After performing some security related OS updates, i was receiving from LDAP all sort of strange errors. Like, when you logged on the ldap server as a regular ldap user (not system user) the regular user@host:~$ prompt changed to:
I have no name!@host:~$
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This article will show how you can rebuild any debian package. You might need to rebuild a package for various reasons: add/remove some compilation options, make some changes to the sources, or compile a newer version from testing/sid into stable, etc. Regardless of your reason, this can be done very easy using debian tools.

First you will need to have some basic debian building tools installed:
apt-get install devscripts build-essential Read the rest of this entry »

According to tune2fs manual, reserved blocks are designed to keep your system from failing when you run out of space. Its reserves space for privileged processes such as daemons (like syslogd, for ex.) and other root level processes; also the reserved space can prevent the filesystem from fragmenting as it fills up. By default this is 5% regardless of the size of the partition.

On large partitions (250GB drives and up are quite common these days), the default 5% reserved space can be quite a lot (12.5Gb in my example). For ext3 partitions you can tune this parameter by using tune2fs with the parameter -m. For ex. to decrease this to 3% you would run (for ex. on /dev/sda1):
tune2fs -m3 /dev/sda1
You should be very careful when ‘playing’ with this parameter and be sure you know what you are doing before changing this value.

It seems that the Debian team doesn’t like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name “Etch”) released last year, the next Debian release (code name “Lenny“) will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: “For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.”

Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4:
“There may be a possibility to include KDE 4 in Lenny. The efforts on KDE 4.1 have been quite promising and seem to be leading to a desktop environment which can fully replace KDE 3. The KDE team will provide betas and release candidates of the 4.1 release in experimental. In the event that KDE 4.1 is on time, and there are no major issues, an upload to unstable in order to include it in Lenny is possible.”

The development of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 seems to be on track and the final release is still expected in September 2008.

Debian provides security updates for old stable releases for one year after a new distribution has been released. Yesterday, Debian announced that the support for Debian 3.1 (sarge) is coming to an end this month, as etch was released last year in April, sarge will be supported until March 2008.

Anyone still running Debian sarge, should really be thinking seriously to finally update to etch asap.

Debian’s Official Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080229