iXce’s blog

Dear Google friend,

Could you please keep this little tip safe and warm?
If your friendly Xen hypervisor stops outputting during the boot process at some point and completely freezes, or just stops until you get X or so, just add “console=vga vga=keep” to your Xen kernel line in your GRUB configuration, so that it looks like this:

title Xen 3.1
root (hd0,4)
kernel /xen-3.1.gz console=vga vga=keep noreboot
module /vmlinuz-2.6.19-4-generic root=/dev/mapper/lvm-root ro console=tty0
module /initrd.img-2.6.19-4-generic


Thanks dear.

Christof: You can speak. I can hear you.
Truman: Who are you?
Christof: I am the creator… of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
Truman: And who am I?
Christof: You’re the star.
Truman: Was nothing real?
Christof: You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch. Listen to me, Truman. There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear. I know you better than you know yourself.

The Truman Show

I discovered pamusb a few days ago (actually, I had already heard about it, but never puzzled to try it), and WOW it’s great! In case you wouldn’t have guessed it yet, it lets you use an USB drive or a removable media (SD cars or so), as a mean of authentication for any pam-based application (su/sudo, keyrings, screensaver…). The setup is damn easy (it’s all about adding one line to a file in /etc/pam.d, typing two commands and adding an agent run on every session), and the whole thing works damn well.
It’s just really cool to just have to unplug an usb key to lock my laptop and replug it to unlock it, or to insert it upon login or… It’s just greatly useful. I’m still a bit reluctant to make it “required” and not just “sufficient”. It’d just be awful to be unable to login because I lose it or so…

Oh, just a little tip, to avoid “Unsafe disk removal”, just add the drive to /etc/fstab (you can reference it by label) and make it readonly and mountable by user.
LABEL=MY-KEY /media/auth vfat ro,defaults,user,noauto 0 0If you want to rename *your key, just head to the RenameUSBDrive article in Ubuntu Documentation

Here are 0.4.2 debs for hardy (which currently only has 0.4.0):

• libpamusb 0.4.2 deb for hardy
• pamusb-tools deb for hardy

And a few handy links:

• Neat howto for debian based distros
• pamusb homepage
• Andrea Luzzardi’s blog (pamusb author)

I’d been looking for a short domain name to alias guillaume.segu.in (that’s 17 characters!) for a while. chui.la (“I’m there” in French) looked good, but aulo.in seems easier to type . So here are those 7 (only!) characters, with a pretty (imho) logo:

Merry chrismas everyone =)

Okay folks, the scheduled-unscheduled maintenance began at 10:30:36 UTC, and everything was back up 1 minute and 1 seconde later. Everything looks alright now, and IO problems are gone.

Have a nice day on Compiz Fusion web services

We don’t need no thought control…

Meh, it’s been a long while since I last blogged. Figured I’d to post this one after the one about today’s server outage.
Let’s say that life has been awfully overwhelming. School is taking more and more of my time day after day, week after week. I’ve been trying to improve at physics for months now, but it still seems to be unsuccessful. Well, we’ll see.

I haven’t been completely idle code-wise though. My gnome-about rewrite got committed to GNOME 2.21 SVN and will make it in GNOME 2.22 release, scheduled for March 12.
There’s also another top secret project we are working on with a good friend of mine. No ETA (because, you know, 5 minutes a day isn’t much) though I hope we’ll have something ready for Christmas.

A server outage occurred this evening around 16:30 UTC after an unsuccessful kernel upgrade, which aimed at fixing IO issues.
Everything was back up online around 17:10 UTC, no data was lost and everything is OK hardware-wise.

Apologies for this unscheduled downtime. Please note that a new attempt is scheduled for tomorrow (the exact hour is still unset).

HAI
  CAN HAS STDIO?
  I HAS A 2710p
  PLZ
    GIMMEH 2710p
  AWSUM THX
    LOL "2710p is great"
  UR DOING IT WRONG
    LOL WTF
  KTHX
KTHXBYE

The title says it all, 0.6.0 is here, at last !
The official announcement is available in Compiz Fusion Community list archives.

Congratulations to the development team, translators, and support team for this awesome release ! We made it big