Debian Stable 8.0 Jessie Released

After four years, this is our first post.

If you haven't being connected to the Internet, I want to give you a heads up - Debian Jessie 8.0 was released!

Source

Among the notable feature is the usage of Systemd!
Quoting the release page;

After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.
Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie.

Feel free to try and shoot out your comment at the bottom of this post.
Thanks!

Background on Ubuntu

Recently, I installed Ubuntu on my machine. I have a folder called climbingwallpapers in

/usr/share/backgrounds/

with all kinds of background pictures. Anyway, I wanted to have a bunch of desktop background that changes from time to time. I notice that there is an xml file that does this in one of the default installation folder with images.

I'm sure there is an easier way to come up with the xml file for the backgrounds in my folder.

But I didn't bother to google. Just wrote this short script....and ran it. If you would like to use it, I've attached it here. Just make the necessary changes and run it like...

$ python generatedesktoptheme.py > background-1.xml

the script is below...

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import re

transition = '5.0'
duration = '300'
count = 0
firstfile = ''
ffrom = ''
path = '/usr/share/backgrounds/climbingwallpaper/'

print "<background>"
print "  <starttime>"
print "    <year>2009</year>"
print "    <month>08</month>"
print "    <day>04</day>"
print "    <hour>00</hour>"
print "    <minute>00</minute>"
print "    <second>00</second>"
print "  </starttime>"
print "<!-- This animation will start at midnight. -->"

for f in os.listdir(path):
 if re.search("\.jpg|\.gif", f):
   count+=1
   if count == 1:
     firstfile = f
 else:
   continue

 f = path+f
 if ffrom == '':
   ffrom = f
   print "  <static>"
   print "    <duration>"+duration+"</duration>"
   print "    <file>"+f+"</file>"
   print "  </static>"
 else:
   print "  <transition>"
   print "    <duration>" +transition+"</duration>"
   print "    <from>"+ffrom+"</from>"
   print "    <to>"+f+"</to>"
   print "  </transition>"
   ffrom = f
   print "  <static>"
   print "    <duration>"+duration+"</duration>"
   print "    <file>"+f+"</file>"
   print "  </static>"

print "  <transition>"
print "    <duration>"+transition+"</duration>"
print "    <from>"+ffrom+"</from>"
print "    <to>"+path+firstfile+"</to>"
print "  </transition>"
print "</background>"

Debian Wheezy/Sid/testing

Hi,

I rarely blogged here - since most of the time I wasn't using Debian, but it's derived work - Ubuntu. Now that I'm getting bored facing the workable and hardly to break distro, I dare myself to use Debian Testing for my Dell D430 laptop.

The installation isn't taking so much pain, but the first problem that I met is my keyboard and my mouse weren't worked even during the GDM session. I managed to use its rescue DVD and get  the shell works. Later I installed gpm and walla, it's worked.

I hanged at #debian but the communities suggested udev to be backdated(meaning, since I am using Testing distro, it will break, and don't complain, use Stable instead). However prior to trying udev workaround, gpm IS the answer and it's working. Experience does solve this problem.

Actually I installed OpenSuse 11.4 before.. since I want to open my opinion to other distro as well. But I keep breaking my machine, and does not get my binaries straight away.. meaning it lacking software compared to Debian based.

Debian however, lacking Kamoso, a webcam software that I chose to record. (actually I'm using ffmpeg to, but ffmpeg does not show real time video, I don't want to spend my time write another script just for that).

So still, Ubuntu IS the most relaxing distro for desktop as for me, as for now.

Trolls are welcomed.

Several important Bash shortcut

I've been using Bash a lot, and sometimes when typing long command line, having to press the arrow button multiple times to go to the first character is very tiring.

This are few important shortcut that I start to use:

Ctrl + a - Jump to the start of the line
Ctrl + e - Jump to the end of the line
Alt + d - Delete word
Alt + f - Move forward a word, where a word is composed of letters and digits
Alt + b - Move backward a word

More info from this blogpost : http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/08/bash-shell-shortcuts.html


Or from Bash Reference Manual regarding Readline Movement : http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Readline-Movement-Commands

Going deeper to look for what we have lost.

There are not much blog writeup on MyDebian blog, but occasionally, when i find something useful, no matter how mundane or easy it is for the experienced user, I will try to document it somewhere. The objective is that, maybe somehow, somewhere, someone will benefit from it.

Recently, I accidentally formatted one of my windows partition by mistake. I know this is something stupid to do.

And that's what happens when you start to use w1#%#0%s for a long time. You tend to stop thinking.

To cut the story short, I wanted to format one of my partitions, and accidentally formatted the wrong partition. Worst, I reformatted the partition with

$ mke2fs /dev/sdb5

When i realized what I have done, it was already too late. All I can do now is unmount it immediately and try to figure out a way to retrieve the files back from some forensics software. Supposedly, mke2fs allocates a new filesystem on the partition and does a low level format of putting zeros. I'm not sure how true is that. I felt so stupid for doing something without thinking...and I was banging my head on the table. The particular partition had many files....aside from my collection of movies, anime and tv series videos, a whole lot of research work is in that partition.

Anyhow, i wasted no time and tried to look for a way to recover the files. Thankfully, I found a forensics software tool on linux, and conveniently, you can use aptitude to install it. The software I installed is testdisk.

After....

$aptitude install testdisk

I ran the software with testdisk /dev/sdb, and i followed the menu and run an analyses and a deeper search

analyses on the whole disk. I'm not very sure how testdisk work, but its pretty cool. It managed to detect and identify my missing ntfs partition that was deleted. I managed to recover the missing ntfs partition and made copies of my missing files in that partition.

Well, I heard some people using it to find files they deleted by mistake. I hope you'll find a good use for it too.

Compiling Pidgin from source. Updated

It seems that a better method suggested by Donald P. Kong in the mydebian mailing list works better than compiling pidgin from scratch. Basically, you can use Apt-Pinning. A method to install unstable packages on a stable debian distribution. This is assuming that the package you want to install exist on the unstable version of debian and all dependencies can be resolve. Otherwise,

If the package still does not exist under unstable version of debian, you can use the method below.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently, I had trouble using pidgin. The pidgin I have installed is 2.4.3-4lenny2. though I usually just wait a while and aptitude update and upgrade for the latest version when using sid, however, on Lenny it seems to be a little bit slower, and I don't know if its the x86_64 bit architecture that I'm using or it just takes time to have the latest version of pidgin debian package to be included into Lenny repository. Seems yahoo made some changes to the server, yahoo messenger plugin does not work anymore on Pidgin. As of this date, the best way to go around this problem is to get the latest 2.5.7 version. Unfortunately, there is no .deb package for this yet on lenny. I can't wait. Yahoo messenger is already part of the daily life routine. And I dont want to boot on windows or install a VM for windows.

So what I did, was I had to compile it from scratch.
Long story short, just for the sake of documentation for others, I have included what I did here.

$ wget -c http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pidgin/pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ tar zjvf pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ cd pidgin-2.5.7
$ aptitude install intltool libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libdbus-1-dev gnutls-dev libnss3-dev
$ ./configure --disable-screensaver --disable-startup-notification --disable-gtkspell --disable-meanwhile --disable-avahi --disable-dbus --disable-perl --disable-tcl
$ aptitude purge pidgin
$ make
$ make install
$ ldconfig

I choose to disable some features of pidgin since I didn't think I will need it. I just need it to work until lenny comes up with an stable and updated working package.

After that, you can run pidgin as usual and connect to yahoo without any problems. The above instructions may not work since my PC is setup differently, if it doesn't, write a comment or join our mailing list. Maybe we can help you out.


Here are some references on the yahoo issues on pidgin. [http://theflamingbanker.blogspot.com/2009/06/some-clarification-on-yahoo-issues.html]

Java Plugin

Upon getting a new PC with a Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU to play around with, I have encountered many problems due to the 64-bit architecture being used. Particularly, many applications still does not have the 64-bit version yet.

Among the problems is java plugin for firefox or in the case of debian, its iceweasel. Previously, sun did not have the 64 bit version java plugin for firefox. But I googled around and found out that recently, for the version java6 update 12, they have already include the 64 bit version plugin. Among the reference I found was at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html which gives all supported plugins and what not for mozilla.

1) The easiest way to install sun java on debian is to:
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jdk
This will fortunately, as of this date, lenny installs java6 update 12.

2) After doing this, you will need to choose your default java to use. Just for compatibility with other applications, if you are using netbeans or what not. To choose the default java to use, type:
$ update-alternatives --config java
then select the sun java you just installed.

3) Next is to create a symbolic link for the firefox/iceweasel to the java plugin
$ cd /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so
That should install the java plugin for firefox, for x86_64 bit version, and those using the amd64 kernel.

4) I later restart firefox, and check to see if the java plugin is installed. At the location bar, i type about:plugins. To see if there is a java plugin support. Looks like things look good.


5) also tried to upload some pictures into facebook. The upload features requires java plugin. Seems to work great.

So there you go...java plugin seems to work. Have fun.