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.

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.

The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename Etch). This update adds security updates to the stable release, together with a few corrections to serious problems. As always, the first point release also corrects a few issues that have been noticed too late in the release process to stop the release, but still should be fixed.

This point release for Etch also includes an updated release of the installer, which includes the following changes:

Yeah, this is quite an old picture, but I just couldn't resist republishing it. It's fun, and it's still true. :)

Original comment from Illiad, the writer of the hilarious User Friendly Comic Strip:

You have express permission to sell the Mike posters for Debian! My share of the profit should be entirely donated to the Debian project. All I ask for is a small mention somewhere that says this. Best of luck with it, and keep up the great work with a fine distribution!

The other day I was playing with fun Google Trends tool and got an idea to check Ubuntu versus Debian popularity. You can see the result on the picture below and I don't know about you, but it simply amazes me how popular Ubuntu is these days. And not only that, but its popularity is growing day by day, while it can be easily seen that Debian is either stagnating or slowly fading out.

sshfs is a very slick way to access your remote filesystems, securely and transparently. It is based on the great FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) framework, which has been integrated in the linux kernel since version 2.6.14. While sshfs may not be as fast and featureful as other full-blown network filesystems such as NFS or Samba, it still has some great features:

If you are lucky to have fresh X11R7 on your desktop with all its new features and nice filesystem layout you might have noticed that some things have compatibility problems with it. Namely, if you have flash plugin installed you might not see text in flash content displayed properly, depending on how your Linux distribution handled the upgrade.

New version. Has full update for bzip2 files for the distributions that support it. Because debian-check & debian-export need to know about that, they have an additional parameter (distribution). The statefile is now also in the bzip2 format, check your helper scripts for all that changes before running them!

I have removed most of the system() calls thanks to File::Copy & File::Touch perl modules. There is also one important bugfix, in debian-mirror the new Packages file is now generated earlier so that you don't lose packages (ones that downloaded correctly) if debian-check runs just after the problematic run of debian-mirror (using stale Packages file and erroneously deleting just downloaded packages). Have fun!

As of today, Debian has officialy obsoleted non-US support, the relevant packages have been merged into the official distribution. So I'm releasing the updated (simplified actually :)) version which everybody should use.

Ever since Debian switched to the package pools I wanted to have a simple script to mirror the whole distribution (one of unstable, testing or stable) as efficiently as possible. In fact I did react pretty fast to the situation and scripts you can download on these pages have been in production since 2001. But only now have I found some time to clean them up and prepare them for world-wide distribution. :| Hopefully not too late...

Is running Oracle10g on Debian Linux possible? Oh yes, definitely! And it runs great, really. It's even easier to install than the older versions of Oracle as there are no problems with incompatible libc library & other bugs. You need to make just two simple preparations before you can enjoy your new development database.