Email Issues: Debugging Emacs23 on Wheezy

Upon migrating my data over to my children's computer, I ran into problems trying to use MH-E from Emacs23. When creating reply emails, a crapload of octal data was being added to the headers of each email. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on, so I started to move aside all of my custom nmh/mh format files, thinking it may have had something to do with incompatible versions of the NMH software.

When that wasn't successful, I switched to the command-line and used the nmh tools directly. No issues. Back to Emacs, I created a new message and noticed something: MH-E was trying to add X-Face/Face data, the image icons that get displayed next to your "From:" header. This was interesting, because I didn't recall creating a ~/.face file anytime in the past. Poking around revealed that Gnome had added my login icon as a ~/.face file! MH-E was dilligently trying to do what it thought was the right thing, and included it in each email I sent. I'm not sure why the process took so long, other than the image used was HUGE. Silly rabbit!

So, the following line in my ~/.emacs file guaranteed it didn't try this again:

(setq mh-x-face-file nil)

If I ever need to start including an X-Face or Face header, I'll update that with the appropriate path.

The second issue I ran into was found while trying to research the answer to this first one, the `dir' file for info wasn't being displayed from `emacs' when it worked perfectly well from the `info' command-line application. I uncovered this bug, and did a quick test. I decompressed the /usr/share/info/dir.gz file. It worked! (I also took the opportunity to edit the file and use English instead of German for the introduction. Not sure how that happened.)

In comparison between Debian Wheezy's version of Emacs and info file integration  (emacs23) v.s. the Homebrew install I have running on my MacBook at work (emacs24), I'd have to say that the Homebrew install is winning out here. I may have to make a local build to keep up, or pull in some backports.

Upgrading to Wheezy

The blog post will be abbreviated today on account of the software upgrade on my sons' eMachine. The last update was May of last year, and now that backups are done, it is time to become current. Long have passed the days of my Debian development, but I remember all of the valuable lessons of package management, systems installations, and upgrade dragons. Hopefully, this one will run smoothly.

Meghan, the kids, Peter, and I visited a few houses in the Stillwater and Lino Lakes area today. We fell in love with one house, newly on the market. Hopefully our house, which we recently reduced the asking price for, will sell quickly now. We spent our lunch at Red Robin for burgers, fries, and and rootbeer. I tried their Blue Moon shake, which had beer, orange liquor, and ice cream.  Pretty tasty!

I still haven't run yet today, but I'll get a late night one in after Nora goes to bed in the next hour or so.

Never been so happy over bad hardware...

Some time over the last few months, my personal computer at home took a nosedive into disaster. Through power outages and careless monkeying with circuit breakers, it refused to boot to a working prompt, and when it did show signs of life, it looked as if my most precious information was lost forever: my home directory partition. Yes, I know that a filesystem is more robust than that. There's no such thing as a complete and catastrophic failure when it comes to generic issues with home computers. My heart sank, none the less, when I couldn't run the standard file system check (fsck) utilities on the problem partition.

This evening, while the children slept and my wife was out visiting with her sister, I crept downstairs to see what I could do to recover my personal, electronic life of close to two decades. I powered the system off, held my breath, and powered it back on. beep. I watched in anticipation as GRUB announced that it found something bootable. YES! My heart skipped a beat when I saw the display flip to frame buffer and a higher screen resolution. OK. I grinned when the status updates indicated that there were working filesystems on the mirrored hard drives! And there! My chewie partition was alive and well, passing the journal recovery! YES!!!

And then I saw the kernel panic! The hardware is fubarred. It could be the CPU, memory, or the motherboard itself. The last message indicated a video card issue, but with memory or CPU failures, it could be deceiving, a false lead. I wouldn't be able to initiate a system back-up this evening to other media, but I did find out that my old life still lived! The $200 desktop PC I purchased for my children will come in handy for recovering my old life. The two disks won't be able to live in the small form-factor machine, but the hardware will be instrumental in reading the data and backing it up elsewhere.

I have hope again that my folly of poorly administered personal backups may not be a complete failure after all. (I had disparate backups scattered over different media, but nothing concrete or systematic.) What's sad is that I know how important such backups are, and yet I still had the hubris to believe that my little Linux system in the basement would live forever. Or perhaps it was simply my busy life as a husband and father that shifted my priorities.

Could I live without the data on those two hard drives downstairs? A few years ago, I probably would have become a hermit in that basement while trying to recover the old vestiges. Now, I realize I have a little more time.

So, what are plans then for the Wookimus network? The Buffalo NAS device is aging and the firmware buggy. Although Meghan still backs up data to the mirrored drives there, these drives themselves are not backed up anywhere. We've paid for CrashPlan, and I'm actively backing up Meghan's iMac with it. I'm tempted to purchase a RaspberryPi and build an OpenMediaVault host and replace the Buffalo, then install Bittorrent Sync.

I think it's high-time for a new personal Debian laptop. The ASUS UX51Vz-XH71 15.6" Ultrabook Silver Aluminum has caught my eye. It doesn't have as much memory capacity as the MacBook, but 8 Gig is plenty for my own use. It's powerful, light, and I've found evidence of successful Linux use. I know that it contains proprietary hardware, but what doesn't these days. I wish I could be more idealistic these days, but not everyone can be Richard Stallman and still make a living; Yoolong is a bit short on power.

Helping out a Debianite!

The week started out busy and stayed that way.  Sunday afternoon, I spent my time helping out a good friend Renee with her Debian desktop.  Years ago, she and her beau (now husband, IIRC) had been pinched for cash and tired of the BSoD's.  Carl, an old co-worker of mine, and I suggested Debian as an alternative.  About once every two or three years, they ask for a tune-up, and Sunday just happened to be that day.  She was having issues playing sound and installing fonts.  Usually easy things to fix, I spent the better part of the afternoon debugging the sound issues.

Carl and I apparently weren't very thorough with our initial setup.  With the Gnome desktop, there is a nice little utility called gksu that prompts the user for either the root password of the system, or ties in to sudo, which apparently I mis-pronounce as "pseudo" rather than sue-doo, to allow a privileged user to enter their own password.  This is the same type of setup that Apple's Mac OS X uses.  Renee and Chris couldn't find the root password (easy enough to change), and gksu wasn't configured to use sudo!  Awkward.  As a result, over 460 packages needed to be updated for security or usability reasons since the release of Debian 5.0 (Lenny).

The second mis-step in our setup was forgetting to assign Renee's account to all the right local hardware access groups, such as "audio", "video", etc.  Sound setup in Lenny was a bit weird anyway, so I downloaded and installed the PulseAudio packages.  Took me a bit of hoop jumping and research to figure out all the right things to do -- turned out that it was a simple answer of adding Renee and Chris to two groups rather than one.  Only took me a couple hours to find that one.

Lastly, of course, was trying to get Flash 10 working in Lenny.  I found "The Perfect Desktop - Debian Lenny" to be extremely helpful.  The difficulty with Debian in general continues to be its strict adherence to what it considers free.  Adobe's Flash Player is definitely not free, and thereby does not warrant support. However, your browsing experience is seriously impinged upon if you do not include the latest Flash and Shockwave language.  Free software has a natural latency to this level of support, it's always behind when trying to provide compatible variants to otherwise restricted rights software.

I can only think of one acceptable alternative to Debian, though: Ubuntu.  Being a Debian-bigot, it's a natural fit for me.  For the average user, not the monkey-wrenching geek like me, Ubuntu has all the benefits of the Debian operating system with the polish and support you would like to see in a desktop operating system.  Ubuntu package selection is a bit more strategic than Debian's when it comes to "fitting in" to the current computing environment.  This has earned Ubuntu the "black sheep" stigma from some hard-core Free Software pundits, one that is undeserved in my honest opinion.  (I can guarantee you that it isn't on Richard Stallman's Top 10 list of Linux derivatives.)

Ubuntu would be a great fit for Renee and Chris.  I'm using it on my laptop and my work-desktop right now!  Works great!  Perhaps the next time they need a tune-up, I'll convince them to switch over.  Wulfgar, if you're reading this and tired of the BSoD's, look to Ubuntu!

Chad

A New Year

Ah, a new year! Lots to do, I tell ya. Work will be a rush for the next couple weeks. Major deployment of Debian using FAI is due to roll out by the end of this week. Role playing sessions to plan, guitar to learn, cross country skiing to do, girlfriend to spoil. Yes, this year will be eventful.

Beer. I need to start my first batch of home-made beer this weekend, the first weekend since before my Dad's birthday that I'll have "off"! Only two short days at work and the "real" free time starts.

The New Year's party at the Stoke's house (Jason, Tiffany and Atalanta) was fun. I got to see lots of old friends from "the Shire" -- the SCA Shire of Innersea in it's Golden Years: Meghan B., Jake E., James M., Kristi, Bob, Paul S, Brian. The gift exchange was fun to watch; even Meghan B's "booby prize" gift to Meghan S. and I was appreciated. ;-)

Today (Tuesday, January 1, 2000) was fun, too. After lunch at Louis' with Jake and Meghan B., we played the card game "Guillotine", "a game where you need to get a head to win". It's a simple card game where you represent an executioner in the French Revolution who is trying to build up a reputation by executing the the higher prestige Aristocracy. If you can get over the grim setting and plot, it's quite fun.

Anyway, time to hit the sack. Busy day tomorrow.

Later!

^chewie