with a slightly more complicated disk setup: it has two SCSI disks running as a RAID 1 array using md and lvm. Upon rebooting after the upgrade, the system didn’t reappear on the network. What I found on the console was the initramfs panic shell: the root file system had not been found. Rebooting the old etch kernel worked fine.
The workaround proved to be very simple, once I distilled it from the search engine results. Just add rootdelay=10 to the kernel options in the bootloader. I’m using GRUB so this translates to editing the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub.
I had also added raid1 to modules in /etc/initramfs-tools and regenerated the initrd, but that (alone) didn’t help. I’m not even sure it is needed at all — it might already be included anyway when using MODULES=most in initramfs.conf.
I’ve been slowly pushing upgrades through my NetBSD machines and recently upgraded the “music server” that runs SlimServer to power my SqueezeBoxen. That brought a new version of Perl on the machine, which made SlimServer unhappy — it wouldn’t start anymore. I tried to rerun the little script that downloads the “blessed” versions of various CPAN packages from Slim Devices, but the files needed for my trusty old 6.2.1 version were no longer available on their server.
Well, I can’t live without the SqueezeBoxen so an emergency update was needed. (more…)
Some time ago I added some UTF-8 pages to this site. I promptly started receiving one error message per page from the Swish-e search engine I’m using. Of course, the search results also showed “garbage” since Swish-e only handles single byte characters.
Today I got tired of the errors arriving in my mailbox, so I dug into the code and fixed things. (more…)
For a long time now I’ve removed the generator meta tag from all WordPress installations I’ve setup. Mentioning WordPress is just honey for the bees. Since I removed the meta tags the amount of spam has decreased remarkably. Posts about WordPress are targeted much sooner and for much longer than other posts.
Starting with WordPress 2.4 the generator information is inserted by the core code, as opposed to the theme. This means that the meta tag will reappear even if you have removed it from your theme. However, this is actually a good change, because now you can disable the tag not only from the HTML pages generated by the theme, but also from all other formats WordPress outputs. The information is created by a couple of functions centrally instead of scattered instances through the code.
I’ve created a plugin to accomplish this: No Generator works with the trunk code from svn, and will work with 2.4 once it is released.