I was pretty anxious to get my hands on a Logitech Squeezebox - and particularly the Classic one. Since I'll be moving to a new place soon I'd like to move my server (which now sits next to my stereo, is connected to it by RCA jacks, and runs MPD) to a closet, but that means I'll have to find another solution to access my music library over the network. The Classic seemed like the perfect solution. The newer models have too many bells and whistles and costs a lot more. But the Classic, being sold by only a few shops now, seems on the verge of being phased out, so I decided to wait no longer, buy it, and set up the whole thing. The plan was to add a real NAS (like the Qnap TS-219p, which can run Debian and has an advertised power consumption of ~ 20W under load) to complete the setup and have a power-efficient and centralised music playback solution.

Xfce's Terminal has been my terminal of choice for ages. It's a relic from the days that I ran Xfce as a desktop, days that are long gone. I've gone quite minimalist since but Terminal does just what I need it to do - it's a terminal emulator that doesn't get in your way. Sure there's urxvt and the likes - the best thing to push my buttons is to put me in front of an .Xdefaults file and tell me to configure urxvt. Hell, I'm all in favour of control - but urxvt's configuration borders on the insane. However, there's one feature urxvt has that Terminal (and a lot of similar emulators) doesn't have though, and that's the possibility to manage the WM_CLASS properties of the terminal windows you launch. A typical WM_CLASS output would be this:

[stijn@hermes ~]$ xprop WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "terminal", "Terminal"

To the skilled Linux user, rsync and the OpenSSH suite aren't strangers. In fact, they're frequently used and praised by a lot of people for their convenience and versatility. Together they form an excellent remote backup solution.

Rsync supports operations over SSH out of the box. So far there's no problem. To automate those backups, however, you'll need to run a job scheduler (like Dillon's cron daemon). This doesn't pose any problems either - running it unattended does though...

I have been wondering for quite a while why Vim was so hard to read. Although I am by no way proficient at Vim, I do like it (yes, I tried nano, thanks but no thanks). I like my eyecandy so my terminal does pseudo-transparency, but even with a full black background the comments are still hard to read - they're in dark blue by default. Recently, with setting up the VPS and things, I do spend a lot of time in SSH sessions, and there's no geany in there. So I had decided for quite a while to go hunting for a nice vim colour scheme.

I had this site open in Firefox for weeks (I have the 'Read it later' extension but somehow I still manage to pile up tabs that I don't look at for days, don't ask why). So I went checking out how the themes looked, pulled one in, only to discover it didn't work as advertised. I dropped it into ~/.vim/colors/ like instructed, but no. I could load it, yes, but it stubbornly refused to give me the same colours as the online previews.

That's right. This is a sequel. But unlike most it should be part of the good ones.

As readers of my previous article on encryption might know, I take my privacy at heart - even though it gets increasingly hard in this digital era.

But let's not lose focus here. I share the interest in encryption with a few friends of mine, Teran being one of them. He hinted at a design flaw that affects a lot of mainstream encryption schemes - Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault, but also open source solutions like dm-crypt or TrueCrypt.

My server used to run NFS v3 so I could easily manage my multimedia collection from my local laptop. I found out a few months ago NFS v4 boasts quite some improvements over v3, so I planned to migrate. Unfortunately that never got further than the stage of building the required packages, and yesterday I decided to give SSHFS another go. Compared to v3, NFS v4 brings a more secure solution, but at the cost of slightly more complicated configuration. SSHFS, on the other hand, is childishly easy to set up.

This weekend FOSDEM '08, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, took place in Brussels. It started with the Beer event on friday evening - which I did not attend, I'm not much of a beer fan :-P. Sunday's programme looked like the most interesting to me, with a lineup of talks about Drupal, OpenWrt, suspend, and interaction between the kernel, HAL, udev and networkmanager.

Seems Linux is vulnerable to a vmsplice exploit allowing local users to be come root. This affects kernels 2.6.17 till 2.6.24.1. For those building their own kernels, patches for 2.6.22, 2.6.23 and 2.6.24 are available. For older kernels, you can grab a git commit fixing it, or check the diff between the 2.6.24.1 and 2.6.24.2 patch (I think the latter looks nicer :-P).

Start them compilers!

Someone recently pointed me to a Linux.com article on derivative Linux distribution. Whereas lots of people - including me - used to think it was okay to run a distro without providing sources as long as they were provided upstream, by the 'mother distro', this article makes things clear: it is not. Mepis got targeted for this and had to provide the full sources themselves. Of course, if that is what the GNU Public License says, that's how it has to be done - you cannot claim your distro is GPL if you don't honour that same license. Strangely, it seems, no other distros (and there are plenty of derivative distributions) got targeted at the time.

Zenwalk users might know a certain guy called Béranger, who has 'annoyed' the Zenwalk team with his (rightful) questions about source availability. It seems he did not loose his edgy approach though - read this article about Zenwalk not complying with the GPL. While he certainly has a point, when it comes to his communication skills there really is a lot of room for improvement.

The wait is over: 2.6.24 hit the stores on January 24th. What particularly interests me - and lots of Linux laptop users - is the shitload of wireless drivers integrated! Drivers for Intel's IPW3945 and 4965, Broadcom's 'AirForce One' thingies - I'll keep it diplomatic - and other stuff too. Sadly, the rt2x00 driver seems not to have been updated - which means a lot of people will still experience speed problems. The fix for this is using the rt2x00 git branch.