I just set up FreeNX on my Sarge machine and it works really nice! I was hoping it would be able to "receive" remote desktop (rdc) connections and channel it to an X server (to use standard Windows CE/TS thin clients with a Linux server). I found the .deb’s too late, and as such followed another howto for Ubuntu .

Here’s how I did it on Sarge:

apt-get install cdbs autotools-dev patchutils autoconf bzip2 zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev xlibs-dev libfreetype6-dev libmikmod2-dev libssl-dev libxaw7-dev automake1.9 automake1.4 expect tcl8.4 netcat ssh build-essential dpatch

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb-src http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/unstable/ sid nx

apt-get source nx freenx
cd nx-1.4.92+1.5.0

sed -i s/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 5.0.0\)/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 4.2.0\)/ debian/control
export DH_COMPAT=4
dpkg-buildpackage

cd ../freenx-0.4.4+0.4.5

sed -i s/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 5.0.0\)/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 4.2.0\)/ debian/control
sed -i s/openssh-server,\ openssh-client/ssh/ debian/control
dpkg-buildpackage

cd ..; dpkg -i *deb 

Edit /etc/nxserver/node.conf and add the following line:

COMMAND_XAUTH=/usr/bin/X11/xauth

If you want to use SSH authentication instead of FreeNX’s own passdb backend put the following lines in there as well:

ENABLE_PASSDB_AUTHENTICATION="0"
ENABLE_SSH_AUTHENTICATION="1" 

Fetch the 1.5 client for Windows (2.0 from Nomachine doesn’t work). Enter the correct details (enable "encrypt all data" if you want it to work through firewalls and NATs — that way you just have to open up SSH and be done with it). Enjoy!

Been trying to fix up an installation for the last few days now. SLES9 on a box with an 8 port Areca SATA controller in it, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 as OS (will run Oracle). Areca supplies a driver floppy to use with the installer; all very nice. However, the SuSE installer does not copy the driver module into the initrd (even though it is regenerated on install, and even set to be loaded on boot in the config!), so after the installer reboots you get a kernel panic saying it can’t find the root fs. Which is correct, since the module isn’t loaded. Areca has some details in their README about "do this when the SuSE installer reaches 70%: press Ctrl-Alt-F2 and …", but the SuSE installer reboots automatically without question or warning, and by the time I could follow their instructions (some files needed to be on the disk first) I couldn’t fix it up before the thing rebooted by itself. PITA. Rescue mode gives kernel oops when I try to mount it the XFS filesystem on it. Debian Install CD finds the controller, but I cannot chroot into it (to run LILO) since the system is 64bit and the Debian one is 32-bit. Argh.

I love Debian, and the Areca ISO from tienhuis.nl … 

Yes, yes, it’s GNU/Linux 😉

 Stumbled upon this page with a very clear look on why Linux is actually better (than Windows) for you, and your computer. It doesn’t hammer again and again on the freedom (as in speech or as in beer) but more on the actual advantages which can help you persuade others to try this wonderful OS out 😉

I converted my OpenWrt installation on my WL-HDD to boot from harddisk, as 4M flash isn’t a lot if you want to make a print/scan/webcam server out of the little thing…

root@nalia:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 3.2M      2.9M    324.0k  90% /jffs
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1     9.2G    134.3M      8.6G   1% /
none                      7.0M     20.0k      7.0M   0% /tmp

Lookin’ good 😉

Update: Oh, eck, wait , a few minutes after this post the harddisk made a loud click and everything started giving bus errors. Now it doesn’t boot anymore. :'(

Just received a few emails from LPI saying I passed my 102 exam, so I can now proudly call myself LPIC-1 certified! 😀

Went to FOSDEM yesterday. Skipped RMS and GPLv3 talk; the former because it’s always the same anyway, the latter because it doesn’t attract me very much to be debating license issues time and time again. So we arrived at 2, just too late to join the SER seminar (at least not by walking in late) – so we walked around and checked out the T-shirts etc. Big dissappointment, Openstuff wasn’t there, so no penguins for me 🙁

At 15:00, LPI exam started, so I took the 102 there – as far as I can tell, this will be no problem. Results in 6 weeks…

At 16:00, we went to see the Xen talk, pretty interesting.

Haven’t seen much of the talks yet, but on sunday I’ll probably see most. It’s a pity the wifi is not working at all and won’t be working for the rest of FOSDEM. I simply can’t understand how you can break that when it’s so easy to set up. Apparently the soekris boards were only delivered on friday with an atheros card, and the atheros card “Breaks(tm)” under high load. I dunno, many people use madwifi and that works just fine… (but Soekris boards run BSD). Would have  been nice to do some live discussion, surfing, ssh’ing etc.
Now on to Day Two …

I’ve done a few installs of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD lately… for some tests. Seems to work fine for the most part, although I haven’t really used it like I used the GNU/Linux “edition” 😉 Still, looks quite nicely run, so I’m setting up a Belgian (local) mirror on the PowerSource/Phyxia mirroring box. If nothing else, this will allow me to continue playing/testing this even if their main mirror (gnuab.org) goes offline. This happens a few times a day as far as I can tell, not really handy. I’ll have to see if I can get this to run permanently on a not-so-important box… 😀

Somewhere this week I changed my firewalling script so that on start it would clear out all the tables and start fresh with my rules. Some time afterwards I noticed I could not reach certain sites, such as Ebay, modules.apache.org, mininova, and others – I didn’t see the connection immediately though.

When clearing out the rules it also automatically cleared out the “clamp mtu to mss” option Debian’s pppd script enabled before… after putting that back into the tables, everything started to work fine again.

Took quite some debugging, as I first thought this was a pmtud issue, and that was supposed to solve it… Another thing learnt, another thing to remember when similar problems arise 🙂