Last year I bought a Canon DSLR camera. As part of the deal, I agreed to use it and not let it gather dust in a corner. One of the things I've been doing is trying to take regular pictures and upload them to a daily photo blog.

For most of last year I was managing to load one or two pictures per week at best. Since Christmas I've been able to maintain a daily stream - while only a third are actually DSLR images - I think it has been useful forcing me to think creatively and my DSLR has been used more than it would have been otherwise.

If you take pictures and have them available digitally it's an interesting idea to have a photo blog. While it may seem a chore, it's not, like all things it does help to practice and you don't have to take a picture every day...

Here is my photo blog in case you are interested www.blipfoto.com/ajt.

Just when things are going well they start to not go well. Last weekend the power supply suddenly died in my seven year old desktop PC. Well actually at first I didn't know what had died but I borrowed a PSU from a friend and confirmed the rest of the PC was okay.

I've ordered a replacement model from a local supplier, and even though I plan to replace the PC within the next 2 years anyway I've bought a silent high efficiency model to see if they make a real difference to the noise the PC makes.

As things go it's not going to break the bank but I don't like it when things break.

For a while I was running the ATI fglrx driver on my desktop box. It was almost unusable with KDE4 so I switched to Fluxbox, but even then it was painfully slow. Eventually I gave up with ATI and installed the open-source Radeon driver. After a purge of the ATI components and a reboot Fluxbox was much more responsive. In fact it is now sufficiently fast enough to run KDE4 properly.

It was faster running Squeeze but at the moment in Wheezy it is at least fast enough to use again.

I'm not happing much luck with my Wheezy desktop system at the moment. Ever since Sarge I've run Debian testing on my desktop with a constant upgrade. My home server and other family systems all run the current Debian stable. I know that testing isn't perfectly stable and things break - the point is the point of testing, to test things in case they break so that they are fixed when the next stable is created.

At the moment lots is broken and has been for more than just a few days. I submit bug reports but as is often the case I get no response or if I do they aren't helpful. I'm not complaining, I accept that testing isn't production quality and it does break from time to time but it seems more broken than usual at the moment.

AMD/ATI fglrx driver is unusable at the moment. X/KDE4 is horrendously slow to the point of being unusable as a desktop system. The open-source radeon driver is perfectly usable - though not as fast the closed-source fglrx is when it's working well.

Mid-week I installed Linux 3.0.0 as my kernel. Suffice to say it just panics when X starts or when KDE4 login is in process. Doesn't matter which graphics driver I use and the timing isn't consistent but if I don't boot into X, it's okay if it stays in text mode. If you manually start X after being on the console then it's okay too - but that's hardly a sensible way of doing things.

Google Chrome has been pretty dire of late, exceptionally slow on sites like twitter or Google's own Plus. Today (version 15.0.849.0-r96325) it just seg faults as soon as you try to start it. As a result I'm now running Iceweasel 5.0.1 which is actually a pretty good browser, the 3.x branch had got horribly slow in comparison to Chrome.

At least the jam making has been going well!

I followed the suggestions in this blog article Encrypted partitions with Ubuntu/Debian. In Wheezy, KDE4 finds the USB key prompts for the password, then shows you the unencrypted volume and you can mount/eject like any other USB key.

The problem is that this doesn't work in Squeeze. KDE4 prompts you for the password, and it creates the device-mapper entry, but it doesn't allow you to mount/eject the USB key from the GUI. While its a irritation, it's easy to manually mount/umount the drive from the command line, but it's a problem for desktop users.

I don't know enough about the innards of udev, udisks, D-Bus, HAL and KDE4 to know where to look for a fix. A quick hunt through the Debian bug reports suggest that this is a problem and it's not really a KDE4 problem as it also impacts GNOME users too - but so far no solution.

Some time ago I added zeros to the end of Qemu/KVM disk images on a Bytemark hosted server to make the images larger. One of the files is still sparse two of them are not.

All of them are about 2G of used space in the VM, but only one of them is a 2G sparse file on the outside, the others don't appear to be sparse any more. I tried copying one of them with "cp --sparse=always" but that didn't help, and fsck of the VM's file system find anything, it really is only 2G in the VM and the remaining 18G is empty space.

Not sure what to do next. If it were not a hosted machine I'd just move the images to a local server and copy the contents into a new disk image and not worry, but as it's hosted I only have so much RAM/disk to play with on the box and moving 200G files over the public internet is impossible.

It's something to keep me occupied anyway.

Today I thought I'd upgrade my partner's desktop system from Lenny to Squeeze. I more or less followed the "official" advice rather than use my own method. As to be expected lots of things didn't go as planned...

After only a short while I hit a problem with bash and dash, it's a know bug but it did add some time on to getting the box running.

Once the main upgrade was done I started to remove all the kruft that was left over from which took more time than anticipated. Once that was done I logged into KDE4 and hunted for more kruft and added things that were now needed that weren't possible in KDE3.

Finally I logged in as my partner and reconfigured her desktop more or less to standard with all the oddments removed and trimmed so that she could personalise it from a sane base-line.

Problems: dash/Bash - known bug but annoying; vlc won't play MP4s from the BBC but Xine will - annoying as vlc is okay on two other systems; and finally most strange of all, Icedove will not run directly under KDE4 but will via an SSH/X session!

This morning I upgraded my home server from Lenny to Squeeze. My laptops and desktop systems run testing most of the time anyway so they didn't need upgrading so this was the first "real" system I've upgraded. I've upgraded two tiny console only virtual systems already - that went fine but today was the first big system.

As I use apt-cacher-ng I thought it wise to first download everything so the cache mechanism wouldn't break anything. So I changed the sources and did an aptitude update then an aptitude -d -y full-upgrade. Next I installed apt aptitude dpkg and let it sort out any dependencies, then did a safe-upgrade followed by a full-upgrade.

Where possible I tried to let it install the maintainer's version of config files, I have mine rsnapshotted. Once it was all done, I upgraded the kernel and added a few things that weren't in Lenny that I wanted and purged things like kqemu that have gone. I rebooted, which confirmed that GRUB2 and the new style sysv-rc was working, purged grub-legacy and rebooted again (all okay).

At the moment I'm blackilisting kernel modules I don't require, and fixing some breakages, for example Dovecot and nfsv4 which complained about the old config files. Overall it's been pretty painless, less than 2 hours so far including most of the fixes. Next up my partner's desktop system - which will be more complex, KDE3 to KDE4 transition on that box...

I use SSH "Controls" by default on my desktop PC. This makes setting up new connections more efficient and quick. It also means that you think you are on a "New" SSH connection when in fact you are on an existing connection. I may now have to ask my hosting company to reboot the box as I now think I've stopped the SSH server and now can't reach the damn thing...

Serves me right for having a good day yesterday in expanding the size of a running KVM session's filesystem!

Spotted a a link to ask.debian.net today. Interesting site, alas a few pretty lame questions and answers in the mix too. When people ask really stupid things or give really stupid answers it's sometimes hard to get them back on the straight and narrow without sounding rude. If you don't try and help them, then the stupidity just gets propagated.

I've nothing against newbies or newbie popular distros like Ubuntu, but sometimes you do see really bad advice on Ubuntu forums when you are doing a Google search for something...!