This morning, hardworking Debian developers pushed the remaining pieces of the brand new X.Org 7.3 to Debian sid (unstable) distribution. And it must be said, a well done job!

ii  x11-apps            7.3+1      X applications
ii  x11-common          1:7.3+2    X Window System (X.Org)
ii  x11-session-utils   7.3+1      X session utilities
ii  x11-utils           7.3+1      X11 utilities
ii  x11-xfs-utils       7.3+1      X font server utilities
ii  x11-xkb-utils       7.3+1      X11 XKB utilities
ii  x11-xserver-utils   7.3+1      X server utilities
ii  xbase-clients       1:7.3+2    miscellaneous X clients - metapackage
ii  xorg                1:7.3+2    X.Org X Window System
ii  xorg-dev            1:7.3+2    the X.Org X Window System development
ii  xserver-xorg        1:7.3+2    the X.Org X server
ii  xutils              1:7.3+2    X Window System utility programs


By Allen B. Downey
Second Edition Revision date July 2007

The Little Book of Semaphores is a free (in both senses of the word) textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming.

In most computer science curricula, synchronization is a module in an Operating Systems class. OS textbooks present a standard set of problems with a standard set of solutions, but most students don't get a good understanding of the material or the ability to solve similar problems.

The approach of this book is to identify patterns that are useful for a variety of synchronization problems and then show how they can be assembled into solutions. After each problem, the book offers a hint before showing a solution, giving students a better chance of discovering solutions on their own.

The book covers the classical problems, including "Readers-writers", "Producer-consumer", and "Dining Philosophers". In addition, it collects a number of not-so-classical problems, some written by the author and some by other teachers and textbook writers. Readers are invited to create and submit new problems.

Referencing the post Nvidia Linux driver 100.14.11 and Linux kernel 2.6.23. Here I have attached the patches for the older versions of Nvidia drivers. The procedure to follow is the same as described in the above document.

Debian's FreeRadius package is built without support for EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP because of the licensing problems of the OpenSSL library. But, if you want to implement 802.1x network authentication with strong security, you'll need it. This is a short tutorial that explains how to build Debian (sid aka unstable) package linked to libssl and with EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP support compiled in.

First, download the newest source package (orig.tar.gz), Debian diffs (diff.gz) and description file (dsc) from the freeradius package page. The version I tested the procedure with is 1.1.7-1.

Three and half years have passed since my first attempts to install Oracle 10g on an unsupported Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Seeing that Oracle 11g is out, and exclusively for Linux at this time, I decided to download it among the first and see and share with you what it's installation looks like.

The distribution can be downloaded from the Oracle Database Software Downloads page, but let me warn you upfront that the archive is 1.7GB in size, so you'll need quite a big pipe to successfully download it. What makes it even harder is that Oracle insists that you download it from browser window (Wget and similar utilities won't work out of the box, although there are some tricks that can be deployed), so be prepared to have that browser window open for a long time and prey that download doesn't break along the way.

Exactly 10 years ago, on 15th August 1997, Miguel de Icaza started his first announcement about GNOME Desktop project with this words:

Goals
We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software:

• We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.
• We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing the applications.
• We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test the code, so that the software will compile out of the box by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.

Due to software or hardware (network switch or ethernet card) error it may be possible that you need to restart auto-negotiation on the ethernet device. Here's how to do it:

mii-tool -r eth0

or

ethtool -r eth0


Then check the kernel log to see what happens:

% dmesg
eth0: link down
eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1


Thanks for this tip goes to Vivek.

Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler, merged in the 2.6.23-rc1 release, if you drive your Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I guess that's what we get for running binary drivers.

This one has bothered me for a long time. The solution is, of course, simple. But, I still don't understand why was it necessary to force users to search so hard for this piece of information, where all the older X server releases worked OK out of the box?

If you find that after upgrading to X.Org 7.3 your display becomes very slow, and you own ATI Radeon, all you need to do is to put this line in the Device section of your xorg.conf: