Blog Without An Important Name

I was asked to install Ubuntu Linux on someone’s Acer Travelmate 230 laptop, and I ran into a problem that was very easily fixed, once I knew what it was. However it wasn’t documented anywhere under the laptop model, which made finding the solution hard.

The problem was that X would start with only a 640×480 resolution, and no amount of xorg.conf tweaking would make it behave otherwise (well, it also often came up with a completly black screen. I have no idea what that was about). The installer correctly detected that it needed the i810 driver, and that was set up. However, the video card (I can’t remember the exact chipset name, but it’s an Intel) has no RAM of its own, and instead relies on taking over part of the system RAM to work. By default, this is set at 1Mb, which isn’t enough for any kind of decent resolution. I think that the Windows drivers must override that, but it seems the Linux ones don’t. To make it work, all you have to do is go into the BIOS settings, go to Advanced and change the setting, which (IIRC) it calls ‘UMA’, from 1Mb to 8Mb. All of a sudden, the Linux drivers report that it can happily go up to 1024×768, and it works well. If I’d known that from the start, the install would have been quite seamless.

I haven’t tested the other parts of the hardware, such as the modem, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they work well too.

Last week I spent Monday through to Saturday at linux.conf.au, which was a very good conference on Linux stuff. I hoped to write about things as they happened, but lacking a laptop, I was only able to spend an hour or so per day using a computer and so it didn’t happen. So now I’ll go through and write about it. Given this is a few days later, I’ll probably not include as much detail as I would have if I did it closer to the time.

Monday, 23rd Jan

This day was devoted to the miniconferences. None of them was especially exciting to me, so I went to the Damian Conway one, which was him doing a talk on presentation skills in the morning, and Perl 6 in the afternoon. He is a very good speaker, and so the presentation skills one was well worth it, and the Perl 6 one was also. There’s a lot of good stuff coming into that. I’m thinking I might have to follow the development a bit, or perhaps even get involved.

If you ever have the chance to see Conway talk, do. It’s quite an experience. It was also pretty nice, as I’d previously done the presentation skills one, so seeing the Perl 6 one pointed out a lot of the things he’d been talking about.

Tuesday, 24th Jan

On Tuesday, I went to the Debian miniconf, which was less interesting. Given I’m not really involved in the Debian development or anything, this is probably to be expected. There was a few things that were worth seeing however.

Wednesday, 25th Jan

This day the conference proper started. The talk I went to in the morning was A whirlwind tour of changes in the Linux 2.6.x system call API. It covered a few of things that I’d heard about, but didn’t really know the details of. Now I think I’m going to have to play with some of them a bit. I already have an idea for something I’m going to do with this. As soon as I can make something using inotify compile on 2.6.12.

After lunch was Tridge’s Samba 4 Status Report, which demonstrated how good samba 4 is looking. It can now replace a Windows PDC with a few clicks and 30 seconds, which (as I understand it) is better than Windows can actually do. Oh, and they’re also going to have support for the network filesystem in Windows Vista before Vista actually comes out, which is really quite funny. It’s a bit of a pity I don’t do anything much with Samba, except for using it share files from my machine to Windows ones, so none of these advancements are any use to me. But I can see them being really good for anyone who has a sizable network.

The final talk of the day was From New Zealand to Bolivia, the Koha Library system flies. This one is about a New Zealand developed, open sourced library catalogue system. It covered more the social and background side of things, rather than the technical side, which was good. It described the kinds of organisation that have been using it, and the kind of work that has been done on it.

Later that evening was the keysigning. That had around 50 people at it, so hopefully some more of those people hurry up and do the actual signing thing. My current key can be found online, it already has a fair few new signatures.

More later…

The default install of Webalizer on Debian doesn’t perform DNS lookups on the log files, although it is capable of it. There are three ways of getting Webalizer to do this, in rough order of recommendedness: 1) make your webserver do the lookups when it writes the logfiles (this makes your webserver slower, and has been a source of vulnerabilities in the past), 2) use logresolve to pre-process your log files (logresolve isn’t included in Debian sarge), and 3) tell webalizer to do it.

Making webalizer do it is pretty easy, simply add lines similar to the following in /etc/webalizer.conf:

DNSCache /var/log/apache2/dns_cache.db
DNSChildren 5

The first tells it where to put it’s cache file, the second tells it how many resolutions to do at once. The higher, the faster, but also the higher load on the system.

If you add these lines to the config, keep in mind that only new entries will be updated, and so it won’t be until the next month rolls around that you have a complete statistics by domain name.