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Showing posts from March, 2015

Boiling frog, or when did we loose it with /etc ?

$ sudo find /etc -type f | wc -l 2794 Stateless When was the last time you looked at /etc and thought - "I honestly know what every single file in here is". Or for example had a thought "Each file in here is configuration changes that I made". Or for example do you have confidence that your system will continue to function correctly if any of those files and directories are removed? Traditionally most *NIX utilities are simple enough utilities, that do not require any configuration files what's so ever. However most have command line arguments, and environment variables to manipulate their behavior. Some of the more complex utilities have configuration files under /etc, sometimes with "layer" configuration from user's home directory (~/). Most of them are generally widely accepted. However, these do not segregate upstream / distribution / site administrator / local administrator / user configuration changes. Most update mechanisms cre

My IDE needs a makeover

Current Setup I am a Linux Distribution Engineer and work on arbitrary open source projects. Mostly I'm patching/packaging existing things, and sometimes start fresh projects. My "IDE", or rather I shall say "toolbox" is rather sparse: GNOME Terminal Google Chrome GNU Emacs GCC toolcahin with GDB Python3 - iPython, iPdb, pyflakes git, GNU bazaar There are a few things that annoy me, and should be done better these days. Documentation I lookup documentation mostly with Google Chrome. This includes the texinfo renderings of the docs. There are a few reasons for that. First of all my developer machine is not polluted with all the dev packages under the sun, instead I compile practically everything in a chroot. And most of the time chroots have much newer versions of everything (from gcc & automake, to boost and whatever other dependencies are in use). However I would like to have easy generic lookup builtin for common things that I lookup in

Intel CPU microcode support in ubuntu-drivers-common

Ubuntu Vivid Vervet 15.04 is on its final approach to release at the end of next month. Here is a highlight of one of the features that I have helped to land. ubuntu-drivers-common is a framework to detect hardware-dependent components on user's machine and offer to install additional packages to enable better support for such hardware. Typical examples are drivers for the graphics cards. This cycle I have added CPU family detection plugin, which helps to detect cpu family and install appropriate microcode update. E.g. if one is running Intel CPU, intel-microcode package is installed. Check out: $ ubuntu-drivers devices $ ubuntu-drivers list $ ubuntu-drivers autoinstall