HTTP error 301: You will be redirected to the new blog site

HTTP error 301: You will be redirected to the new blog site 🙂

http://blog.gurudelleccelsopicco.org/

((enjoy))

Testing Drivel

This is a test post using Drivel.

Does it work?

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The Art Of Community by Jono Bacon

The Art Of Community now available.

((enjoy))

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/08/19/the-art-of-community-now-available/The

ATI Linux Proprietary Driver – Catalyst 9.8 RELEASED

It is available for download here (64 bit platform).

Updated instructions for Ubuntu installation  are as always here.

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Oracle In-Memory Database

Interesting links:

• Oracle timesten in-Memory Database: http://www.oracle.com/database/timesten.html
• Oracle in-Memory Database Cache: http://www.oracle.com/database/in-memory-database-cache.html

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IEEE 802.21: Media-Independent Handover Services

The IEEE 802.21 working group (see www.ieee802.org/21) recently finalized the first standard for dealing with handovers in heterogeneous networks, also called Media-Independent Handovers (MIH). The standard is expected to allow mobile users (and operators) to take full advantage of overlapping and diverse access networks. It provides a framework for efficiently discovering networks in range and executing intelligent heterogeneous handovers, based on their respective capabilities and current link conditions.

An interesting primer about this can be found on the last issue of “The Internet Protocol Journal”.

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Root exploit for Linux Kernel in the Tun Interface

Brad Spengler, the developer behind the Grsecurity project, has published an exploit for a vulnerability in the Tun interface in Linux kernel 2.6.30 and 2.6.18, which can be exploited by attackers to obtain root privileges.

The fix is available for kernel 2.6.30.2, see the patch here.

Now the real question is: is it a GCC issue (the fno-delete-null-pointer-checks optimization) or a programming error? I vote for the second 🙂

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Internet e la battaglia del mediterraneo

Internet e la battaglia del mediterraneo

Ubuntu Jaunty on HP EliteBook 8530p – All Issues Solved!

All the issues described in my previous post about Ubuntu Jaunty (64 bit) upgrade have been solved! Yeppa!

1. ATI Video Card – WORKS. The ATI Catalyst driver 9.6 and 9.5 work fine. You can read more about it here. Download the source of the driver from the ATI site  and follow the instructions for building the Debian packages. With the 9.5 driver it was mandatory to use “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” (read about it here). While waiting the release of the new ATI driver I’ve successfully configured the radeonhd driver 1.2.5 from this PPA and following the instructions from x.org here. You will have to rebuild the drm module for the current kernel (beware of kernel updates). Unfortunately the OpenSource driver does not support 3D acceleration yet.
2. Garbaged Printing with some black squares. It seems an issue of foomatic-db-engine. I think that there isn’t an official fix for this, currenty there is only a workaround here (see comment #84 from Till Kamppeter). Download the pdftops filter and replace your current /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops from the cups packaage.
3. Battery duration. Now the uptime on battery is back to more than 3 hours like on 8.10. The problem is that the radeonhd driver is not able to optimize the ATI card for battery duration like the fglrx does. With the radeonhd driver there the Thermal Zone 2 always between 55 and 62 degrees (look at it with “acpi -t”), while with the fglrx driver it stays at 44-45. The strange thing is that even without X running the video card is heating, I suppose a BIOS issue.

So now I can enjoy all the Jaunty wonders! 🙂 New notifications, faster boot and shutdown, a reliable suspend/resume.

((enjoy))

Upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my HP EliteBook 8530p

Here is a report of my upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my HP EliteBook 8530p (model number FU617AW).

The upgrade process went smooth in almost 1 hour of time. There were about 1200 packages to upgrade for about 900MB of download.

Here is a quick report about problems encountered after reboot:

1. ATI Video Card NOT WORKING. The laptop has an ATI HD 3650 (R600 chipset). The fglrx ATI driver is not working with the latest x.org version 1.6 provided by Jaunty. At this time this is not yet resolved, I’ve filed a but on the ATI site. The bad thing is that the fglrx driver makes my machine crash, I get a black screen of death when X fires up. I’m sure that there is a Kernel Panic but I was not able to catch any info (I’ve no console on serial…).The only work around for now is to use the free ATI driver provided by xorg, even if with this type of video card 3D acceleration is not working. So the performance compared to 8.10 are really worse for the moment.
2. Trackerd Corrupted Index. After logging in, I got several pop-up message from tracker about “Tracker Index Corrupted”. This is a know bug (see Bug #346912 for example) and the only workaround is to remove the contents of ~/.cache/tracker and of ~./.local/share/tracker/data and to restart trackerd. It will re-build all the indexes and will work fine.
3. Garbaged Printing with some black squares. There is some problem in ghostscript or foomatiq filtering which leads to have some letters substituted with black squares. This is a known problem (see Bug #361772) and I did not get a solution yet.
4. Reduced Battery life. I’ve the impression that the battery duration is significantly less compared to 8.10. When switching to battery (from fully charged), the estimated duration dropped to about 2 hours from 3 hours with 8.10. I still have to investigate the reason.

So, if you are in doubt about upgrading or not, be warned of these problems. I will try to update this post whenever I’ll get the solutions.

((enjoy))