Guru dell'Eccelso Picco

I’m subscribed to Linux Journal from the very first day and yesterday, digging between my paper archives, I found these little pieces of history: the first 3 Linux Journal issues published in 1994.
This journal for me has been a really useful source in all these years of Linux fun, so a big big Thank You to all the people that contributed to it in the last 17 years!

Linux Journal Issue 1 2 3

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Under Ubuntu, if are you using the latest version of Thunderbird from the PPA (rebranded as Shredder), you may encounter some problems with the Lightning plugin, especially if you are using the 64 bit version.

For example, with Shredder 3.0.6 you have to use the Lightning plug-in version 1.0b1 and not the latest 1.0b2.

For the X86_64 version you may find the archive of the various builds here:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b1/contrib/linux-x86_64/

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If you have a Vodafone Internet Key and you don’t want to get crazy configuring it, use this really fine package: Vodafone Mobile Connect from Betavine Forge, a Vodafone Group R&D Lab.

It has nice features like:

• statistics about transferred bytes (rx/tx)
• sending SMS
• choosing your preferred network settings (gprs, umts, preferred)
• nice Python GUI
• automatic detection of your Internet Key
• it will not use Network Manager

It will works fine also with recent Internet Keys which need usb_modeswitch.

I’ve tested with a 28.8 Mbps USB Internet Key Model Number K4505 under Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit.

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After reading this interesting post on Phoronix about the great increase of performance between ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, I finally convinced myself to make the upgrade.
My first concern was about the ATI driver, which gave me some trouble with 9.04.
Anyway after a good backup, I started the upgrade, and in almost 2 hours I was up and running with 9.10, with a lot of improvements!
The upgrade installed automagically the fglrx driver version 2:8.660, my previous version (built from source) was 2:8.620, however, after the first reboot I started in recovery mode to issue the magic command “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” because I feel that this is still crucial to make the driver work.
After this safety measure, I rebooted and really appreciated the boot speed! Upstart is making a great job really!
So far, I’m very impressed by this release, my major benefits are the following:

• Ultra fast boot and shutdown
• Great performance of the ATI driver. The black areas that sometimes were appearing for example scrolling a Firefox full screen window have disappeared
• Upgrading Skype to 2.1.0.81 solved the problem about the editing of my profile and avatar display
• Performance are really increased, for example opening PDF with Evince
• Not yet tested printing feature
• Suspend to ram works fine
• VMware Workstation works fine

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If you are in the need of expanding the LUN where your Linux is installed without rebooting the server, then may be that here you can find the right answer. Your Linux must be sufficiently recent to support features like LVM version 2, ext3 on-line resizing and so on.

My setup in tihs test is the following:

A Linux RedHat 5.3 64 bit Virtual Machine with a single 300 GB LUN /dev/sda in Raw Device Mapping mode (Physical Compatibility mode) under VMware 3.5 and a Compellent SAN. Inside the single disk there is one Volume Group (vg0) with serveral Logical Volumes.

The SAN guys expanded on-line the LUN from 300 to 500 GB (a 30″ operation ).

To force the rescan of partition to get the kernel aware of the new size (supposing your LUN is /dev/sda):

# echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/rescan

and then in dmesg you’ll see:

SCSI device sda: 1048576000 512-byte hdwr sectors (536871 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 8f 00 00 08
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through
sda: detected capacity change from 322122547200 to 536870912000

Now you have two choices at this point: expand the partition containing the current volume group or create a new partition and extend the current volume group. I sincerely prefer the latter, since resizing the partition with fdisk is a risky operation IMVHO.

Use fdisk to create a new partition of type LVM (0×8e) in the free space. But at this point you may have trouble in the kernel re-reading the partition table:

# sfdisk -R /dev/sda
BLKRRPART: Device or resource busy

So to inform the OS of the partition table changes use partprobe(8) command which comes with the parted packages.

Verify in /proc/partitions that the kernel has updated the partition table.

Now use pvcreate /dev/sda3, then vgextend vg0 /dev/sda3 and you are done! Verify with vgdisplay that the Free PE are consistent.

To make some more stress test I made the following:

While running this command on a newly created LVM partition /dev/vg0/TRASHME mounted on /TRASH:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=TTTT bs=1024k count=30000
..... dd is running....

I tried an online resizing of the Logical Volume and the ext3 partition inside it:

# lvextend -L+10G /dev/vg0/TRASHME
Extending logical volume TRASHME to 40.00 GB
Logical volume TRASHME successfully resized
# resize2fs /dev/vg0/TRASHME
resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/vg0/TRASHME is mounted on /TRASH; on-line resizing required
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/vg0/TRASHME to 10485760 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/vg0/TRASHME is now 10485760 blocks long.
in the mean time dd finished his work:
30000+0 records in
30000+0 records out
31457280000 bytes (31 GB) copied, 175.612 seconds, 179 MB/s

Great! Remember to always backup your data before doing operations like this! YMMV.

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On my Ubunty Jaunty I’ve started to use the latest Firefox build using this PPA:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
but the Ubuntu Mozilla Team has decided to rebrand it as Shiretoko, and this seems to break some sites which relies on the User Agent string. Using the User Agent Switcher add-on for Shiretoko, ops… Firefox, is a nice trick. Another option is to use Ubuntuzilla.

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This is a test post using Drivel.

Does it work?

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It is available for download here (64 bit platform).

Updated instructions for Ubuntu installation  are as always here.

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Brad Spengler, the developer behind the Grsecurity project, has published an exploit for a vulnerability in the Tun interface in Linux kernel 2.6.30 and 2.6.18, which can be exploited by attackers to obtain root privileges.

The fix is available for kernel 2.6.30.2, see the patch here.

Now the real question is: is it a GCC issue (the fno-delete-null-pointer-checks optimization) or a programming error? I vote for the second

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All the issues described in my previous post about Ubuntu Jaunty (64 bit) upgrade have been solved! Yeppa!

1. ATI Video Card – WORKS. The ATI Catalyst driver 9.6 and 9.5 work fine. You can read more about it here. Download the source of the driver from the ATI site  and follow the instructions for building the Debian packages. With the 9.5 driver it was mandatory to use “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” (read about it here). While waiting the release of the new ATI driver I’ve successfully configured the radeonhd driver 1.2.5 from this PPA and following the instructions from x.org here. You will have to rebuild the drm module for the current kernel (beware of kernel updates). Unfortunately the OpenSource driver does not support 3D acceleration yet.
2. Garbaged Printing with some black squares. It seems an issue of foomatic-db-engine. I think that there isn’t an official fix for this, currenty there is only a workaround here (see comment #84 from Till Kamppeter). Download the pdftops filter and replace your current /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops from the cups packaage.
3. Battery duration. Now the uptime on battery is back to more than 3 hours like on 8.10. The problem is that the radeonhd driver is not able to optimize the ATI card for battery duration like the fglrx does. With the radeonhd driver there the Thermal Zone 2 always between 55 and 62 degrees (look at it with “acpi -t”), while with the fglrx driver it stays at 44-45. The strange thing is that even without X running the video card is heating, I suppose a BIOS issue.

So now I can enjoy all the Jaunty wonders! New notifications, faster boot and shutdown, a reliable suspend/resume.

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