It works!!!

One thing I just realized after upgrading to Edgy, all hotkey in my desknote, which by the way is an ECS A907, works out of the box. No hacking, no tweaking, no user intervention. The volume manager key works, the "internet" key fires up Firefox and the "mail" key opens Evolution.

Now...if only I could make use of that f***in' flyin' windows key ...

Edgy upgrade fail on acpid

I just upgraded my dapper into edgy. everything went fine but acpid and
everything that depends on it.
After several hours of googling... I found the answer from launchpad.
The workaround are:
1. Shutdown the acpid (I removed it instead)
2. sudo killall hald
3. sudo dpkg --configure -a
4. sudo apt-get install acpid

Perhaps 4 months is a bit too short for a release cycle of a distro as
massive as Ubuntu...

Mounting Remote Directories using SSHFS

Due to limited harddisk capacity, I stored my edgy repository in an external USB hard drive.
To access it, I mount it using sshfs. Here is how I did it in Ubuntu 6.06.

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

$ sudo modprobe fuse

$ mkdir /somewhere/localfolder/

$ sshfs -o allow_other user@remotehost:/somewhere/somefolder /somewhere/localfolder

To unmount it just use the normal umount command

$ sudo umount /somewher/localfolder

Now I have edgy repo, shall I start upgrading now... ?
I heard some bad rumors about upgrading dapper to edgy.
I think I need to do some backup first.

screen bash

When executing application using screen, I found that if the application went bad, we couldn't find out the error unless we specificy to log it. My debmirror script sometimes fail and I don't know if it is fail unless I repeat the script again.

Hence, bash must go first :-)

It's also quite handy to hide whatever I am doing on the screen as I only need to press C-a d to detach it.

Lust : Feature or Bug

Q: What is lust, a feature or a bug?
If it is a bug, then we are still in development stage and shouldn't have been released yet.
If it is a feature, then why some of us must go to hell because of it?

A: Well, probably deep inside our heart, there are lots of things that was meant to be patched by ourselves.

Hmm... a self-repairing apps...
Thank God we're not running Vista :p

pmount vs perl

After modifying debmirror, i copied it into a folder in my mounted portable hard drive.
The remaining space is quite large, so I put dapper & edgy as the target and start executing the script.
*bam*
myscript: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: Permission denied

what the h###?!

I am absolutely sure I have no problem with permissions as the same script also copied into the parent directory of
a running ubuntu local ftp repository, and it works.

After checking every possible permission problem I encountered, I finally came into mount permission.
I mounted the portable hd using pmount (it's a usb-connected external hd) and it turnout that the default parameter
used by pmount include a noexec option, therefore, when I mounted it using the classic mount, the script worked.

Now, one question remain...
How come a perl script is considered a binary executable, while bash script is not?
Hmm...

Blogging via mutt

In blogspot, one can post his/her blog via mail. I like this feature because of two reasons :
1. The built in blogspot editor is terribly *cough*bloated*cough* slow
2. Due to aging hardware, opening firefox in my laptop takes zillion years
The problem is, the reason #2 is also the reason why I hate opening evolution in my laptop.

Few days ago, I installed mutt. The setup is not perfect yet, but I found myself quite enjoying it.
It loads extremely fast... that I only keep evolution just for reading html-formatted-mail sent to me.
I can also deal with junk mails much better :-)

Patching debmirror...

I just realized that debmirror has a weakness in its design. Debmirror is designed to download the packages lists, selecting correct packages to be downloaded, then and only then,  download the packages. However, the packages selection, is somewhat long and tedious. Even worse, there is no progress indicator to tell us how much time left for package selection process to start downloading those damn packages.

I wonder if I can modify it to make it faster.

* searching google with keywords: perl tutorial*