Live CDs, and fun with Xinerama

The Koha Live CD has been uploaded to the sourceforge.net File Release System. Get it from here. Next, I plan to do a CD with Gparted on it - for preparing people’s hard disks before Linux installations. It would be primarily for my own personal use - but if someone gives me space to host the ISO, I will be more than happy to share the Live CD with the world.

In other news, since my server box mostly operates in a headless mode (with me logging in via ssh), I have started to use its monitor for Xinerama (combining it with my laptop’s LCD panel). Xinerama+GIMP = Fun :D.

Broken sendfile() and the advantage of using wget

While working on the Live CD for Koha, I noticed that once in the Live CD environment, Apache served dynamic (perl) pages perfectly, but all static content (CSS files, images, etc) seemed to be truncated at 0 bytes (though I could see that their sizes were in the range of kilobytes from the directory listing provided by Apache). The error log did not indicate anything, nor did the access log. I fired up Xterm, and ran wget on a static page. Wget reported:

Connection closed at byte 0

After some googling, it turned out that there is something broken with sendfile() in the Live CD I was working on. I added EnableSendfile Off at the end of httpd.conf, and after that, things worked out perfectly. If someone is interested, more information on the EnableSendfile directive is available in the Apache documentation.

Old friends…

It seems that the blogging fever has finally caught up with some of my school mates. Here are some of them:

Maybe, after the exams, I’ll cook up a “Planet Pointers” for all of these blogs.

Away till the 17th

I’ll be away for my exams till the 17th, and I will not be replying to any mails till the 17th/18th.

The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader.

Despite yesterday being the hottest day in the season (with the temperature almost reaching 41° celcius (around 106° Fahrenheit)), four of us from our college braved the heat and reached New Empire at around 2:30 PM to watch Revenge of the Sith.

Most memorable dialogue in the film:

This is how Liberty dies - with thunderous applause.