ADSL port forwarding

If your box is behind an ADSL modem (and unless you have a professional server and datacentre to put it in, it probably is) then by default the NAT addressing and firewall will mean that you cannot get in remotely to your box. This may be fine if you don’t want anything from the box accessible, but I tend to like being able to ssh in from anywhere, so you need to set up some port forwarding from your ADSL router/modem to get into your box

I wont attempt to describe how your ADSL modem/router config works, you’ll have to read it’s manual, but the ports you probably want are:

ssh 22 – if you want to log from outside your home network with ssh
smtp 25 – if you want your box to be able to receive email
ftp 21 – if you want ftp (though I recommend sftp or scp which use ssh and therefore encrypt your password and data)
http 80 – if you want webpages visible from the internet
https 443 – if you want webpages visible from the internet and want to use https encrypted http

Dynamic DNS

Unless you have a fixed IP address from your ISP, you will probably want some sort of Dynamic DNS system that sets a hostname to have your current IP address. I use http://dyndns.afraid.org as they are free, you can host your own domain there and there are plenty of domains you can use for sub-domains if you don’t want to buy a domain. They provide lots of scripts to help you keep your IP address recorded correctly whenever it changes

Mail

I really want mail configured for delivery, as that is one of the easiest ways to get alerts from your machine (though twitter could be cool too though). If you have a email to smms gateway or smartphone with push email then these alerts can be very fast and direct.

I use exim, not because it is the fastest or most configurable mail system available, but because it is very easy to get configured and running on Debian or Ubuntu. Simply install the exim4 package and the debconf wizard will get you up and running.

sudo aptitude install exim4

The wizard, which can be re-run with the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config, asks you how you want to configure exim. Normally you select the first or second option (“internet site; mail is sent and received directly using SMTP” or “mail sent by smarthost; received via SMTP or fetchmail”). Most of the questions come with sensible defaults. If you selected the second option you will get asked what your smarthost for sending mail is, in many cases this is just mail.your.isp or you can use google if you have an account, but it will require authentication which which is a little more complicated to set up.

Next you want to set all email for ‘root’ to forward to you preferred email address.
Edit /root/.forward to look like this

# Exim filter   < <== do not edit or remove this line!

if error_message then finish endif

deliver me@myemail.com

You can test sending email with a simple command line of mail root -s test followed by a message and then CTRL+d. You should get the email at your address set above.

Logwatch

I like to know what is happening on my boxes, and logwatch does a great job at summarising the changes that have happened very day. Install logwatch with

sudo aptitude install logwatch

and it will email root every day with a summary of log changes and other useful info.

As I don’t actually want this information every day, I moved the cronjob for logwatch from daily to weekly with

sudo mv /etc/cron.daily/00logwatch /etc/cron.weekly/00logwatch

so now I get a weekly summary for my box, which is good enough for me

Raid emails

As I use software raid to make my disks a little more redundant (Warning: RAID is not a backup strategy. 2 disks CAN (and sod’s law / murphey’s law says that at the worst possible time they actually will) both die at the same time. RAID simply gives you an extra chance to get a new disk without having to get your data from a backup)

If you use software RAID, make sure your raid config
cat /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
has the following lines set appropriately

MAILADDR root
MAILFROM raid@myserver.com

Smart disk monitoring

As I don’t trust disks (and you shouldn’t either, as they will die on you at the most annoying time) I like to have the S.M.A.R.T disk monitoring installed, which does occasional tests on the disks, and can warn you if the disk starts showing bad sectors. If your disk does have bad sectors, it is probably best to replace it pretty soon, though sometimes you can just get a very small set of bad sectors and live with the disk for a long time.

Install smart with

sudo aptitude install smartmontools

and if you have logwatch installed too, then the SMART reports get added to your logwatch summaries (including disk temperatures which can be a good indication of airflow in your box)

Toughening SSH

I found that I had a lot of attempted logins on my box because SSH was open on the default port. One solution is to move the default port, but I am likely to forget to use that port number and just confuse myself… So I started looking at other ways to reduce the risk of having someone brute-force their way into an account.

You can use some really good stuff like fail2ban to take failed logins and firewall that IP off for a while, but I decided that I wanted something even stronger. I disabled password logins completely via SSH! To do this you will need to have created a ssh keypair and set up the public key on your server and make sure it works to log you in BEFORE you disable password logins.

To disable password logins, simply edit
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
and change

PasswordAuthentication yes

to say “no” instead. This will mean that you can never log in with a password, and have to use a ssh key. This will be almost impossible to brute-force, though you do have to keep your private ssh keyfile secure.

As a minimum, you may want to think about setting

PermitRootLogin no

in your sshd config so that the root account cannot be brute-forced, as this is probably the most common account that attempts are made on.

Monitoring with Munin

To keep an idea of how busy the box is, the cpu and ram usage, disk usage and many more things I have installed munin to monitor my servers. Munin logs system activity and automatically creates web-accessible charts of the status of your box. An example is online at http://munin.ping.uio.no/. I have set mine as password protected via an apache htaccess file with htpassword (there are plenty of resources online for how to do this), so that only I can see how busy my box is.

If you also install sensord and lm-sensors then munin can also chart things like fan speeds and temperatures

Security updates

Whether you are running Debian, Ubuntu or any other linux OS, make sure you check how to setup security updates for your distribution and install updates regularly. Having old packages is possibly the easiest way to get your box exploited.

If you don’t like having to remember to install packages you can install cron-apt to download the packages and tell you, so you can install them, or even install them for you (however it is generally a good idea to know what is going onto your system before it goes in, just in case anything looks suspicious or might break something)

/etc in revision control

Have you ever made a change to your system config, then realised not long later that it was a bad change, but can’t remember what you did?

Introducing etckeeper. etckeeper is a very clever package that takes /etc and puts it all in git. It can easily be configured to automatically commit every time you install or remove a package, so that all you have to do if you found something in /etc is broken is check the recent changes!

Simply install it with

sudo aptitude install etckeeper

and it pretty much works out of the box (It also supports other code control tools other than git, but the default is git)

Anything Else?

This list is by no means complete, and there are probably many more common tweaks you can do – Please leave a comment if you think of anything else that fits in or anything I might be doing wrong (hey, nobody’s perfect!) as I am always looking to improve how I run my little servers.

If you have several machines and static IP addresses then you can configure syslog to log to across the network, which would be cool as you could have errors logged from a box that has had bad disk crashes and dies and still know why. However I don’t have static IP’s so have not looked into this much

While you can just use something like dpkg-deb to turn the right files into a .deb, this only works for already-compiled files and loses some of the great features about Debian-based systems such as changelogs, so I am only going to describe how to make a full source-format package that is built using the Debian tools

Prereqs

You will want to install a few packages before you go any further – these are very useful helper tools for packaging. Install dh-make, dpkg-dev, debhelper and devscripts

sudo aptitude install dh-make dpkg-dev debhelper devscripts

I chose debhelper here as it is a very powerful and yet often simple way of quickly creating packages. It takes a lot of the slow work away from the packager and does very sensible default things. My example package does not really need compiling so it could be simple to just create it by hand, but using debhelper to do the default packaging rules gives you more time to do other things

It is worth mentioning here that all aspects of the parts of a Debian package are covered in detail in the Debian Policy document (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/, which although Debian specific will not steer you wrong for getting started with Ubuntu packages (the Ubuntu Policy Manual appears to be athttp://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/ubuntu-policy/policy.html/). (The Policy is also packaged up in the package debian-policy, though ubuntu-policy might be of interest too)

Lets Begin

So, where do we start. Let’s start at the point where you have a simple program, perhaps a shell/perl/python script that you simply want to package up as a deb for easy installation. The first thing we want to do is make a folder formed out of the package name and version, and put the script in it in the correct place.

Here is my example folder with me example program (called simple-program):

simple-package-0.1/usr/bin/simple-program

Note that the folder is the package name followed by a hyphen and a version number (simple point versions are the easiest to work with, so stick with them if possible)

Now, all work is done from within the package folder normally, so cd into that folder

cd simple-package-0.1

So far, all we have is just a folder with a binary in the place we want it to end up in. Now we have to “Debianise” (or Debianize if you prefer) this into a package

dh_make --single  --createorig

This command takes a source tree and turns it into a Debian source package format. The first flag tells dh_make that our source package is only going to build a single binary package (which is the most common). The second argument tells it that we do not have a tarball of our package so it should create a new one for us.

Now if you look in the current folder, you will see a debian/ folder. This is where all the Debian-specific magic happens.

The next thing we do is edit debian/rules

The rules file is the main makefile (or build script) which is run by “make” to produce your package. Everything starts from here.
(If you have a new version of dh-make, then your rules file may already look like this, if your dh-make is older then you will end up with a longer file, so edit it to look like this )

$ cat debian/rules
#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
# Sample debian/rules that uses debhelper.
# This file was originally written by Joey Hess and Craig Small.
# As a special exception, when this file is copied by dh-make into a
# dh-make output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
# This special exception was added by Craig Small in version 0.37 of dh-make.

# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1
%:
        dh $@


Note that on the last line, the indent is a TAB character. Make sure you use a tab and not several spaces, as make is very particular about tabs

This debian/rules is really simple – all it does is says “whatever I was asked to do, tell the command ‘dh’ to do it instead”. dh has sensible default rules, and you can find more about dh by running the command “man dh” to look at it’s manpage

(If you ever want lots more detail about what each step of building is doing, you can uncomment the line “export DH_VERBOSE=1″ and each helper script will print out more info)

As the above build file doesn’t say anywhere which files to copy to the output package, we have to do something to make that happen. We are going to use the debhelper script called dh_install  to do this.

Edit a new file at debian/simple-package.install

dh_install looks for this file (actually, it will also look for just debian/install) and will copy any files listed in it into your package. In this file we will put a list of files we want installed, one per line (wildcards work too, but I will list our only file for explicitness)

$ cat debian/simple-package.install
usr/bin/simple-program

Notice that we do not have a leading ‘/’, this is deliberate. Also, if you check man dh_install then you will notice that dh_install will not move files to other directories as it is expected that your makefile will do this for you. For now I will assume that your simple package comes with all the files in the correct places.

Building

Now let’s try building. Run dpkg-buildpackage and this will turn your little folder into a Debian source package and then go and create a .deb (It is worth mentioning that the command debuild is also available, but as it is a wrapper around dpkg-buildpackage and other tools I will write more about it later, and just start simply with dpkg-buildpackage)

Have a look:

$ ls ../simple-package_0.1-1_i386.deb
../simple-package_0.1-1_i386.deb

See – you have a .deb

Now let’s have a look inside it (this is just converting the file to a tar and then asking tar to list it’s contents):

$ dpkg –fsys-tarfile ../simple-package_0.1-1_i386.deb |tar -tv
tar: Record size = 8 blocks
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./usr/sbin/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 17:41 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 17:41 ./usr/bin/simple-program
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2010-06-16 18:48 ./usr/share/doc/simple-package/
-rw-r–r– root/root 193 2010-06-16 17:44 ./usr/share/doc/simple-package/README.Debian
-rw-r–r– root/root 178 2010-06-16 17:44 ./usr/share/doc/simple-package/changelog.Debian.gz
-rw-r–r– root/root 693 2010-06-16 17:44 ./usr/share/doc/simple-package/copyright

Notice that your program is listed in ./usr/bin/simple-program, and also that there is a changelog, a readme and a copyright file – I will come on to those later.

So, we’re done? I can just give this to people?

Erm, no… Not really

While you may have a package, you will notice that it is a rather dumb package

$ dpkg-deb -I ../simple-package_0.1-1_i386.deb
new debian package, version 2.0.
size 1730 bytes: control archive= 524 bytes.
303 bytes, 10 lines control
290 bytes, 4 lines md5sums
Package: simple-package
Version: 0.1-1
Architecture: i386
Maintainer: anton <anton@unknown>
Installed-Size: 32
Section: unknown
Priority: extra
Homepage: <insert the upstream URL, if relevant>
Description: <insert up to 60 chars description>
<insert long description, indented with spaces>

See – it really is a but dumb as we have not configured much about it. Lets start fixing that now as we really don’t want to be giving this to everyone in it’s current state

Package control files

Let’s start with the file debian/control

$ cat debian/control
Source: simple-package
Section: unknown
Priority: extra
Maintainer: anton <anton@unknown>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7)
Standards-Version: 3.8.1
Homepage: <insert the upstream URL, if relevant>

Package: simple-package
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
Description: <insert up to 60 chars description>
<insert long description, indented with spaces>

We will want to edit several of these fields. Of course these are all explained in Chapter 5 of the Debian Policy. The first thing to note is that the first chunk applies to the source package. Here we want to set our Maintainer name and email.
The build-depends are a default guess too, and should be enough for us for now (build-depends is all the packages needed to build this program, which often include any extra libraries you might need or extra tools such as unzip).
Important: As we are using a somewhat new debhelper way of building, and this might not exist on older boxes, we really need the line here that says to use version 7 or newer of debhelper (otherwise someone might try building with only version 6 and it will fail badly)

The homepage is also worth filling in if your package has one, but the whole line can be deleted if not required. The section and priority I will leave you to look up in the Debian policy manual if you want to know more about them, but can be left as-is for now

The second block is all about the binary .deb we want to produce. Note that the Package: section has the same name – This is the default for a “single package” that we asked dh_make to create for us, though you can have more than one block if your source package should produce multiple debs.
The Architecture: fields is worth getting correct. You can put in values like i386 or amd64 if your package will only work there, or if it should compile and work on any architecture you use any. As my package is a simple script-type application, it is actually slightly more special than that and only needs building once and will not need recompiling for any architecture, so I am going to change this to all. “all” has a special meaning, telling dpkg-buildpackage to only compile it once and use that on any architecture.

The Depends: field is also another important field to get correct. This says what you will need installed to actually use this package. So if your package is written in Python, then you want to put the correct Python package name in here (and a version in brackets like “python (>=2.6)“ if your package needs a minimum level of that package. You can also do OR’s if you use a pipe “|”.
The two magic variable depends are filled in by various debhelper scripts and can be left alone (in this case they will end up empty.

The Description: field has a special formatting. The first line is a short description of less than 60 characters, and then after that is a long description where each line starts with a space. If you want to put an empty line in your long description put a space then a period/dot ( “.”) on this line (do not use an empty line). Full explanation is in the Debian Policy.

“Where do I set the version number” I hear you ask… well, I’m coming to that now

debian/changelog

Package versioning is controlled from the debian/changelog file. You can edit this file directly, but it is often easier to use the command dch as it will fill in various fields for you, and can even do simple increments and comments completely from the command line. If you run dch from the main folder of your package it will launch the default editor with a new comment line created for you. If you want to quickly increment the version you can use dch -i and this will do the same, but increment the version number for you first (creating a new changelog entry in doing so).

Let’s have a quick look at a changelog (you might want to look at Section 4.4 of the Debian Policy too)

$ cat debian/changelog
simple-package (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

* Initial release (Closes: #nnnn)

— anton <anton@unknown>   Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:32:10 +0100

A changelog file is a colletion of repeated blocks like the above. The first line of a block shows the package name, then the version in brackets, then the release this package was built for and then it’s urgency. The version here is what comes out when we build our package. The release is only really used when uploading a package as the build-systems look for this field to work out where your package should go (in Debian you would have something like stable or testing, whereas in Ubuntu you would use the release name such as lucid or maverick)

Then we have a set of specially formatted bullet points. You can have many of these, but check the policy for allowed formatting. Notice that we have a Closes section here. This is used by bugtrackers that are attached to the package building systems, and unless you are uploading to one of these is probably simplest to remove.

Then we have the signature line which should have your name and email address, followed by two spaces and a timestamp. If you use dch -i then dch will create all this for you, and if you check the man page for it you can see how to set environment variables in your shell so that you do not have to tell it your correct name or email address. (It is worth mentioning the -v flag to dch. This lets you set a specific version to be put in the changelog, which is useful when you want to go up to version 2.0 or similar.)

It is perhaps worth mentioning that there are two types of source packages.

The usual type of package has version numbers that have a hyphen in them and the part before the hyphen is the upstream number, and the part after is the Debian revision. This is used to show that the upstream code has a specific version number but allows us to have our own incremented versions that clearly show that we are not shipping a new version of the upstream code but merely patches or even just packaging fixes which do not change the upstream code at all.
When built, these types of packages output a .orig.tar.gz file and a .diff.gz file. This allows the upstream code only to be in the orig.tar.gz, and the diff.tar.gz to be a diff file of all the changes we have made, including the entire contents of the debian/ folder

The second type of package is a “native Debian” package. This package has simpler version numbers and only builds a .tar.gz file. This format is normally only used for packages that are entirely owned by Debian (or Ubuntu) and the source code was created entirely for use in Debian (or Ubuntu).

You can choose which type of package your’s is by how the version number is structured. Without a hyphen it will be a “native” package, however I recommend you use the first type by default (you can also force the type with flags to dpkg-buildpackage).
The advantage of the first type of package is that because you have a .diff.gz and a .orig.tar.gz if you are uploading a very large package you only need to upload the .orig.tar.gz if the code in it has changed. If you are just making packaging fixes, or small patches then these are all in the .diff.gz and will be a much smaller upload.

Other files

Of course there are many other files in debian/ which are mostly templates created by dh_make. I will only explain a few here as they are all pretty well covered in the Debian Policy

debian/copyright – You should put a full license in this file so that people know what license your code is under (see Section 12.5 of the Debian Policy manual)

debian/README.Debian – This file is a readme file that is normally used to supplement any upstream readme file. It is copied out to /usr/share/doc/package-name/ as you saw above in the .deb. It should explain anything you have to do to make this package work that may be different from the upstream readme (if any) and normally contains the “Debian way” of getting your program running.

debian/compat – This file sets the compatibility level of the debhelper tools – you normally don’t need to change this

debian/package-name.dirs or debian/dirs – This file will create empty directories that your package might need. Note that you rarely ever need this as dh_install will create any directories that will be needed to hold the files it copies (I mention this as I frequently see it being used unnecessarily)

debian/preinst, debian/postinst, debian/prerm, debian/postrm – These files (also can be done as package-name.preinst) are the Pre and Post install/remove scripts. I won’t talk much about them now as you shouldn’t need to use them in simple packages. Note that dh_make creates some .ex files as example scripts. As usual see the Debian Policy if you need these

debian/docs – This file lists any doc files you want copied into the /usr/share/doc/package-name/ in your package. It works like dh_install but see the manpage of  dh_installdocs for more information

That is probably all the interesting files for now, you can probably remove all the other files as they are simply template or example files.

Other build output files

You might have noticed that when you built your package, as well as the .orig.tar.gz, the diff.gz and the .deb you also got a .dsc file and a .changes file.

The .changes file is used to describe this version of your package, and contains the latest chunk of your changelog. It also is used by tools such as dput to describe which files to upload and contains the checksums/hashes of these files. This file is usually signed with gpg to prove that this package was built by you.

The .dsc file is kind of similar, except it is purely about the source package. It has the checksums of the source files and is also signed. It also contains details such as the build-dependencies of your package so that systems can use it to work out what needs to be installed to build your package correctly.

You will probably only need either of these files if you are uploading files to some sort of repository, as they are mostly consumed by other programs.

If you try getting the source of a package, try apt-get source hostname then you will see that this downloads the .dsc file, and the releveant source files. If you want to unpack the source, you can use dpkg-source -x *.dsc (or if you want to build the binary package straight away, try apt-get -b source hostname and it will download and build though you might need to run apt-get build-dep hostname to install all the build packages needed for the hostname package)

Advanced building

So you can now create a simple package, you know how to set all the control files and how to increment the version in the changelog (hopefully using dch). Let’s look briefly at some more advanced building with dpkg-buildpackage.

Some packages want to be root to build. What they really want is to feel like they are root, so you can use the program fakeroot to build a package that complains it is not root (this way you don’t actually need root)
$ fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage ….

If you have gpg set up, then you will have noticed that every time you build a package dpkg-buildpackage asks you to enter your passphrase. While this is great for giving the package to others, it can be really annoying if you are doing test builds. The flags -us and -uc (unsigned source, unsigned changes) will stop it asking you.

If you just want to build the source package you can use -S to force that.
Similarly to just build the binary use the -b flag.

If your package is a non-native package, then dpkg-buildpackage will only put the .orig.tar.gz in the .changes file if the version ends in “-1″, otherwise it assumes your .orig.tar.gz is already on the server you are going to copy to (normally using dput). If you want to force it to include the .orig.tar.gz use the -sa flag

One thing worth doing if you do much packaging, is creating a chroot for building in. This way you will know that your build-depends are complete and that if you give the package to someone else (or use another computer) it will definitely build (it is easy to forget all the packages you installed on your box to make it build).

The simplest way to do this is to setup either a pbuilder environment or an sbuild environment, but I will leave an explanation of this for another post.

Enjoy creating your new .deb packages

The disks are as follows: 250G, 200G, 160G 120G, so to get the most space out of them I divided them as follows (Note: this is a simplification for the purpose of explanation, the real disk also has a raid 0, mirrored /boot/ partition which is not mentioned below. You need this because LVM is not supported by GRUB, so you can’t boot from a LVM volume):
250G: A (200G), C (40G)
200G: A (200G)
160G: B (120G) C (40G)
120G: B (120G)

A,B,C are partitions on the disks for software raid – I then set up software raid for each pair of A,B,C and set the created LVM physical volumes on top of them, which then are grouped together into one large volume group, giving me around 360G (actually less once you convert to base 2 rather than 10) of mirrored data storage. Note that I can lose any one disk and still have all my data (though I wouldn’t want to hang around too long replacing the disk as a second disk failing could mean you lose most of your data).

I actually created 3 LVM logical volumes, one for mounting each of / (the root of the disk for all OS data), /home (for all the stuff I actually really care about), and a volume for swap that doesn’t really need to be in lvm or raid, but it was just easier to do.

I previously wrote instructions about how to setup LVM and software raid, but this time round managed to completely screw the whole lot up just near the end. I forgot to define one of the raid devices in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf so next time I rebooted this raid device was not found in the early boot stages. As this raid volume is needed to create the full set of LVMs for my root filesystem, the system stopped booting right at the beginning because the LVM array was incomplete.

Fixing it was actually not to difficult, but I mention it here in case it is of help to anyone else (or in case I manage to do it again, which is probably likely)

Fist I booted a Ubuntu Live CD (actually a USB stick image created from my running Ubuntu laptop and a spare Ubuntu CD), but nearly any live cd should do. Once booted, I had to install (in the live session) mdadm and lvm2 as Ubuntu does not have these installed by default. Once you have these tools you can start your recovery (note that this needs to be done with root permissions, so sudo -s or similar to get a root shell)

Find the raid devices with mdadm –assemble –scan and then use pvscan and lvscan as required until your system has found your lvm config, then mount it (don’t forget to mount /boot/ too as we will need to rebuild the initrd)

mkdir /tmp/root
mount /dev/mapper/main-root /tmp/root
mount /dev/md0 /tmp/root/boot
chroot /tmp/root

Now you should be pretty much inside your root filesystem on your lvm array. Now we need to make sure all the raid arrays are configured in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Run mdadm –detail –scan to generate the lines for the config file, and make sure each array is listed in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

From here it is pretty simple, all we have to do is rebuild the initrd so that it knows how to find all the raid and lvm devices needed during boot. dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-<your current kernel version> It is imporant to make sure that you get the right kernel, so have a look in /boot to check you get the right version (uname -r wont work here because you have booted your live cd image and not the kernel your box will run)

I got several warnings about /proc/ not being mounted, but this did not appear to be a problem.

Reboot, and you should be ok. You may want to make a copy of your current kernel in case you accidentally break it, just copy the linux-image…gz and initrd…gz from /boot/ to new names and run update-grub and that should give you two kernels to choose from (hopefully booting choosing them in the right order, the order should be based on the version numbers in your kernel files so adjust if needed)

I tried the usual Ubuntu Jaunty Live/install cd, but found that Ubuntu do not consider LVM a core part of Ubuntu and so the installer couldn’t install on my disk without serious reworking. So I grabbed the alternate install cd which is pretty much the old curses Debian installer, which does support LVM. Having backed up /home/ and /etc/ I started down the road installing. Things went very smoothly (short of a scary warning from the installer suggesting it was going to erase my LVM partition but actually doesn’t do anything more than rewrite the same partition table to the disk). In little over an hour I had Jaunty fully installed, and a large number of my work specific apps installed and running, including Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony which are quite large downloads).

Of course firefox picked up all my custom plugins and current browsing session because I had left /home/ completely intact and reused it. I initially didn’t like the look of gnome and so tried kde briefly before managing to get it crashing regularly (probably one of the compiz 3d effects). I cleared out ~/.kde/ and got it a little more stable, but couldn’t get kde network manager to attempt to connect to my wifi, and wicd didn’t seem to finish connecting properly.

I decided to go back to gnome and try and see if I could get used to it. Customising it was a little interesting, as I like a launcher bar at the bottom and nothing in gnome seemed to be what I was looking for. Eventually I found gnome-do and the theme that has a recently launched bar at the bottom that resembles the osX launcher with icons that expand when you move the mouse over them. The gnome terminal is rubbish, so I am still using the kde konsole for now.

I am starting to get comfortable in gnome, and I think the fonts actually look better, though that could be something extra in Ubuntu or simply a better default setting somewhere that I would have found on a reinstall of Debian too. Gnome feels slightly faster than KDE, though that could be my imagination.

All-in-all I am impressed with the really good finish in Ubuntu Jaunty, and gnome is quite workable now (though I do miss the kde ctrl+alt+esc shortcut key to bring up a kill this window icon, which I have always found useful for when some Java applet tries to kill firefox). The gnome power/battery monitor applet has a rather cool power graph funcion which is interesting, though ultimately nothing more than a toy. I did like the kde4 application tray as you could set a wide panel and tell it ti use two rows to list running applications, which I cannot seem to get gnome to do.

Gnome’s philosophy of almost no options does kind of annoy me though. For a start I want my screensaver to be a random slideshow of photos I have on my computer, but the screensaver uses a hardcoded folder to display from, and doesn’t tell you what this folder is. This may be fine if the system created that folder for you but my system didn’t have it created (probably becaue my install reused an existing homedir) and I had to search for a while to find out that it was ~/Pictures. After that a symlink solved that probelm.

Another niggling issue I have is that under KDE I could configure the compiz effects to do an “expose” style window view – when Imove the mouse to a specified corner, all running applications are presented as nicely arranged tiles for me to select the one I want. Despite installing the compiz configuration package, I cannot seem to find a way to get gnome to do this, which is a shame as I could find that really useful.

It is still a novelty to me to have any 3d effects at all, so I have them all prettty much turned on and am loving it (I initially played with compiz when it first hit Debian Unstable, but the ATI graphics drivers for my T43p were not reliable enough and I had frequent crashes, so ultimately turned it all off again).

My new Ubuntu system is very stable, very flashy and I am really impressed. This is not to say I am going to move all my other machines from Debian to Ubuntu, but next time they are up for a reinstall (probably not until a major hardware upgrade) I will probably consider Ubuntu rather than just installing Debian straight away.

Two excellent resources are:

• AptPinning – Debian Wiki
• howtoforge – A short introduction to apt-pinning

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed “Lenny”) after 22 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of twelve processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.

Debian GNU/Linux runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of twelve architectures are supported: Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386), IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm, armel), IBM S/390 (s390), and AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” adds support for Marvell’s Orion platform which is used in many storage devices. Supported storage devices include the QNAP Turbo Station series, HP Media Vault mv2120, and Buffalo Kurobox Pro. Additionally, “Lenny” now supports several Netbooks, in particular the Eee PC by Asus. “Lenny” also contains the build tools for Emdebian which allow Debian source packages to be cross-built and shrunk to suit embedded ARM systems.

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” includes the new ARM EABI port, “armel”. This new port provides a more efficient use of both modern and future ARM processors. As a result, the old ARM port (arm) has now been deprecated. This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.10 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.22.2, the Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment, LXDE 0.3.2.1, the GNUstep desktop 7.3, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox), Icedove 2.0.0.19 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird), PostgreSQL 8.3.6, MySQL 5.0.51a, GNU Compiler Collection 4.3.2, Linux kernel version 2.6.26, Apache 2.2.9, Samba 3.2.5, Python 2.5.2 and 2.4.6, Perl 5.10.0, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Emacs 22, Inkscape 0.46, Nagios 3.06, Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1 (dom0 as well as domU support), OpenJDK 6b11, and more than 23,000 other ready-to-use software packages (built from over 12,000 source packages).

With the integration of X.Org 7.3 the X server autoconfigures itself with most hardware. Newly introduced packages allow the full support of NTFS filesystems and the use of most multimedia keys out of the box. Support for Adobe(R) Flash(R) format files is available via the swfdec or Gnash plugins. Overall improvements for notebooks have been introduced, such as out of the box support of CPU frequency scaling. For leisure time several new games have been added, including puzzle games as well as first-person shooters. Also notable is the introduction of “goplay”, a graphical games browser offering filters, search, screenshots and
descriptions for games in Debian.

The availability and updates of OpenJDK, GNU Java compiler, GNU Java bytecode interpreter, Classpath and other free versions of Sun’s Java technology, into Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 allow us to ship Java-based applications in Debian’s “main” repository. Further improvements in system security include the installation of available security updates before the first reboot by the Debian Installer, the reduction of setuid root binaries and open ports in the standard installation, and the use of GCC  ardening features in the builds of several security-critical packages. Various applications have specific improvements, too. PHP for example is now built with the Suhosin
hardening patch.

For non-native English speaking users the package management systems now support translated package descriptions and will automatically show the description of a package in the native language of the user, if available. Debian GNU/Linux can be installed from various installation media such as DVDs, CDs, USB sticks and floppies, or from the network. GNOME is the default desktop environment and is contained on the first CD. Other desktop environments – KDE, Xfce, or LXDE – can be installed through two new alternative CD images. Again available with Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 are multi-arch CDs and DVDs supporting installation of multiple architectures from a single disc; and this release adds Blu-ray Discs, allowing the archive for an entire architecture to be shipped on a single BD.

In addition to the regular installation media, Debian GNU/Linux can now also be directly used without prior installation. The special images used, known as live images, are available for CDs, USB sticks, and netboot setups. Initially, these are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only.

The installation process for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 has been improved in many ways: among many other improvements, support for installation from more than one CD or DVD has been restored, firmware required by some devices can be loaded by using removable media, and installations via Braille display are supported. The installer boot process has also received much attention: a graphical menu can be used to choose front-ends and desktop environments, and to select expert or rescue mode. The installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 63 languages.

Debian GNU/Linux can be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended way), jigdo or HTTP; see Debian GNU/Linux on CDs [1] for further information. It will soon be available on DVD, CD-ROM and Blu-ray Disc from numerous vendors [2], too. Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 from the previous release, Debian
GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed “Etch”) are automatically handled by the aptitude package management tool for most configurations, and to a certain degree also by the apt-get package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly  recommended to read the release notes [3] for possible issues, and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and
translated to additional languages in the weeks after the release.

1: http://www.debian.org/CD/
2: http://www.debian.org/CD/vendors
3: http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/releasenotes

Dedication
———-

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who died on December 26th, 2008 in a tragic car accident. Thiemo was involved in Debian in many ways. He has maintained several packages and was the main supporter of the Debian port to the MIPS architectures. He was also a member of our kernel team, as well as a member of the Debian Installer team. His contributions reached far beyond the Debian project. He also worked on the MIPS port of the Linux kernel, the MIPS emulation of qemu, and far too many smaller projects to be named here.

Thiemo’s work, commitment, broad technical knowledge and ability to share this with others will be missed. Thiemo’s contributions will not be forgotten. The high standards of his work make it hard to pick up.

About Debian
————

Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, developed by more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. Debian’s dedication to Free Software, its non-profit nature, and its open development model make it unique among GNU/Linux distributions.

The Debian project’s key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract, and its commitment to provide the best operating system possible. Debian 5.0 is another important step in that direction.

I also had problems finding inkets that could print direct to cd from linux… Then BlueMonki suggested a LightScribe drive. LightScribe is a technology where you put the disk in the burner upside down and it etches a label onto it. Of course you need a new drive and specific media, but the drives are available for £20 and media is less than 30p each, which is more expensive than a normal dvd+r but not a problem for occasional use.

I picked up a Samsung drive because it was cheap, and came with 3 faceplates, so I could match my silver pc case. I was a little worried that I would have a hard time making the software work, but it was really easy.

Install the LightScribe system software, available in 32bit .debs, and install it with sudo dpkg -i <downloaded deb>
Then install the LaCie LightScribe labeller software which you will have to convert with alien –scripts <downloaded file.rpm> before you can install it (you might need to install alien from apt/synaptic first), then install it with dpkg as well

You can also use the LightScribe simple labeller if you just want text, but its a little boring to do that. If you do use it, after aliening the rpm and installing it you might need to change the group of /opt/lightscribeApplications as Debian doesnt have a wheel group. I used “sudo chgrp cdrom -R /opt/lightscribeApplications” as I am in the cdrom group and that sounded the most sensible group name.

You will probably want to work on your images with Gimp, or your favourite image tool, to add text to your cd label, though you could just use an image without text.

I found a cd template file here, which I modified to make square and make the middle transparent so I could add a layer in gimp and add stuff in the right places, then turn off the layer to save the image for burning. My version is here, consider it in the public domain.

Once you have your cool cd label image created, you want to burn it. Simple run “4L-gui” (I couldnt find an icon for this, so you might need to run it from the run dialog or a console window), select your image, move it and scale it as needed then hit the burn button in the top right.

It all worked straightforward, which was surprising. Best of all it seems that the LaCie software will work on any LightScribe drive so buy whichever one you fancy.

There is a lot more software out there for windows, but you will probably want to do more than they let you, and then you simple need Gimp and something to burn an image.

It is worth pointing out that burning the label takes ~15 minutes, but I didn’t mind. I do have to look out for what colour media you can buy as I think that could make quite a difference to how the final result looks.

There is quite a difference in programming between mplab and piklab. Although there is support for a large number of chips in piklab, they are not supported as well as mplab. The big problem is that in mplab most special bits (i.e. each bit for an output port, one per pin) have a defined name so you can set them on or off individually. Piklab on the other hand has support for only a few of these, so if you want to turn on a pin, you have to set a value on the whole port (byte). Saying that, I prefer the piklab editor as it seems to do a better job with syntax highlighting etc.

Below is some code examples to help you get started if you are finding the learning curve steep

Some macros that may be useful to put in a header file are

#define ZERO    0x00  // 0000 0000
#define BIT0    0x01  // 0000 0001
#define BIT1    0x02  // 0000 0010
#define BIT2    0x04  // 0000 0100
#define BIT3    0x08  // 0000 1000
#define BIT4    0x10  // 0001 0000
#define BIT5    0x20  // 0010 0000
#define BIT6    0x40  // 0100 0000
#define BIT7    0x80  // 1000 0000
// macros to manipulate the bits
//set bit Y on byte X
#define SET_BIT(x,y) (x |= y)
//unset bit Y on byte X
#define UNSET_BIT(x,y) (x &= ~y)
//toggle bit Y on byte X
#define TOGGLE_BIT(x,y) (x ^= y)
//test bit Y is set on byte X
#define IS_BIT_SET(x,y)  (x & y)

These can make coding much easier, as then you can just worry about setting the bits and not about conversions to binary.

For anyone not sure how to get anything working, the following code will get you started with the PICKit2 development board and the included 16f690. This is the code to light up different LED’s on the test board depending on what the variable resistor is set to

/* Configuration bits */
typedef unsigned int word;
word at 0x2007 CONFIG = _INTRC_OSC_NOCLKOUT & _WDT_OFF & _PWRTE_OFF
  & _MCLRE_OFF & _CP_OFF & _CPD_OFF & _IESO_OFF & _FCMEN_OFF & _BOD_OFF ;

void main(){
  while(1==1){
  PORTA = 0;//?
  TRISA = BIT0; //Set RA0 input
  ANSEL = BIT0;//  Just RA0 is an Analog Input
  TRISC=0;//Set All PORTC as output

  ADCON0 = BIT0;  //  Turn on the ADC 0000 0001
                  //   Bit 7   - ADFM,Left Justified Sample (0)
                  //   Bit 6   - Use VDD (0)
                  //   Bit 5:2 - Select AN0 channel (0000)
                  //   Bit 1   - GO/DONE - set separately (0)
                  //   Bit 0   - Enable ADC (1)

  ADCON1 = BIT4;//Set AD Control 0001 0000
                // Bit 7   - res
                // Bit 6:4 - Select the Clock as Fosc/8 (001)
                // Bit 3:0 - res

  SET_BIT(ADCON0, BIT1);//GO/DONE to start conversion
  while( IS_BIT_SET( ADCON0,BIT1 ) ){}//Wait until sample is done

  //Set 4 highest bits to write direct to led's. Ignore 4 LSB
  //ADRESH contains bits 9:2 of result
  PORTC = ADRESH >> 4;
  /*
    //Could also make ACDValue only contain upper 4 bytes
    ADCValue >>= 4;
    ADCValue &= (BIT0 | BIT1 | BIT2 | BIT3); // could also do this with 0xF0 (i think)
    //And then set only those bytes
    PORTC |= ADCValue
    //This would mean other bits of portC would still be same
  */
}
}

The datasheets for the pics can be hard to get started with, so hopefully that helps a bit. The examples I saw for doing similar things were ridiculously complicated and without good reason. Of course this code is specific to the 16f690, but it should be easy enough to convert.