00:38:23 # Life mandatory comment about git. You can of course check out a svn repository using git. git-svn clone svn://svn.debian.org/reportbug-ng. Now you have a local git repository.
09:03:33 # Life Using inkscape as postscript backend. I tried getting Japanese output from dot(graphviz). I have been successful with getting png output, but not postscript. png is good but it is not vector and does not look pretty in printed material. SVG output happened to be functional, and thus I tried using inkscape to translate the output to postscript, for use in my LaTeX document. Inkscape happens to have an noninteractive mode of operation, and I can invoke it like: inkscape test.svg -p "> test.ps" to generate postscript from svg file. Good.
Font configuration is required for Japanese text in dot, like the following:
node [shape=box, fontname="GothicBBB-Medium-EUC-H", fontsize=10,
width=0.5, margin=0.3]
edge [fontname="GothicBBB-Medium-EUC-H", fontsize=8, margin=0.8]
10:33:24 # Life Booting from USB disks and why that's interesting. I've decided I wanted to try running Debian on nc4000 (laptop PC by HP). I didn't want to erase what is already there, so I needed some external USB HDD to do that. Since I didn't feel like hunting around for a USB CD-ROM drive and creating bootable USB, or configuring PXE, I decided to install using qemu to install to the USB HDD and use that installation on the machine. It was surprisingly simple. I connected my USB-HDD to my desktop machine, which recognized the disk as /dev/sda, and I used qemu to install Debian on it. qemu -hda /dev/sda -cdrom XXXX -boot d. Note that you really need kqemu or kvm for speed. Then, I selected LVM, and installed. After initial reboot within qemu, I changed the kernel to a 686 kernel since a k7 kernel was installed, but that's the only package I changed. After reconnecting the USB HDD to nc4000, I managed to boot from the USB disk. Initially, it failed to boot since vgscan ran before USB disk was recognized, and could not find the root device. Looking at the source, I found initramfs will probably re-try after 3 minutes. But reading further, I found that the timing can be improved by specifying rootdelay= boot option to the kernel. I specified rootdelay=15 for the kernel option in grub, and voila, it found the root filesystem on LVM. The /boot filesystem was /dev/hda1 inside qemu, but it is now /dev/sda1 on the nc4000; and boot stopped at fsck on /dev/hda1. It was trivial to fix after dropping into the command-line. LVM is able to work around device name change, which is nice to know. For the graphics card, qemu and nc4000 have different cards, and I had to dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. Okay, so I have Debian running on my notebook via USB HDD, now what ?
22:31:16 # Life etch release party in tokyo. I will be holding a party in Tokyo somewhere this Thursday to celebrate Debian etch release. You're all invited to come, please contact me if you want to join in.
08:55:59 # Life pbuilder maintenance with git. I'm working with git and the best part about about having migrated from cvs to git is that I can resolve conflicts without accessing the server. Conflict resolution is an interactive process; I can let downloading and uploading happen at a different time, when I am not attending.
$Id: 200704.html.en,v 1.6 2007/04/20 15:39:54 dancer Exp $