Sample Blog

This entry written by skx contains some perl code which I hope will be filtered:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello, world\n";

# this code is syntax highlighted, unless there is a bug ;)

I'm trying to put together a list of sites using the Chronicle blog compiler.

So far I have the following sites:

• Steve Kemp's Debian & Free Software Blog
• Bob's tech ramblings
• JKT's blog
• Textproof news & comment

Please let me know if you'd like to be listed here.

This is a sample blog. There are a couple of demos you can view, each showing the same output for different themes:

• default theme
• leftbar theme
• copyrighteous theme
• blocky theme
• simple theme

A much more complete demo site would be the authors own blog, which is powered by the most recent release of Chronicle. You can find that here:

• http://blog.steve.org.uk

To test the internationalisation I've also produced a French Demo which was created using the default theme, and the addtion of:

chronicle --lang=french ..

NOTE: The blog entries still have a Date: header, but that is written in English and converted in the build process.

This entry has no tags!

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

By Leo Marks

Xen Migration

This afternoon I mostly migrated Xen guests from their old host to their new. (As part of a an upgrade of facilities. Upgrading in place would have been much fiddlier and more annoying!)

The migration took almost three hours, which was longer than anticipated but shorter than I'd feared. In the future I'll know to do it differently, but I managed to script it fairly well after the first couple were done manually.

Everything appears to be working correctly so I will soon nip out for some high quality beer.

test

• test

Hello ☺!

My GNOME desktop is broken upon my primary machine, and it has taken me too long to get it sorted out.

Short version: metacity will not run:

skx@vain:~$ metacity
metacity: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime

The .so file referenced is a symlink to libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13, and using nm I can see there are no symbols listed:

skx@vain:~$ nm /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13
nm: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13: no symbols

That seems weird to me, but libraries are mysterious beasts, so I might be expecting this behaviour?

Anyway dpkg claims this file is installed by libglib2.0-0, and the package hasn't had an upload since July 17th, so I can't believe this is the reason for the recent breakage (Even given that I don't logout often..)

Reinstalling both packages (metacity + libglib2.0-0) has failed to fix the problem so I'm lost.

Right now I'm running GNOME with a different window manager, icewm, via a ~/.gnome2/session file:

gnome-wm --default-wm /usr/bin/icewm-gnome --sm-client-id default0

This works almost perfectly - it is better than metacity in the sense that new windows don't overlap existing ones if there is spare screen space, but worse in that alt-TAB shows two windows "Top extended Edge Panel" and "Bottom Extended Edge Panel" - which I don't need/want to see.

I'd be happy to stay with IceWM if I could fix those two problems, but I'd love to know why metacity is broken, and how I can fix it. I can't see any obvious bug reports - and I'm not 100% certain that the gthread package is the source of the error...

Any suggestions welcome.

ii  metacity       1:2.18.5-1     A lightweight GTK2 based Window Manager
ii  libglib2.0-0   2.12.13-1      The GLib library of C routines

Xen Help?

One thing that I wanted to do with the new host was track bandwidth usage upon a per-guest basis.

This should be possible with something like vnstat - however solutions counting traffic by interface name are not a good mesh with Xen - since by default a guest will have an interface with a name like 'vif20.0' - and no means of mapping that to a specific guest.

Each of my guests has been allocated three IPs which are defined like this in the Xen configuration file:

Configuration file

Unfortunately anything else I've tried to give each IP a static interface name fails. I've seen reports of this online but no solutions.

Given a configuration file like this the Xen guest doesn't receive any traffic upon the second + third address:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo1',
        'ip=1.2.3.5,vifname=foo2',
        'ip=1.2.3.6,vifname=foo3' ]

Any suggestions welcome.

You have chosen to format your input text via the markdown format, but the Perl module Text::Markdown is not installed. Aborting. Upon a Debian GNU/Linux system you can probably correct this via: apt-get install libtext-markdown-perl