Last year I needed/wanted a new laptop, something with decent battery life but still lightweight and with a useful vertical screen resolution. The Acer C110 I had before was nice but lasted less than 2 hrs on battery. So I got an Atom-based unit, an Acer Aspire One 751h: 1.3GHz Atom Z520, 2Gb memory, 160Gb disk, 1366x768/11.6in display, 1.37kg (weighed it myself), 6+ hours of battery life, and - very important to me - a decent, full-size keyboard, all packed into the size of a sheet of A4.

Nice gear - except for the not-quite-Intel GMA500 graphics crap, for which no decent (semi-)free drivers exist. I won't bore you with the tedious story of getting decent graphics going - it was quite tedious, but I'm really stubborn.

So here are some of my lessons learned, hopefully helpful to you people out there. The features and subsystems not mentioned (the majority) worked out of the box or without more than normal configuration steps required.
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I detest udev. With a passion. Because of bugs like #453356 or #339797 and as a matter of general principle because it's overcomplex, brittle, and Just Plain Wrong. No, a dynamic /dev is not generally desirable. No, I don't want you to fuck up my /dev and slow down every single boot by redoing the same damn crap all the time. No, I don't like your rule language or your lousy diagnostics.

So I consider myself the president-and-first-member of the G.R.O.S.U. ("Get Rid of Slimy Udev") club. But I do eat my own dog food (debian developer and all that), so here's my alternative setup to avoid udev without losing useful capabilities:

Udev itself I get rid of by creating a dummy dependency fulfiller package using equivs. Here's the resulting .deb for the lazy ones.

The few hotplugging activities that I do like to handle (eg. initializing the Bluetooth env if/when I use the killswitch, or auto-mounting removable storage) I take care of with hotplug: ancient, trusty, simple, totally sufficient.

Here's my cut-down-and-minimized hotplug package. Share and enjoy.

...the non-geeky middle-aged checkout chick at Aldi starts chatting to you about her now using this Linux Thing, and that being quite cool.

I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.

After the almost-fiasco of upgrading my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy, I say, so here goes.

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...because while Sarge-to-Etch wasn't too ugly a transition, it nevertheless isn't something I want to do too often for all the boxes I'm responsible for. (As a matter of fact there's a few I'll leave running Sarge.) Here's all the notes I've made during the upgrade; maybe useful to others, maybe not.
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Some time ago I mentioned a big mess in debian's sudo regarding the environment cleanup. The mess is even worse: run sudo env and you'll either get a single PATH that is SECURE_PATH (and thus not yours) or you'll get two bad PATHes for the price of one! Hurry! This offer ends soon! *ahem*

Guess what is implied by the env_reset/env_keep fix for losing all your other variables... The problem affects all the 1.6.8's, that means sarge/security's p7-1.3 is as borked as sid's p12. p7-1.2 didn't force you to use env_reset so you didn't feel the problem as badly.

I'm a perfectionist. Not only do I now know exactly what is broken, I also have a fix. It requires recompiling sudo.

This recent advisory suggests that one updates his sudo installation. With the subsequent result of being trapped in a mess of obscure, badly documented env_something options, a suggestion of env_check which doesn't work and no way of passing environment variables to the sudo'd process. Great.

Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again: Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY" or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*

The original list is there and deals with the US Army, but Debian seems to be going there rather quickly. Damn politics. So, while there are no 213 things yet, it likely won't take long. Sigh.

1. Not allowed to post about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
2. Not allowed to post about a posting about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
3. Especially if the post doesn't mention Ubuntu at all and is somewhat sarcastic.
4. Must not imply the listmasters are sarcasm-impaired as they don't like this.
5. I must not expect democratic behaviour in the Project.
6. Not allowed to post anything containing non-politically-correct words (like "lesbian") on d-d-a.
7. Debian does not have a Cabal.
8. Not allowed to request an update on the stalled GFDL argument with the FSF. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
9. I am not authorized to question authorities.
10. Especially not debian-admin.
11. Not allowed to call an RC bug an RC bug, if it happens to affect the scum architectures.

Additions welcome.

Well, more than a few - and some kooks, as usual. debian-devel feels like nan-ae at times... This is how my email load went up after the infamous "proposal" hit the nets (blue being spam, green being real mail): That TINC is not true for Debian is unfortunately pretty obvious by now, even to a non-political tech like me; that there are voices of reason left in high places is good to see reinforced, however.

So thank you, Martin Schulze, for that post. You put the concerns of lots of us in words very nicely.

i hate spam, i said that already, and last weak i got over 200 spams on a single day. then i decided that it's time to implement my long-time plan of firing up spamassassin on my two old servers, and to do it right and run it as a sendmail milter.
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I've given a talk about Debian at SAGE-AU's annual conference in 2003.

The paper and presentation slides are avaliable here.

It was very well received, and I'll give some follow-up presentations at this year's Tasmanian Summer IT Conference as well as the SAGE-VIC IT Symposion

Debian is my favourite open source project. The structure of stuff in Debian very much pleases my sense of perfectionism. Plus, Debian is perfect for server machines.

I'm supporting the project by packaging and maintaining various stuff, most notably kuvert my mail privacy tool.

This list shows the packages I'm currently maintaining and a bit of technical status for each of them.