La Salle Debain

Recently on my laptop I switched over to udev which is kernel 2.6's replacement for devfs. Things mostly went smoothly except I kept having to reinstall vmware everytime I rebooted. That's because the current version doesn't support sysfs so the device nodes aren't automatically created by udev. vmware then thinks it is unconfigured makes you do the install again. Until a new version comes out, the following workaround may help.

1. rm /etc/vmware/not_configured if it exists.
2. copy the following code into /etc/init.d/vmware around line 805. Just before where the case "$1" in start) line is.

for a in `seq 0 9`; do
mknod /dev/vmnet$a c 119 $a > /dev/null 2>&1
done
mknod /dev/vmmon c 10 165 > /dev/null 2>&1

3. Now run /etc/init.d/vmware start and the program should work again.

People on the Debian-User mailing list have posted two howtos recently. Using OpenLDAP on Debian Woody to serve Linux and Samba users by Markus Amersdorfer and Configuring SSH2 for Public Key authentication from Jadev.

This is an introductory book with a Debian focus and lots of useful information for desktop users.

Some programs in the windows world such as Nero store CD images as a big .bin file and a smaller .cue file. To convert these files into an .iso suitable for burning with e.g. xcdroast, apt-get install bchunk and read its' man page.

Emma Jane Hogbin has written a HOWTO on building a multilingual search engine.

In debian-user, Jean-Marc Liotier offers the following recipe for logging in to a remote host via SSH without having to give a password.

# Local end :
cd ~/.ssh
# Enter an empty password when prompted by the following command
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f id_dsa
scp id_dsa.pub user@remote.end.net:~/.ssh
# Repeat last command for all remote ends

# Remote end
test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
cd ~/.ssh
touch authorized_keys2
cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys2
chmod 640 authorized_keys2
rm -f id_dsa.pub

# Local end :
ssh -l user remote.end.net
# Look ma, no password !

To use the chroot environments set up on the Debian machines run the dchroot program. In each chroot, there is a file /etc/debian_chroot, the contents of which will tell you which chroot you are in (see /etc/profile for an example of how to add this to your prompt).