Developers' Blogs: Pete

well, i's out... i wonder how many of you use -stable? and -current?

well some appropriately reported secfixes can be found here which worth backporting:
http://bugs.frugalware.org/index.php?tasks=all&project=1&string=%5BSEC%5D&type=&sev=&due=&dev=&cat=&status=closed&perpage=50

Upon installing a FW developer machine in a vlan (not wlan, notice the simple v) enabled environment, i noticed the for-now essential vlan package is not in the first cd, and netconfig not supports it. What the heck are vlans, and why are they important?

Vlan is a layer2 technology in OSI terms (data link layer), a marginal hack on ethernet. basically it prefixes each ethernet frame leaving a switch with a vlan tag, which is a plain integer, and also expects frames coming in tagged by this way. under linux, you can utilize the feature by instructing the kernel with a cli tool to expect this, and configre the real interface to have subinterfaces. there are many naming schemes for generating the virtual subinterface's names, let's see a basic example:

(the only) physical interface: eth0
we have frames taggged for vlans 4,9 and 11
the resulting sub-ifs: eth0.4 eth0.9 eth0.11

the created sub-interfaces can be given unique layer3 configuration (IP address, mask, GW) like they were real phys interfaces.

What are the advantages? Well, you can have a 200 port switch, and put the first 100 and the others to different vlans and pretend you have 2 100-port switch, segmenting broadcast traffic, providing security (there is no inter-vlan communication*), maybe different gateways with different firewall policies.

Well, so far the vlan package is not needed, because on all ports untagged frames are leaving, only the switch knows internally that which ports belongs to which vlan and passes traffic according to the setup. The ports are configured into "access" mode, in Cisco's terminology.

But, let's say, we want to serve the two layer2 partitions with the same firewall - either we need 3 nic's (one for each vlan, and one for the uplink), or we configure the switch to pass us the traffic of both vlans on the same wire thus 2 interfaces are enough. Considering a desktop pc can be easily upgraded with about 5-6 nic's, this seems not a big leap forward, but consider enterprise equipment (like entry level 1U boxes) with limited or no expansions for extra nic's and ten or more vlans and i bet you get the point

* inter-vlan communication is only possible with a router (or a switch with layer3 capabilities aka. layer3 switches) routing L3 (ip, ipx, appletalk) packets. using various tunneling technologies, ethernet frame level communication can be estabilished, too

* the situation above is fictious, was created to provide a simple vlan primer and may lack design issues, therefore not recommended (without thinking over) in a real-life situation*

i've upped all my boxes to 0.4 and it's a good feeling - the installs went without hacking. if you configure your printer, don't forget to configure it after adding, my hp340 was configured to 75dpi (output was like first printers from the c64 era). After setting it to 300x300, greyscale (it's a mono laptop/portable printer, not working with the simple "340" settings with gimp-print), Floyd-Steinberg dithering, a very nice test page came out.

also if you use hp printers, and you have the option to choose from pcl or non-pcl drivers, i suggest the former.

It's a quite good idea to back up your mobile, because if it dies (or the SIM inside), you probably will loose more or less vital information like phone numbers, SMSes...

I haven't found yet a good software to do it (GSMlib have some software, it might wort to check out). Some vital references for hacking with GSM capable modems:

The extended AT command set for GSM modems, in a nutshell
http://www.traud.de/gsm/atex.htm

GSM related work at SZTAKI (by Gabor Kiss)
http://gatling.ikk.sztaki.hu/~kissg/gsm/
http://gatling.ikk.sztaki.hu/~kissg/gsm/atscan/siemens_s55.txt

GSM modem faq with some relevant comments and their explanation
http://www.gsm-modem.de/gsm-faq.html

Just searched the BTS, and noticed that there is 45 open bugs in all categories... Well, this is the lowest i have seen lately.

Just joined us: ryd

now it recognizes more correctly some network adapters (like sis900 and d stepping realtek chipsets). and, now it starts to dominate the world

http://pete.teamlupus.hu/site/photo/index.php?ct=10

Well, it's 0.4pre2

http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=1374

Thank you, mcangeli !

Just came to the point to rewamp my home pc. This means - backing up 100G data to an external hdd (no warez, mmedia like SFD2005 video recordings and audio track, a disk image of a 3.5 UHU linux partition etc.), formatting the main drive and give 0.4pre2 a go!

The main reason was for this reinstall to give more space to 3 linuxes, make room in the first primary partition for my educational copy of WinXP (not installed yet, but coming soon) and consequentally, shrink the last large /home partition.

It was a much straight process than pre1, and gone wonderfully till booting up console with all the stuff that can be installed from CD1. Err, it tried to boot, but upon restart i was given a cli grub shell - indicating sth. very nasty. Manually booting the system produced the error message about grub can reach the hdd sectors where the kernel is.

So the disk was sliced up, /hda1 is empty with 5G space, /hda5 was filled back from the previously dd-ed disk image with FS resize2fs'd, /hda6 holded 0.4pre2 (have to go with logical/extended partitions because you can have only 4 primary partitions which are obviously not fit for 4 system and a home part.).

The situation where you can't step back. The solution -at least in theory - to place the whole winxp (who knows how it boots or what quirks can arise) partition under the 4G bios barrier with leaving space to form separate /boot partitions for the 3 distros.

Well, i felt a bit lost facing this and kissed goodbye for my data but went forward: resized the uhu partition to a bit larger than the space used by files, dd-ed a bit more than the how long the fs was told, deleted it and the XP partition, created a 3,5G partition for the windows, and created two partitions for /boot 's (yes, two - one for the UHU distribution, and one for the two frugalwares, one FW for the latest stable from 0.4 on, and a forever -current for testing, they will share a common /boot), and the rest of space was given to the UHU (dd stuff back, e2fsck, resize2fs).

Because none of the OS-es installed with separate /boot in my mind, i had to boot to knoppix, mount the drives, get the contents of /boot from the root FS and copy it to the newly made partition - and modify grub entries and fstab entries to reflect the move. Did you know you can get 4 warnings for not placing \n at the end of the fstab while booting 0.4pre2 ?

After all, i have all my data (knock-knock) and both distro boots.

I've just created AlexExtreme's account, welcome aboard and happy hacking!

I was just checking my crafted url to the bts, which showed that in the past 24 hour there was 12 bugs closd, 10 by vmiklos and 2 by voroskoi. Keep up guys!

In the meantime with janny's help i made the updated version of foo2zjs (a printer filter for some HP & Minolta & whoknows), with a bit cleaned up depends, and i'll test it tomorrow on a real device.

In the last days i rewamped the main page of the wiki, go and check out, all feedback welcome! I've added some stats' url, too. Regarding this, there is a quotation from the darcs page:

These statistics are provided purely for interested developers, and are not intended to reflect quality - or - quality of work done by any given developer in darcs, merely to show activity of operations in the darcs repository performed by all developers. If you want to use them to motivate yourself, that's fine, but keep in mind that a bit of useful work is more meaningful than a lot of useless work.