Posts tagged ‘ubuntu’

Keeping Ubuntu backports pinned away

I’ve been keeping the entries for Ubuntu backports in my sources.list for a long time now. They always been commented out though, since I don’t really trust them enough to keep my system up to date with backports. It wasn’t very elegant though so I decided to see if pinning could do the trick. After an email to the Ubuntu user list my /etc/apt/preferences now look like this:

Explanation: Make sure backports is not installed be default
Package: *
Pin: origin ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net
Pin-Priority: 499

This means that I can keep the backports’ entries in sources.list enabled without being bothered with updating the entire system when doing an apt-get upgrade.

There’s only a minor detail—update-notifier thinks that there are updates available, but once I click it no upgrades are found. I guess there are two pieces of code that checks for upgrades, one doesn’t handle pinning and one does.

[Edited] It seems my whinging about update-notifier's inability to handle pinning was a little premature. It seemed it just needed some time to adapt. Now it’s correctly respecting my whishes not to upgrade any packages available in backports.

Ubuntu Java package

I know there’s a UbuntuWiki page for building a java package. However it’s difficult to read and it’s outdated.

The process is:

  1. Download the binary installer from (Sun)[http://java.sun.com/].
  2. Make sure fakeroot, java-package and java-common is installed.
  3. Execute

    fakeroot make-jpkg –full-name “My Name” –email “My@e.mail”

It will work for both the JDK and the JRE.

Finally, Ubuntu CDs in the post

My touchpad and Linux 2.6.11

I installed the Ubuntu build of 2.6.11 yesterday and noticed that my touchpad didn’t work properly. It felt sluggish and tapping it didn’t work at all. A bit of googling turned up this and this.

I didn’t bother with the Synaptics driver for X.org, mostly since I wasn’t sure the suggested kernel patches are in the Ubuntu kernel. Also, I can live with 2.6.10 until Breezy Badger… with the focus on laptops I’ve seen on the Ubuntu dev-list I can’t imagine they’d let such an obvious thing as a non-functioning touchpad slip through.

udev update

In this post I described my udev setup. The one drawback with using udev that way is that I need to cll pmount manually everytime. Yesterday I stumbled across some posts on the the Ubuntu mailing list and I’ve started liking Gnome’s Volume Manager a little better since.

Using e2label I set the label on my ext2 partition. This causes pmount to mount the partition using that name.

Then of course I didn’t want the device itself (/dev/sda in most cases) to be mounted. As an experiment I modified my udev rule to only apply to the device:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{serial}="070B000514B09F0", KERNEL="sd?", NAME="%k", \
  SYMLINK="usbstick_priv"

As expected having udev add the link somehow prevents pmount from mounting the device.

Now all that is left is to set the label of the VFAT partition on my USB stick.