Today Ubuntu 5.10 was released – give it a try if you are looking for a modern, stable, good looking linux desktop distribution 
Eclipse 3.1.1 released
Today Eclipse 3.1.1 was released. It contains 263 bug fixes – my favorite one is that auto completion works in the Display view again while debugging.
improving console video mode
I wanted to improve the resolution of the console on a linux server. After reading some forums and HOWTO’s I found out that it’s very easy, you just have to add
vga=MODE to your kernel parameters – where MODE stands for the desired screen resolution.The possible screen resolultions are listet here. These values are hexadecimal so vga=791 stands for 1024×768 and 16 Bit Colors (0×317).mounting SATA disk on startup
A friend of mine had trouble with his VDR based on Debian Sarge – he added a SATA disk, partitioned, formatted an mounted it, added an entry in/etc/fstab and everything seemed to be fine – until he rebooted.When the system booted the disk was not mounted automatically at the mount point defined in /etc/fstab. After logging in and typing mount -athe disk was mounted correctly.
The problem was that the required modules for SATA were not loaded early enough. To fix this I did the following:
- Add the required module in the correct order in
/etc/mkinitrd/modules(scsi_mpd, sata_via, sd_mod) - Run
mkinitrd -o /boot/new_initrd_filename - Changed line
initrdof desired boot menu entry in/boot/grub/menu.lstto name of new initrd file - Reboot
new debian mail server
Today I finished the setup of my new mail server. Based on the recently released Sarge 3.1 I used the following configuration:
- exim – as MTA
- fetchmail – to collect my emails from various accounts
- procmail – to pipe incoming mails through the spam and virus filters
- dovecot – IMAP Server
- squirrelmail – webmail interface
- spamassassin – THE anti-spam-solution
- ClamAV – to check new mails for virus
Of course the web interface and the IMAP server are only accessibly through a secure connection.
All the packages used for this configuration can be found in the debian repositories and were easy to install with apt-get. The configuration of the components was not to hard though there were some tricky things (I never thought it could be complicated to get apache2 running in secure mode only – see).
Maybe I’ll write a short HOWTO about it.