Random bits of more or less Debian-related stuff...
I finally received my complimentary copies of Raphaël Hertzog's book on Debian, after much delay. Yay! And I can tell you this: it's looking a hell of a lot better in paper form than it did in the Docbook-XML sources I spent countless nights proofreading...
After adopting three Kino-related packages, and spending a few hours polishing them, I got sucked onto the #Kino IRC channel, where I was reminded that there was yet another Kino-related package that Jens wanted to maintain before retiring (namely, smilutils). I suppose I'll end up maintaining it too, it doesn't seem to move very fast upstream anyway. Anyway, that gave me the opportunity to get in touch with a few people involved in Kino, and to (hopefully) make a point about Theora: it should be possible (and easy) to import and export Theora from Kino, so as one can have an entirely free, complete chain from the camcorder's ieee1394 plug to the final rendered video.
I wanted to give Gnoppix a try, so I wgeted and burnt the CD image. And booted it. It's a bit disappointing: it feels much slower than Knoppix, I didn't find as many apps on the CD, and it looks less polished. A bit of a surprise though: I thought it was derived from Knoppix, but there seem to be quite a few mentions of Ubuntu in the menus, so there may have been a change there. Maybe due to Gnome 2.8.
Laptop news: my newest box (don't fret, it's still old) is slowly getting into shape. The wireless card I was supposed to get with it when buying the laptop from a co-worker finally arrived, and it seems to work flawlessly. Except I only wanted it for the cases where I'm not home, like during Debian conferences or other geeky places, which means I don't have anything else wireless at home. And believe it or not, there doesn't seem to be any access points in range, despite my living in a rather large residence. Should I move to a more geek-oriented place? In any case, tcpdump and tethereal show the interface is up and working, except the only packets it sees are the DHCP discovery messages it sends. I'll take it with me next time I go to a more potential 802.11 zone, just to see.
Also laptop-related: I've been wondering for months why the PCMCIA cards came up as eth0 under Linux 2.4, and eth1 under 2.6. By carefully looking at the boot messages (okay, by casually looking at them, but I usually don't look at them at all), I finally understood that great mystery. Seems eth0 is Ethernet-over-ieee1394. That's what you get for starting your kernel configuration from the default prepackaged ones where everything is included.
...and that more or less rounds up stuff for today, I think.
