Debian unstable xorg: no mouse & no keyboard
August 21st, 2010
Mostly for my own reference, a good summary about the changes:
http://who-t.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-keyboard-configuration-handling.html
Archive
Posts Tagged ‘debian’
How to upgrade all dependencies of a debian package
June 4th, 2010
Sometimes Debian Unstable users may find it useful to upgrade all dependencies of a package (missing version dependencies etc). The following command can be used to do it:
$ aptitude safe-upgrade ~Rpackage~U
Hedgewars – a worms clone
November 21st, 2009
Blowtorch can kill, too...
Since it’s been over two years since the last time I blogged about Debian games, I figured it’s time to mention this small gem.
Hedgewars is a pretty polished & very playable Worms clone. It supports quick singleplayer games against the AI, hotseat multiplayer games, and multiplayer games over the internet. Naturally, the multiplayer game is the Crux here 
You can play on the global server where players seem to be available pretty readily. I’ve mostly played with known friends, but some extras have always joined in because I’ve forgotten to restrict joins and team additions.
Can you guess what happens next?
In case you haven’t played Team17′s Worms yet, the game consists of teams of hedgehogs that battle against each other with a variety of weapons. The weapons available can be controlled from game settings. Each team starts with the same set of weapons, all of which are not available for use in the beginning. For some weapons you have to wait a couple of turns until they become activated (for example: airstrike, napalm, cake). This allows players to prepare a bit for the inevitable airstrikes etc. More weapons can be picked up from crates that fall from the sky randomly.
Cake!
Last team alive wins the game, as simple as that. The game is turn-based, and there is a limit of time each hedgehog can use to move around and choose a way to attack other hedgehogs. After attacking the turn ends, and the next team gets to act.
Fire Punch!
Turns are team-based, not character-based, so a team with only one hog and another with three hogs get to act as often. This also means that in a team with only hog that hog gets to act every time, while for bigger teams the hog gets to act only every N turns (where N is the number of alive hogs). This can be used tactically for your benefit 
Assuming the opposing team does not have Switch Hog -charges left…
Happy Birthday!
Besides the limit of time on turns, the whole game time is limited so that Sudden Death mode is activated eventually in long battles. This reduces the health of all hogs by 5 (hogs start at 100 health, which can, by the way, be larger when health boxes are picked up) each turn, until it reaches 1. The water level also rises, drowning all boxes and hogs that are below the line. Naturally, the hogs that are higher, have an advantage in the end, so this adds more tactical elements to the game.
All in all, Hedgewars is a very amusing game to play with a bunch of friends, and the games are rather short, so it’s easy to have ex tempore gaming evenings 
Sudden Death for the win!
There is a similar project named Wormux, but I admit to only playing it once very quickly. The playability and polishing just seemed to be better in Hedgewars, but I admit this might be an erroneous evaluation. I guess I might need to give it some proper testing in the future.
Another game I should probably test out is teeworlds
Debian popcon statistics for gitstats
November 21st, 2009
Who said you can’t know how many Debian users are there for a given package?
The popcon installations for gitstats seem to be up to 100 at the moment (package rank 17712 – my unstable installation claims to know 28085 normal packages). Out of those, 23 users actually use it actively.
Now if there was only a way to scale this up by knowing how many % of Debian users have the popularity-contest package installed…
CD/DVD tray stuck on Debian Sid
November 19th, 2009
gitstats packaged in Debian unstable
September 12th, 2009
gitstats has been packaged for Debian by Vincent Fourmond, and is now in unstable. As far as I know, this is the first of my projects that made it into Debian.
$ apt-cache search git statistics gitstats - statistics generator for git repositories
So, who’s going to debianize ViewGit? Granted, it would be more work, but I think it would have more users too
Debian Etch->Lenny upgrade experiences
February 22nd, 2009
I’ve (mostly) finished upgrading my laptop from Debian Etch (+ backports) to Lenny, and overall it was pretty smooth.
Encrypted system logs to gmail using logcheck/procmail/gpg
June 14th, 2008
It’s always a good idea to keep external system logs in case something happens to your server, for example, if it gets rooted. Privacy issues are a good reason to keep the logs encrypted. This is a quick look at how to send system logs hourly to Gmail (or some other external mail) from a Debian server. It also assumes quite a bit of knowledge from the reader, sorry for that
Laptop clock problems on Debian
February 23rd, 2008
I was having some problems with the laptop clock being completely wrong (and that in turn causing a lot of weirdness during boot and before ntp kicked in), but turns out Debian Etch has some problems saving the hardware clock from system time properly when shutting down. Apparently you need to manually run
hwclock --directisa --systohc
to set the hardware clock from system time (after updating the system time with NTP).
Streamripper
January 21st, 2008
[ Apparently I'm such a lazy bum that I'll never get around to providing some real content. So I figured I should maybe start posting some of the tips I usually mention on IRC channels. Just in case this site gets indexed at some point and someone finds it useful. ]
So here’s the Debian package tip of the day:
streamripper – download online streams into audio files
This handy tool allows you to save internet radio streams as MP3s while listening for them at the same time (you don’t have to!). This is what I do in one screen window:
$ streamripper http://someserver:9000 -t -M 1024 -r # rip up to one GiB, don’t overwrite incomplete tracks, and create a relay server
And as usual, now I can listen to the stream using my favourite music player:
$ mplayer http://localhost:8000/ # default port
And yeah, streamripper can name the files properly as long as the stream provides the correct names.
Ohloh
