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About two weeks ago I “killed” one of our clusters in California by rebooting the main server – which itself is kind of ridiculous However, as the cluster was mainly dead and the installed version of CentOS was really messed up (and no big fan of CentOS is working here anymore), we decided to switch those machines to Debian. As I was the one killing it and I’m also the one desperatly needing some of those machines now, I took the burden to set them up again. So I had – actually I’m still having – a lot of fun with CentOS, Debian, netinst and preseeding during the last days!

For the whole setup I could mainly follow the installation guide on debian.org but some things just didn’t work out as expected. At least locally I now figured them out and the installation is working end-to-end
The main issue was to get the preseed.cfg to the client without having to alter the initrd. According to the manual (and tons of blogs), you just have to pass it as a kernel parameter. That’s just half of the truth. What’s missing in there is that you also have to send some more parameters right away so that the installation gets to the point where it loads the preseed.cfg (example). So if you ever have to set up something like that, don’t forget to pass in these parameters in your pxelinux.cfg/default:

append vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz preseed/url=http://path/to/preseed.cfg debian-installer/locale=en_US console-keymaps-at/keymap=us netcfg/get_hostname=debian netcfg/get_domain=unassigned netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 -

(Don’t forget to check the interface in the last parameter. You can also skip it completely if you just have one network interface.)
My whole entry for the default Debian netinst looks like this now:

LABEL lenny
kernel debian-installer/i386/linux
append vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz preseed/url=http://path/to/preseed.cfg debian-installer/locale=en_US console-keymaps-at/keymap=us netcfg/get_hostname=debian netcfg/get_domain=unassigned netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 -

This is enough for us right now because the cluster just has 5 machines so it’s easy to handle and we don’t intend to reinstall it that often. So there is no need for a bigger solution but if you have a big cluster with a lot of machines and you’re changing a lot of things all the time, you might want to take a look at FAI

Vor ein paar Monaten, ich glaube es war im Dezember oder Januar, haben wir ein Paper fuer die EWME 2010 in Darmstadt eingereicht und wurden akzeptiert. Zwischenzeitlich hat diese nun stattgefunden und das Paper kann hier runtergeladen werden

And as the paper is in english, I guess this post should be as well:
A few months ago, I think it was in December, we submitted a paper to the EWME 2010. It got accepted and the EWME took place a few weeks ago. So the paper is now published and can be downloaded here

Abstract – Within the Master Project “Wireless Mobility” this project was offered to IT Master Students during the second and third term and ran approximately over ten months. The project team developed a demonstrator platform to export the display content from a consumer mobile phone to a larger remote display, e.g. installed in a car. The key requirement was the utilization of non-proprietary technical solutions. This constrain did not limit the scope to standardized solutions only, but proprietary solutions ought to be open source or somehow accessible for the interested community. One important goal of this project was the awareness of latest design constraints and challenges in the Embedded Systems and System on Chip (SoC) area through a Project Based Learning (PBL) strategy. In this context, the students developed personal design competence, including specification, design trade-offs, design for testability, analysis and verification, and realization.

Im Rahmen des Masterstudiums haben zwei Kumpels (ebenfalls Masterstudenten) und ich uns in einem Kooperationsprojekt mit Task9 damit beschäftigt ein Handy fernzusteuern. Das hört sich erstmal nach nichts an, allerdings haben wir den Spaß ins Auto integriert und zum Schluss können wir einen lauffähigen Prototypen präsentieren, bestehend aus einem CarPC mit Touchscreen und auf der mobilen Seite ein OpenMoko.
Den Spaß haben wir dann erstmal FH-intern präsentiert und anschließend gab es eine kurze Pressemitteilung auf der FH-Seite, mit reichlich Feedback von anderen Seiten, was uns natürlich schon etwas stolz macht
Ein kleiner Auszug:

• hochschule-ist-zukunft.de
• muensterschezeitung.de
• media.nrw.de
• westfaelische-nachrichten.de
• LocalXXL.com
• auto-im-westen.de

Ein paar mehr Details zum System:
Read the rest of this entry »

Mitte letzter Woche war es soweit und wir haben appazaar in den Market Store von Android released. Wer es also jetzt haben möchte, braucht nur dort zu suchen und auch die Updates werden in Zukunft natürlich darüber released werden. Wir sind schon wieder fleißig dabei zu verbessern und zu korrigieren und die Liste für den nächsten größeren Release ist bereits angefangen! Falls ihr Ideen, Wünsche oder Vorschläge habt, könnt ihr das entweder hier oder besser noch auf dem Blog von appazaar posten. Wir sind für jedes Feedback dankbar

Hier ein kleiner Auszug von dem Release-Post:

Since the first beta we improved appazaar a lot but the most significant changes for you will be these:

* context tags: You now have the possibility to describe your current situation with a few words like “home, lunch” or “working” to improve the quality of the recommendations.
* less traffic: We reduced the traffic a lot with zipping everything and scaling the icons down. So there is less data to commit!
* recommending: On the server side we’re now using different algorithms that still need to be trained more, but that already should recommend more interesting apps for you.

After some hard work and uncounted hours of testing and improving it’s done: The first beta of appazaar is available

appazaar is able to figure out what applications might be interesting for you in your current context and recommends them to you. All you have to do is install it and place the widget on your desktop

What is appazaar doing?
The short answer: appazaar is the last.fm for mobile apps

Once the appazaar-widget is started it will recommend you apps from the Market Store. If you want to know how we know what to recommend, take a short look at the FAQ and the About appazaar page!

As this is just a beta version we’re happy about everyone who’s interested and giving us feedback about it!

The package itself is already available for a while on Ubuntu. Now that libqjson finally arrived in Debian testing (Squeeze) you’re also able to connect to a Facebook account. This way you can use the chat with kopete and don’t need to go to the website itself anymore. For me the 0.1.4 version works okay, even though you can not get it via apt and have to install it manually. Also there still seem to be some bugs but asap there’s a version in the Debian repository I guess that’ll get better too

Seltsamerweise konnte ich in meiner Windows7 VM unter VirtualBox meinen Drucker nicht mehr einbinden. Nachdem eine Googlesuche ohne Erfolg blieb, habe ich mal in den Foren der Jungs gepostet und da kam der entscheidende Tipp: der User muss dafür in der Gruppe lp sein. Eigentlich logisch, aber irgendwie auch nicht… So funktioniert es auf jeden Fall