Every now and again I find I have ssh access to one server - which has access to somewhere I need to get to - but I want direct access (eg to forward an X session)

an now I'm logged into othersever with forwarded X

The drush script which provides comman line acceess to drupal functionality emits an error message when run as a cron job

I presume drush uses this information to calculate layout of output.

However when running as a cron job COLUMNS is not set and tput gives the above error.

Debian Etch has been serving me well for a few years with wonderfully easy and infrequent maintenance.

However it's at the end of its life

http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121

So I've upgraded to Lenny following these instructions

http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en....

It was remarkably painless

One small problem with the mail system.

It's great that Amazon actually offer a version of thier MP3 downloader for Linux - just a shame that it doesn't work for many distributions.

Fortunately clamz is available 

It's a great little command line utility with a very forgetable name.

Test the hard drive with

This may take hours to run and will do so as a background process.

Once complete run the following to see results

I recently bought a Sony e-reader, the main Linux package to support this is calibre but I found that it wouldn't automatically sync my ebooks.

 The FAQ says 

 "The linux kernel can export two version of SYSFS, one of which is deprecated."

Apparently Debian Lenny exports the deprecated version and you have to recompile the kernel to undo this.

Debian has a very strict policy on free and legal software. This helps keep everyone honest, but sometimes a pragmatic approach is called for. MP3 is a file format that is patent encumbered - but also in universal use.

I could use the supplied Ogg Vorbis tools but then my music wouldn't work everywhere I want it to.

So I want to install Lame which is only available in source.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/

Download and extract

I've just installed Debian Lenny and generally am impressed with how well things are auto detected and configured - so much easier than a few years ago - and in many ways easier than a Windows install where you have to constantly find 3rd party drivers to get things working.

 However getting wifi running was a bit trickier (largely because of FCC regulations  affecting licenses and default settings).

This document got me most of the way

http://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi

Additional lines in /etc/.network/interfaces

I just read an interesting article about Windows 7 - it will include a virtual machine to run windows XP for backwards compatibility.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&...

The article points out that this has the drawback of extra maintenance.

I'd have to agree with this - it's one of the big downsides of using virtual machines for testing -  with three virtual Windows' I find myslef constantly having to run updates.

Kdesvn and Kompare are two very nice tools providing rich GUI's for svn and file comparison respectively.

In order to show the difference between two revisions using Kompare, change the default external diff settings to:
kompare %1 %2