Bits & Bytes on Brabbel

Running “Steam for Linux” on Debian Wheezy

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:20:46 +0000

Steam for Linux is here! At least in a usable beta version. And quite some games are already available for Linux from Steam.

But still installing steam is a little tricky for Linux. So some repackaging is required to get it running. But there is a good guide available (although a little techie) here:

Convert Linux raid10 to raid1 PV

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:00:46 +0000

To convert a Linux physical volume stored on a softraid with level 10 (a wrong 2 disk setup which accidently uses raid10) to a clean raid1 mirroring setup some simple LVM commands come to the rescue.

WordPress 3.0 upgrade and the white blank screen

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:39:21 +0000

When just upgrading this very blog from WordPress 2.9.2 to 3.0 using the automatic upgrade feature the upgrade succeeded at first. Even showing the admin page for that in the new design.

Package your own Perl for CentOS (or RHEL) as RPM

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:15:25 +0000

Of course perl is easy to build and you canbuild your own Perl is nice, but it needs to be managed on the target host where it is deployed. As internet access to CPAN is not available everywhere (we are talking about enterprise and carrier deployments here) updates need to be managable. At least on a basic level.

Build your own (faster) perl

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:57:10 +0000

Using the perl that comes with your distribution is usually fine, but it has some limitations. When building a perl for a distribution it needs to be versatile and fit various needs. Therefor ithreads, the perl specific threading implemenation, is enabled there, to allow building modules that require threads to be available.

Resolving LVM: Unrecognised LVM device type 259

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:42:22 +0000

Trying to create a md raid1 device for 2 phyiscal 1TB disks failed unexpectedly with a strange (and very undescriptive error, that is only revealed when running with the verbose option (-vvv): Wiping internal VG cache /dev/md0p2: Skipping: Unrecognised LVM device type 259 Device /dev/md0p2 not found (or ignored by filtering).

Debian an Dell Latitude D830

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:16:53 +0000

The Dell Lattitude D830 is a quite capable business notebook. While the notebook itself is not considered high-end it still allows for good configurations. A definite downside is the battery which lasted only for 1 year and had to be replaced with a new battery pack (not part of warrenty of course).

Perl cache modules performance

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:19:00 +0000

There are a lot of cache modules available on the great CPAN already. The newest kid on the block is CHI, a Moose based intelligent and flexible caching solution with a very sane API and good design, separating the driver backends from the caching logic as much as possible.

Add benchmarking tests to MooseX::Log::Log4perl to verify overhead

Wed, 20 May 2009 21:27:58 +0000

After a while I had the chance to get back to MooseX::Log::Log4perl, which is Role (based on Moose) that can be easily reused in classes requiring logging functionality.

Browsers benchmarked on Linux

Tue, 12 May 2009 23:20:57 +0000

The system itself is a Dell D830 laptop with a nvidia NV135 chip and an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 CPU with 2GB RAM. For actual benchmarking the new futuremark paecekeeper browser benchmark has been put to use.

Setting up your own simple debian repository

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:31:08 +0000

In the process of getting a debian repostiry ready to allow easy installtion with debian’s apt, a small series of posts are going to be created here. So here is the initial post describing a very simple debian repository layout.

Dual-Screen setup with Xorg, RandR1.2 and ATI 9.2 (v8.528) Linux x86_64 drivers

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:25:22 +0000

After seeing that ATI has released again drivers for Linux with a new major version number (and not the scarry .0 behind it) I thought it was time to battle the ATI dragons again. As Debian usually lags behind on the proprietary ATI stuff (who wonders…) I’m using aain the binary packages provided by ATI.

Playstation 3 – der beste Ersatz für echte Freunde

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:57:23 +0000

Die Playstation 3 erobert jetzt (dank günstiger Preise in UK) einige Wohnzimmer, so auch unseres.

Um der sozialen Komponente genüge zu tragen hier einige Playstation Network User:

Howto resize a qcow2 disk image

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:21:32 +0000

Resizing of the file-based qcow2 format for handling disk images is possible by performing the resize on a different format and use the conversion capabilities of qemu-img.

Starting up QuikIT…

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:11:44 +0000

Das neue Einzelunternehmerprojekt QuikIT geht an den Start.

Nach doch inzwischen einigen Jahren der minimalen Zeitinvestition in diverse IT-Dienstleistungen soll nun das ganze in einer organisierteren Form von statten gehen und auch die Möglichkeit schaffen größere Projekte (wie eben http://www.quikplan.at) umzusetzen.

Building proprietary ATI fglrx driver on Debian Lenny x86_64

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:47:50 +0000

To build the ATI proprietary driver (version 8.8, being reported as 8.522) on Debian Lenny 2.6.26-1-amd64 (probably the same for testing/unstable) on x86_64 I ran into 2 subtle problems which requried a little tricking to get the driver compiled and loaded. The following issues apply only to the x86_64 version of linux.

Thoughts on parametrized roles for Moose

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:48:23 +0000

Moose is your favorite meta-object system in your favorite language of choice. And you already have a lot of excellent concepts that extend the basic usage of object-oriented programming, like having simple means to override parts of methods (around, before, after) and of course roles.

Bringing logging to Moose with MooseX::Log::Log4perl

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:51:53 +0000

Finally after some playing around and discovering the main concepts behind moose and failing to find a logging role using my favorite logging system log4perl I sat down an did a little coding (it is really just a few lines) and uploaded to CPAN as MooseX::Log::Log4perl.

Quikplan – Ein neues Catalyst Perl / jquery javascript Projekt

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:48:22 +0000

Mein neues Projekt Quikplan geht an den Start. Gemeinsam mit Chris entsteht eine Kursplanungssoftware die speziell auf die Anforderungen einer Kletterhalle (oder ähnlichem) getrimmt ist.

Als Backend dient Catalyst Perl mit diversen weiteren Modulen (Moose, DBIx::Class, …) getrennt über ein JSON basierendes API. Das Frontend ist eine Web 2.0 Applikation basierend auf jQuery und einen eigens dafür erstellten Framework für einfaches und konsistentes GUI Handling.

System backup vs. system images

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:34:11 +0000

Creating a system image is IMHO different from creating a level 0 backup.

A backup is destined for the one host it was taken from, no other. MBR, partitioning, filesystems will all stay the same. Whereas a system image is used to multiply an installation to different hosts, with probably different partitioning, eventually different mount points. Differences of configuration is not part of this post, so yes, there are definitly different setting for network, hostname, …, but that has to be handled after restoring the image.

Google Picasa Web Albums open doors…

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:28:20 +0000

Seems like webalbums is now available from google. Of course BETA. As with all google products.

It’s 250 MB of free picture storage, with the nice Picasa client to manage your photos locally and upload to webalbums without a hitch. Did I mention picasa runs on windows and linux, just as I need it?

WordPress reached 2.0 and plugins followed…

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 23:07:21 +0000

It took some time til WordPressreached the 2.0 version. And now most plugins are being ported.

This site now runs on WP2.0 with gallery2 plugin in the works. Update: A basic example is disabled.

Somis Milestone 2 reached…

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:30:21 +0000

Milestone 2 has been approved (altough one document was missing, but noone noticed).

We started hacking on the catalyst base now, mostly just some basic controller and view parts.

vServer move to fx7.org

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:40:57 +0000

As always it seemed to be just a view hours work to move all services from the old mos.at hosted vserver to the new dedicated server owned by Duke. So we join efforts on that front and are going to share the server for all our vhosts and services.

CRM + open = openCRX

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 20:26:39 +0000

Seems like there is already a opensource alternative for CRM solutions. I plan to build one during the project part of my studies, so better see what’s already there.

Let’s get that theme started

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 22:32:48 +0000

A lot of nice themes are available for wordpress already. But still I’d like to take the chance and design my page.

I’m still lokking into using wordpress also as a simple questionaire page with a mailform at the end of the questionaire. Although it might be simpler to use php/perl directly, it would be more fun tweaking wordpress to do that.

WordPress setup

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 20:12:30 +0000

After some time, mambo was a little too complex for my needs, so i decided to try wordpress.

There are also tons of plugins available, and although not as easy to administer (still fine), it offers everything I need and is very fast compared to mambo (because it’s simpler).