We need a dedicated hosted Debian box for work. Thankfully it's not my problem to find.

Yesterday I let aptitude upgrade KDE from version 3 to 4.

It's all in now, it wasn't painless but it went in mostly okay. Lots of things don't work and quite a few applications crash constantly or run like treacle. It's pretty but it's as yet unstable and unfinished. I think Debian was wise to release Lenny with KDE3, by the time Squeeze comes out KDE4 will be feature complete and stable.

I think I'd have been better not allowing it to upgrade my KDE3 settings to KDE4 and simply started with all new KDE4 and vanilla defaults. My customised KDE3 settings did not migrate cleanly too KDE4. Also my old AMD64 2GHz CPU and Nvidia FX graphics card is not up to the job of all the eye candy.

Since the weekend I've had strange problems on my Squeeze system. Udev would rename the Ethernet port from 0 to 1, the ALSA sound sub-system didn't load automatically and hal and splashy had a hissy-fit. Upgrading to the new kernel seems to have fixed the Ethernet problem and I'll see if it's fixed the sound too tonight.

It is testing and I do test, so I'm not complaining but that doesn't stop it being frustrating sometimes. On the plus side, reading bug reports, following discussions and fixing the system yourself is a great learning experience and helps to keep you on your toes.

When I get time I need to figure out why an old Dell notebook I have won't boot with a modern kernel, something goes wrong around the time that the hal daemon starts. It's fine with an old kernel so I can still use the box, but I'd like to upgrade to the current kernel if I can.

I let my Squeeze box safe-upgrade over the weekend. Lots of things broke. The hal upgrade was messy, Splashy needs removing before it goes in properly. Udev is now renaming eth0 to eth1, if I manually remove then reinsert the skge module into the kernel it creates it as eth0 correctly... Finally all the sound modules stopped loading and need modprobing for manually.

If I can figure out which package is responsible I'll file a bug report.

I run a couple of Debian Sid systems in VM. Recently I ran a routine aptitude safe-upgrade on one and it all fell to bits. hal got it's self in a mess and I couldn't install or remove anything else via aptitude or dpkg. The virtual machine was not a happy bunny. Apparently it's a known problem with hal and splashy is an extra issue. I'm running up a new image now.

VMs are useful place to test things out and play. It's always better to see what's going on away from one's primary system.

I'm no advocate of terror or violence but I'm getting pretty sick of how HM Government is getting desperate to drum up fear to justify their continued attacks on civil liberties. If you haven't see it there is a nice Billboard generator where you can make up your own more truthful message then post it to flickr. Some of them are clever and make fair comments...

I run a number of systems in virtual machines. Today it was the day of the big KDE3 to KDE4 transition on one of the SID systems. After a bit of a push, it went in okay and it seems to work okay. It's all very new and it will take time to get use to but the Debian team seem to have been wise to let it stabilise a bit before going a head with the move.

I noticed today that I've not posted any articles to this site in over a year. This is very bad. I've been working on an ikiwiki article for ever and day - it's mostly done and I keep promising to do one on NFSv4 and NFSv4+Kerberos if I can ever get Kerberos to work.

The problem is with the redundancy axe hanging over me and family worries I never seem to have the time to do anything. The stupid thing is it's not as if I can actually do anything about things outside my control, it doesn't have to eat up time. Sometimes doing something else helps to take your mind of it - I've just got to get motivated.

On a more positive note my cancer has been declared "fixed". Or rather the hospital has discharged me, saying that any further tests would carry more risk than there is of the cancer returning on it's own. Which is good in a strange sort of way.

Do you twitter? Is there any point to it?

I wonder if it's worth the effort, so while I wonder I'm trying it out - from the command line with Perl naturally... twitter.com/drajt.

British Gas are coming to the house today to service the boiler, so I'm working from home to let them in. In one respect it's nice to not to have to go into work or be disrupted by the noise and inconvenience of work. The down side is that everything thing now runs over the VPN, which is painfully slow... Mind you I'm using SAP Java stuff for some of the day so a slow VPN is the least of my worries...!