At first it was failing to activate my second LVM2 volume group (the one that my root filesystem was on) in the LVM hook. A regeneration of the initcpio image took  care of that.

But then it hangs on “waiting for udev uevents to be processed”. Which is even stranger, because when I boot the same system from the SATA drive init works entirely as expected.  And it does not even time out and tell me what uevent it is waiting for like it should. So I try the -lts kernel, the fallback images, using the “verbose” kernel flag, unplugging all usb devices; all fails in more or less the same way.

Then suddenly XX boots later, when I was ready to let the whole thing go, udev times out and tell me its waiting for “/dev/snd/sequencer”. Apparently when booting from said IDE adapter, and only then, my soundcard (an M-Audio 2496 using the ice1712 alsa driver) messes up on this stock Arch kernel (stock Linux 2.6.31.6 and 2.6.27.39) . Hurrah.

Note to self: Removing all unnecessary components when troubleshooting is a sane strategy and will often save time even if it seems to be more effort: use it more often.

Published here in hopes that it would be useful to someone else.

UPDATE: after a couple of successful boots (but no software of system config changes) I put the card back in and… it works. I usually see computers as quite predictable, but not this.

To get this nice image I had to do some X11 forwarding over SSH through an intermediate server. And since I’m probably not the only one with such needs and I’m bound to forget how I did it I will post it here.

Basically I used this excellent reference. But if you need trusted X11 forwarding (like with ssh -Y instead of -X) you need to generate an xauth file as an extra step when you’re on the remote server. That can be done with “xauth generate $DISPLAY .” And the “nolisten tcp” config option that you need to disable locally is usually found in /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
Additional heads up: if you try and connect with -X in addition to this manual forwarding you are setting up, you might get strange errors like “X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).” So don’t do that.

The bands playing where Niku, Concrete, Framferd and Serepa Deformed. The event was part of a  two day mini festival called Blodbad (bloodbath) and the venue was Rock In.

There was a decent crowd for being a Thursday, but I’m sure both the bands and hosts had hope for more. In any case the sound was pretty good and my friends in Concrete (myspace) delivered a great performance so it was very enjoyable.

The release party in Oslo was hosted by Redpill-Linpro with food being sponsored by Freecode. Despite this, I kinda feared that it would be a tiny and unprofessional event.  But I’m glad to say that fear was unjustified, as there was both a decent amount of people (50++) and many good presentations.  The talks given where:

• What’s wrong with the Bourne shell and what can be done about it? – Axel Liljencrantz
• easypeasy! Norsk Ubuntu-basert distro for Netbooks – Jon Ramvi og Tor Grønsund
• Bli kjent med Upstart – Stig Sandbeck Mathisen
• Stopp Datalagringsdirektivet – Fribit

The first talk was about fish (friendly interactive shell), why and how it has improved the command line shell both for beginners and experts. I found the authors reasoning to be good, and it did have a lot of nifty features, but I don’t think I’ll switch away from bash. Mostly because fish breaks compatibility with it, and I think I’d find that tiresome pretty fast.

The thing that amazed me about the easypeasy guys was how ambitious and serious they were about their distro. They didn’t just wanna package something in a slightly different way, but instead do customization and even application development and try to get deals with companies doing web-content. The core ideas centered around simplifications of UI, tailor the OS to the hardware platform and getting the “web”/”cloud” down to the desktop. Not really my cup of tea, but I’m curious as to how they will do.

Upstart is the program that has replaced the nearly 25 year old init-system (which is responsible for the programs ran in early userspace) in Ubuntu 9.10. It is asynchronous and has a lot more features, and can be used in a init compatible way. So it might well end up replacing init in other distros as well. Time will tell.

At last there was a short plea to register against “Datalagringsdirektivet”, a EU directive that Norway might pass if not vetoed. This directive obliges all ISPs to store information about which users had a given IP for at least 6 months. This means that even if you are not under suspicion your activities are being logged just in case you might be doing something illegally. This is in stark contrast to the principle that one is “innocent until proven otherwise”. As such I have signed as being against it here. And so should you.

Yes, Linux. Debian or a derivative with KDE3  running on a HP thin client. Even has Tux! At first I thought it was just this one terminal, but a quick peek told me that all the user available machines ran this system.  And several people where surfing around on the web using Firefox with the with no apparent struggles. The computers for the employees ran Windows XP though. Definitely a step in the right direction, but the fact that I was somewhat surprised tells me that Linux adoption still has a long way to go. Here is another machine:

Maybe I’ll ask them about their experiences with the system when I go there next time. Would be interesting to hear.

At home I’ve migrated all my machines to Arch Linux x86_64 as of yesterday. Previously it was a mix of Arch 32/64 bit and Debian. No major issues yet so I guess I can say that it went pretty smooth. All the machines are now KVM capable so I’ll set them up as a small virtualization cluster. But first I want to install Linux (openWRT) on my router so that it can run DNS/BOOTP/DHCP and give me a bit more flexibility in the configuration.

I’m now also a Linux Foundation member. I’m not sure if I’ll ever use any of the benefits I get, but the cause is worth 25 usd per year none the less. I even asked them to not send me the free t-shirt. I’d never use it anyways, as it was bright white and had big logos on it. And the fit on such shirts are always the same crappy “loose” (read: “shoulder mounted tent” on a slim guy like me). Not my style.

Today I sent in my first deliverable for my senior project. We also had the first meeting and agreed on tasks for the next weeks/months. More about that later!