Linux (Debian Squeeze) on Thinkpad T500

I recently got myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 (2055V1X) . I chose this older model over the T510 and such, because I prefer a screen resolution of 1680×1050 over a crippled 1600×900 or worse. I write and read a lot of code so I need vertical space on the display and I’d definitely miss the 150pixels additional vertical space my old Laptop (Samsung X20 with a resolution of 1400×1050) has.

However, I shrunk the Windows 7 partition (I didn’t want to dump Windows entirely) and installed Debian Squeeze (AMD64) in the resulting free space. I’m very pleased how painless everything was, almost all hardware ran out of the box, but I’ll document some interesting stuff (how to shrink windows partition without breaking it, how to make special keys work and display information on Linux, how to make the touchpad and trackpoint behave the way I want, …) anyway.

Bug-Hunting: Browsers fail to load research.microsoft.com

This is a follow-up to debian bug #541658 for Iceweasel: “cannot open research.microsoft.com”.
It turned out that this bug applies to all (tested) browsers with cookie-support (Iceweasel, Opera, Chrome, Arora, Kazehakase), but only very few people are experiencing it. If you’re one of them please get in touch via the comments :-)
First I’ll tell how to reproduce the bug, then I’ll sum up the facts I already collected in that bugreport and then I’ll document my further attempts to narrow down the problem.

UPDATE: The reason for that strange behaviour was found and I filed a new bugreport: No. #587789
UPDATE 2: Debians Kernel maintainer considers this expected behavior and told me to file a bugreport upstream and I did: Netfilter bug #622.
UPDATE 3: I think Microsoft has fixed their server. Of course the Linux kernel should be fixed anyway but there doesn’t seem to be much interest in doing so :-/

Shutting down (e)SATA disks under Linux

I’m using a eSATA external harddrive and want to be able to safely unplug it without shutting down my PC. While just removing the drive after unmounting worked so far, I’m not sure if it’s really safe – I’d really prefer to cleanly disconnect it and spinning it down before pulling the plug.
I googled that and stumbled upon http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2009/05/04/linux-sata-hot-plug-unplug/ which seems to be a clean and safe way to do it, so I just wrote a script to do that.

Unlock gnome-keyring on Login with SLiM and PAM

My favorite desktop environment is XFCE, because it’s fast, doesn’t need much memory¹ and still is convenient (automounting of CDs and memory sticks, easy unmounting by clicking, a real desktop, etc).
I also use SLiM as a display manager because it is slim and looks much better than xdm.

On my Laptop I also use GNOME’s NetworkManager because I haven’t yet found a better and less bloat alternative for handling wireless networks and VPNs.
NetworkManager is able to store your passwords (WPA-keys etc) in the GNOME Keyring so you don’t need to enter them each time your laptop connects to a wireless network. But you still have to enter the password to unlock the keyring.. unless you let PAM handle that on login.

Remote administration/tech-support with (reverse) VNC

Like most computer-savvy people I am frequently asked to give tech support to my family etc. Because telling them on the telephone what to do is a major pain in the ass, VNC is my weapon of choice, if SSH isn’t sufficiant (got to show how something is done, SSH impossible/hard because the other side uses Windows or is behind a NAT, …).

I’ll describe how to set up a normal and reverse VNC-connections using x11vnc and TightVNC.

MCabber – Settings and rebinding of PageUp/PageDown

After years of using centericq for ICQ and Jabber I switched to gajim (ICQ via transport), because centericq didn’t have any useable UTF8 support. I was never really satisfied with gajim though, because I happen to switch between my PC and my Notebook multiple times a day, resulting in inconsistent chat-histories etc – a console based solution in a screen is so much nicer.

So I tried MCabber, that turned out to be really great once you’ve configured it to your needs. After installing MCabber (most Linux/BSD distributions should have a package or port) you’ll want to configure it to your needs.