I went along to a bunch of tonight’s Meetup events at a bar in High Holborn. These were formed from an amalgam of several different groups, including the Americans Abroad, Canadian London Expats, and various others. I met some fun people (including at least one who had also travelled in from Reading) and will probably swing by next time around.
Jon.
Has anyone else noticed how middle clicking on recent builds of Debian abiword causes it to decide that it doesn’t want to paste your text but instead will crash randomly and lose your document? If there’s any one single thing which will put people off using Linux then it’s wordprocessors which will crash without warning or without any option to gracefully exit. Please fit it guys.
I’ll fire it up under gdb when I get chance, but I’ll likely have to rebuild the whole damned thing with debugging symbols to get anything useful other than a memory reference.
Jon.
I’m speaking at the IBM Linux Migration Seminar in Manchester on Wednesday. The topic will be “Direction of Linux from the opensource community” and I’ll be taking a similar role to that of Jono at a previous event. My interest is more technical but I’m aiming to target this at a wider audience and come down to the technicalities if I’m asked particular questions. Incidentally, IBM’s POWER website is now citing me as recommend reading. I like it when that happens.
Jon.
I got a little bored earlier while looking for something to write about in this month’s kernel hacking column. I came across a post from Evgeny Stambulchik which amused me because it referred to a bug that’s been present in Linux for donkey’s years and either nobody’s noticed or nobody thought it was worth fixing. The problem is experienced by mounting a floppy that’s been write protected and then doing:
mount -o remount,rw /dev/fd0
(or whatever). This should fail on a write protected disk, but it doesn’t because do_remount_sb thinks everything is ok when it checks the backing block dev to see if it is writeable (it is). Unfortunately, it’s not actually trivial for the aforementioned function to check whether the backing device itself is writeable (something missing in VFS?). So you bodge it by having the floppy_open function hack up the gendisk’s view of it’s read/write policy per this posting…
Evgeny Stambulchik found that doing the following always worked:
# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/
mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
# mount -o remount,rw /mnt/floppy
# echo $?
0
This is the case because the block device /dev/fd0 is writeable but the
floppy disk is marked protected. A fix is to simply have floppy_open
mark the underlying gendisk policy according to reality (since the VFS
doesn't provide a way for do_remount_sb to inquire as to the current
device status).
Signed-off-by: Jon Masters <jcm@jonmasters.org>
--- linux-2.6.14/drivers/block/floppy.c 2005-10-28 01:02:08.000000000
+0100
+++ linux-2.6.14_new/drivers/block/floppy.c 2005-10-29
18:14:47.000000000 +0100
@@ -3714,6 +3714,13 @@
USETF(FD_VERIFY);
}
+ /* set underlying gendisk policy to reflect real ro/rw status */
+ if (UTESTF(FD_DISK_WRITABLE)) {
+ inode->i_bdev->bd_disk->policy = 0;
+ } else {
+ inode->i_bdev->bd_disk->policy = 1;
+ }
+
if (UDRS->fd_ref == -1 || (UDRS->fd_ref && (filp->f_flags & O_EXCL)))
goto out2;
Jon.
I’m planning to spend the festive season in North America. I’ll fly over to New York (JFK) on December 14 and stay until around December 31 or a bit later. During that time, I’ve got to go visit a friend in California and possibly a few other folks too. I’ll also be in Canada for quite a bit of that time (I figure I’ll take the train from Penn station again). My plan is to go to Montreal for a couple of days, possibly take a train out to Halifax, and be in Ottawa on or around Christmas itself.
Jon.
I’m back in Mumbai for the second time in a week. The wedding was fantastic and I’ll write that up later when I’ve got all the photos uploaded and spent some time documenting the whole experience that has been this visit to India. But in the meantime, here’s an anecdotal story about my efforts to get online.
I’m staying at the Best Western in Mumbai. It’s recently had broadband and ethernet fitted so guests can use their laptops, replacing the older dialup sockets in many other hotels. Last time I was here, I used the business centre for a while, then moved room to get one with broadband ethernet internet access, then used the business centre when the connectivity did not work. This time, I was prepared to spend a few hours with tcpdump, arp and a bunch of other tools figuring out how the networking kit was broken. Here’s how to get broadband in this hotel:
So, there you go. Something else they don’t teach you in school.
Jon.
I’ll be in India for a friend’s wedding from tomorrow for a week. I’m flying into Mumbai (Bombay) on Thursday and arriving in the evening. I’ll then have a day in the city before I get on another plane to Ahmedabad to meet Hetal and his family for the ceremony on Sunday. All told, I am excited about my first visit to Asia, but I’m a little apprehensive of using the Internet as a guage of local hotels so I’ve defaulted back to booking with Best Western. Maybe not the best, but at least I know roughly what I’m paying for when I hand over my credit card information. In case of incident (did you wonder why I post this information? that’s the reason folks), here’s my travel itinerary:
* THU13: London Heathrow (LHR) -> Paris Charles De Gaulle (CDG) - Air France AF 2471
* THU13: Paris Charles De Gaulle (CDG) -> Chhatrapati Shivaji (BOM) - Air France AF 134
* THU13: Staying at Best Western Emerald in Bombay (2 nights) - +91-22-26611150
* SAT15: Chhatrapati Shivaji (BOM) -> Ahmedabad (AMD) - Indian Airlines 603
* SAT15: Staying with friends in Ahmedabad (4 nights)
* TUE18: Ahmedabad (AMD) -> Chhatrapati Shivaji (BOM) - Indian Airlines 609
* TUE18: Will book based on the previous Best Western experience.
* FRI21: Chhatrapati Shivaji (BOM) -> Paris Charles De Gaulle (CDG) - Air France AF 135
* FRI21: Paris Charles De Gaulle (CDG) -> London Heathrow (LHR) - Air France AF 1270
I’m still looking into local Linux related events but I’ll mostly be doing touristy stuff. There was a plan to visit some other folks involved with one of the magazines, but that’s not happening since the logistics don’t work. I’m not going to Goa either and will spend some of the time I’m over there catching up on deadlines which are creeping up on me. Should loudly if you want me.
Jon.