Although I have been using Ubuntu as an OpenVZ guest, I have decided to give Debian a try.

Debian has a few advantages and Debian Squeeze seems “stable enough”.

via Debian Squeeze as an OpenZV Template | Shadows of epiphany.

Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called “virtual machines” or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers’ web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it’s more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

via Paravirtualization With Xen 4.0 On Debian Squeeze (AMD64) | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

I don’t want Debian to become Ubuntu. The solid, rather than regular releases are far better, and hopefully we’ll get a 2.6.33 or newer kernel too.

Debian 5.x systems suffer from this vulnerability (with or without Wine installed), and the fix is easy.

At a root shell, do the following:-

sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr="1024"

# make it persistent
cat <<EOF > /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf
# Prevent http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-3547
vm.mmap_min_addr=1024
EOF

Full details at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-3547

Now we have Lenny, and I may be at the point of not regularly running any other Linux distribution, save for trying them out. As I sit here making this post from my Debian server, I wonder has Lenny finally made my Ultimate Edition desktops all but redundant. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ultimate Edition & Ubuntu, but Lenny is all I need in a desktop Linux distribution, and these days my “desktop” boxes are rarely turned on.

I do all my mail, browsing, listening to music, and quite a bit of development using my “server”. A rock solid but desktop friendly Lenny has made it all but unnecessary to power up those desktop boxes, their sole purpose (having more powerful cpus) being development.

The “Universal Operating System” is no longer just for servers.

Could I get the video working by installing the driver direct from AMD’s website?; eh no , and not only that but when I killed X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace the box rebooted, and left my XFS filesystems in a bit of a state.

Kano’s script worked flawlessly, it did a variety of things:

• Installed build-essentials
• Installed GCC
• Installed dkms
• Downloaded the latest driver, built and installed a new .deb on my system
• Reconfigured X
• Restarted the login manager

/Me happy again

PS: you can see all of Kano’s excellent scripts here

Update: Power management seems to be broken with this driver, my monitor never turns off