I don't know why Python applications are so verbose with deprecation warnings. Either the apps should be fixed, or the system should be configured to not emit those pesky warnings in production. Since the former is not happening, I found a way to do the latter. So, if you are sick and tired of warnings like this:

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/rdiff_backup/SetConnections.py:148: DeprecationWarning: os.popen2 is deprecated. Use the subprocess module.
stdin, stdout = os.popen2(remote_cmd)

edit your /etc/python2.6/sitecustomize.py file and append these two lines at the very end of the file:

import warnings
warnings.simplefilter("ignore", DeprecationWarning)


Of course, look for sitecustomize.py elsewhere if it's not in the same directory as on my system (check /etc/pythonX.Y, /usr/lib/pythonX.Y and /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages directories). The correct location obviously depends on the Python version.

Last few months, I have trouble playing wmv (windows media video) files with mplayer. I get this error:

MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: decode_video
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
  Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
  disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
  It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
  gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
  DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
  won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

Why it takes so long to fix that bug, I don't know. Fortunately, the solution is quite easy, you just need to use gl video output driver, instead of xv or vdpau. The latter two won't work with (most) wmv files.

If you have a windows share with a space character in it's name, e.g. something like \\server\my share, to properly mount it from /etc/fstab you need to use the octal code instead of a space character. Otherwise parsing /etc/fstab would produce an error, because space character is a delimiter.

The octal code for space character is \040 (don't forget the leading zero!), so you'd put //server/my\040share in the /etc/fstab for the example above.

Current default for X servers as shipped in various distributions is to not enable the traditional Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to kill the X server. If you would like to re-enable this feature, you may do so in your desktop's Keyboard Preferences application. You may also enable it for the current session using the command "setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp".

Gnome 2.26 packages are slowly entering Debian unstable, and at one time my desktop stopped starting compiz after login, but instead default Gnome window manager metacity would start. So my method of selecting window manager by putting WINDOW_MANAGER="compiz" in .gnomerc definitely stopped working. Further inspection revealed that now window manager can be selected only by setting relevant gconf key to some value.

If you have trouble maximizing those YouTube videos when run under compiz-fusion, here's what you can do to fix it.

Go to CompizConfigSettingsManager, choose General Options and unclick 'Unredirect Fullscreen Windows' option under General tab. Then click Back and select 'Workarounds'. Turn on 'Legacy Fullscreen Support'. Of course, 'Workarounds' plugin must be enabled on the front page for this to come in effect.

And that should be it!

Now try maximizing flash videos again and report you success below.

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


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.

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.