Author Archive

Yes. A real one.

... why on earth is it so hard to release source and binary at the same time ? It happens all the time with mozilla.org software, and it just pisses me off.

Update: Hell, source is still not available, but, well, I just got it from CVS and uploaded to experimental. Enjoy.

... and in debian experimental. I get strange segfaults on quit, though... I'll have to investigate those... I didn't get them with a CVS checkout from 3 days ago, with the very same build scripts... strange.

I also updated the branding package, for which I missed stuff to make it work with Firefox 1.5beta...

Enjoy.

In the past few days, there has been some move on the Firefox front in Debian. Eric uploaded the long-waited non-b0rked security update for sarge, and I finally sync'ed the experimental package with all the last changes from unstable.

I made some work on the mozilla-firefox-branding package so that it actually works for both Firefox 1.0 (and supposedly earlier versions) and Deer Park. Though there are regressions (see NEWS.Debian file), it is now much much cleaner and won't mess up with other extensions as it used to do (it used to behave strange with ctxextensions, leading to a *huge* (and unuseable) context menu). You can give it a try.

Firefox 1.5 beta 1 has been announced for the 8th, and I already started to pull out the latest trunk to prepare its release. Stay tuned.

You scored as atheism. You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God. atheism 100% Satanism 83% Paganism 42% Buddhism 33% Judaism 25% Christianity 25% agnosticism 17% Islam 17% Hinduism 0%

Which religion is the right one for you? (new version)
created with QuizFarm.com

I've been playing a bit with xen the last few days, and it really rocks. It's been quite tricky to put up, though. I've been following two different guides, but they were missing some stuff for what i wanted to try.

I wanted to build the most generic kernel possible, so that it would be easily useable on most installations, like the generic debian kernels. Well, it has been quite painful. Trying to build in a sid chroot, I hit the first issue : while the xen patch doesn't apply to linux 2.6.12, linux 2.6.11 doesn't build with gcc 4.0. You get build errors in I2C, generic serial, and much more other stuff. Then, a bunch of drivers can't be built because of being unsupported.

When you finally succeed in building the kernel as a generic debian one, i.e. with an initrd, you realize the generated package (built with make-kpkg) doesn't build the initrd for you, and doesn't correctly build the modules dependencies (which prevent the initrd to be any useful), even though everything is (supposedly) correctly set-up.

So, after solving all these, I finally was able to boot on a generic xen system and to run some virtual machines. Main issue remaining : xen doesn't want to find an IRQ for the firewire controller, so i can't access my external hard-disk...

I'll try to finalize a clean generic kernel package that does all it is supposed to do, but in the meanwhile, here are the hints if you want to build your own domain 0 kernel :

• install kernel-source-2.6.11 and kernel-patch-xen, and decompress /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.11.tar.bz2
• copy /boot/config-2.6.11-1-686 in /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.11/.config
• add CONFIG_XEN=y and CONFIG_XEN_PRIVILEGED_GUEST=y in it (otherwise, a whole bunch of modules get disabled)
• run the following command in the kernel source directory : MAKEFLAGS="CC=gcc-3.4" PATCH_THE_KERNEL=YES make-kpkg --arch xen --append-to-version xen0 --revision 1 --initrd --config menuconfig kernel_image
• adjust your configuration if you need (you might want to disable network and block device frontends for the dom0 kernel)
• install the generated kernel
• run depmod 2.6.11xen0 and check your /lib/modules/2.6.11xen0 is correct
• run mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.11xen0 /lib/modules/2.6.11xen0
• add the following to your /boot/grub/menu.lst file:
  

  title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6
  kernel /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
  module /boot/xen-linux-2.6.11xen0 root=/dev/hda1 ro
  module /boot/initrd.img-2.6.11xen0

  (adjust the root device and the dom0 memory size if necessary)

And you might be able to get a working xen kernel...

That is so typical from you Daniel. 2 sentences, no argument... and comments closed. Just brilliant.

You got 31 of 37 (83.8%) right. What about you ?

I really enjoy when my wife is chatting with my parents on the phone. Her speaking french is so cute.