Place Ghantoos

I have read many tutorials that explain how to install a debian on the G1 phone (running Google’s Android too).

Here is a compilation of what I have done on my Samsung Galaxy (i7500) in order to get a root access and install a debian system on it.
1- Root access
2- Debian installation

Continue reading “Running Debian on a Samsung Galaxy under Android”

This is just a small post that may help those who are trying to install the wifi modules of a BCM4328 card on a debian OS using ndiswrapper.

The debian wiki explains very well how to install the necessary windows drivers using ndiswrapper, so I won’t go into details. Here are the main steps:

$ sudo apt-get install module-assistant wireless-tools
$ sudo m-a prepare
$ sudo m-a a-i ndiswrapper
$ sudo ndiswrapper -i /path /to/your/driver/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
	device (14E4:4328) present (alternate driver: ssb)

Continue reading “Debian, BCM4328 and ndiswrapper”

I don’t know how you feel about it, but when my hand touches the touchpad “mouse pad” while I am typing on my keyboard, and changes to windows focus or the mouse positioning, it annoys me, A LOT!

So here’s what I did to get over this issue on my debian box. It shouldn’t be very different on other distributions. (I’ll update this post in case I ever try it somewhere else)

Continue reading “Disable touchpad while typing on keyboard”

I have added a new page to my blog today. It lists commands/tips I collected over the past couple of month. I will be updating it every once in while.

Please don’t hesitate to comment suggesting/correcting commands :)

I hope this can be useful!

Cheers,
Ignace M -ghantoos-

A week ago, I encountered some space problems on my FreeBSD system during a system wide portupgrade. Fortunately, I had backed up my system just before the adventure, so my system was saved.

The procedure I followed to restore my data, was:
1- recreate my partitioning, giving 10 more Gigs to the system, using the FreeBSD installation CD
2- copy all the data on it

Since I backed up my FreeBSD system on an external ext3 hard drive, I needed to copy it back from “outside” my freebsd system. My first option was to use Fixit from the FreeBSD installation CD set, but I had problems mounting my partition because of the inode block size of my ext3 partition. Bref. I decided to mount everything from my Linux (ubuntu) system, and copy everything back from there!

I only way to do this was to recompile my kernel with the right “UFS write” flag. And it JUST WORKED!! I copied back __ALL__ my FreeBSD system on the new slices, rebooted my machine, and here I am writing this post from my old-new FreeBSD system! :)

Continue reading “Mounting UFS in read/write under Linux (debian)”

This article has been updated on July 2nd 2009.

As I worked on packaging a project I am working on (Limited Shell) I found my self reading many tutorials on how to build debian packages. But none where related to distutils setup.py. As a nice setup.py natively knows how to package RPM, I thought about a way to include setup.py in a .deb generation.

Here is a small guide to help generate a debian package from a distutils/setuptools setup.py.

The main steps of this procedure are:
1- make sure that your setup.py is functional
2- generate a GPG key to sign your package and a public key to put on your server or wherever
3- create the files that are useful for the debian packaging:
* debian/changelog
* debian/compat
* debian/control
* debian/copyright
* debian/rules
* debian/watch
4- write the Makefile
5- generate your debian package
6- check your files’ licensing
7- check your new package using lintian
8- Conclusion
9- Links

Continue reading “Creating a .deb package from a python setup.py”