As what as you like

• Apr 18, 2008

  Terminator progress

  Just a quick update on how things are going. I’ve been pretty slow lately because of trying to get as many bugs fixed in Hardy as possible. However, we’ve still been working away a bit and the team has continued to grow.

  Reliance on gnome is being reduced, and portability is being increased - you can now run Terminator on FreeBSD without a full GNOME install. Configuration has been entirely replaced - we now offer a stack of config options. If you have gconf available we will look there for gnome terminal settings. If that doesn’t work out we’ll look for a config file in your home directory and if that fails we have comprehensive default settings. I’m hoping to push out a release soon because we’ve also accumulated a few small bugfixes. The plan from here is to have a major release to land the tabs feature, and then go all out for a massive 1.0 when we can save/restore meta-profiles. Woo!

• Apr 8, 2008

  getting information out of a badly broken debian installer

  You have new hardware (most likely server). You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but….uh-oh, it can’t find the CD! What do you do?! Well, realistically there’s not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed. You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn. You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you’re still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don’t have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen. You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko. Can you see where this is going? :) find the .udeb’s on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules. You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don’t do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of. Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to! Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.

• Mar 17, 2008

  Thinkpad X300 thoughts

  The Thinkpad X300 is a pretty tasty beast. Much nicer screen than the X40, and the SSD is a huge win for lots of IO workloads. I’ve still got a fair few Linux support oddities to work through, but thus far people are being very helpful. When the support is there, this will be a laptop to be highly recommended.

• Feb 27, 2008

  First terminator video appearance?

  luisbg has a blog posting of the very interesting looking flickbook, specifically a video which shows Terminator being used to launch the demo. Woo!

• Feb 20, 2008

  Terminator 0.8.1 released

  0.8 had a few annoying little bugs we decided to squash quickly, so without further ado, 0.8.1 is now out and on the homepage.