Quick question, what is the lowest Process ID you will find? Most people (myself included until recently) would be able to say that the lowest number is 1 for the init process. Plenty of programs including ps and pstree have this assumption. This assumption bit me this week with Debian Bug 687829 where pstree on…
After reading Jakub’s pet peeve about debhelper build-dependencies I decided to check my own and sponsored packages to see how they fare. find debian/ -type f -name control | xargs grep -h -o ‘debhelper (>= 9[^)]*)’ | sort | uniq -c 2 debhelper (>= 9) 2 debhelper (>= 9.0) 3 debhelper (>= 9.0.0) 1 debhelper…
I did some upgrades of what seemed like a million packages today on my Debian sid computer. I was doing this remotely and when I tried to ssh back in I got kicked out after entering my password, hmmm. OK, so I waited until I could get in front of it and tried to login…
This weekend procps-ng version 3.3.3 was tagged and released for distribution. There have been many patches and fixes involved in this release as we move from an unchanging static sort of code into something that is easier to maintain and build on various architectures. The good thing is I’m down to 1 or 2 patches…
psmisc version 22.16 was released today. It is a bugfix release that bascially fixes a problem around strings in C. Process name lengths are only supposed to be 16 characters long, so a 17 bye buffer is ok; until you have processes with brackets which means the string is 18 characters. The next wrinkle is…
For various reasons, having vmware running on my desktop would be kind of useful. VMware provide a Free (as in beer) version of their software called VMware Player. I downloaded the file VMware-Player-4.0.2-591240.x86_64.bundle off their website and tried to build it. It failed to build. Given my previous lack of success with VMware server, I…
Sometimes life throws little curves at you to see if you are still awake, today has been one of those days. fglrx is (apparently) fixed I’ve had a long-running problem with fglrx on my laptop. The problem stems from ATI closed-source drivers with one of those laptops that has an ATI and Intel driver. It…
Like a lot of people, I have one of those set-top TV boxes that can record TV shows at set times. I made sure that I could get at the files (using a FTP server in this case) and that the files were some sort of common standard (MPEG 4 TS). I also have a…
Following up from the upstream release of a new procps, the Debian packages have also been updated. This upload has a significant change in that, I hope, procps is now multi-arch compliant. To make this happen, the libprocps library is now in it’s own package, separate from the binaries. It also means that if you…
procps-ng version 3.3.2 was released today. This version fixes some bugs introduced in version 3.3.1 as well as a number of enhancements. Below is the most significant set of changes that 3.3.2 brings. NLS The most visible change is that procps-ng is now international. The NLS changes took a long windy path but we got…