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Nouveau driver not loaded

After experiencing some X11-crashes, it turns out that X11 was using the modesetting driver instead of Nouveau. For some reason my Debian configuration was not selecting the driver I needed.

If you inspect your X log-file (usually /var/log/Xorg.0.log) and look for Modeline entries, the log lines will start with modeset(0) if you are using the modeset driver, and with NOUVEAU(0) if you are using the Nouveau driver.

Firefox: You've launched an older version

After upgrading my workstation to buster, Firefox insisted on creating a new profile:

The new version was 68.2, the old version too, but Firefox kept complaining.

The solution: create a new profile, close Firefox and compare ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/compatibility.ini. Copy the LastVersion setting from your new to your old profile. Now Firefox is happy to use your old profile again.

Talking to Grid Control

And suddenly, Firefox did not want to connect to Oracle Grid Control anymore.

The error message displayed was Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap). Google was not immediately useful (suggesting things like turning off SSL).

Virtual Debian

I have been trying to get old versions of Debian to run as virtual machines. Most of it works without trouble, but there are some things you should be aware of, if you want to try it yourself.

My host is a Debian Wheezy machine running Linux kernel 3.11 and Qemu/KVM 1.1.2, using Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) 0.9.1.

Releasing old software

After a long, long time, I decided to release a new version of psiconv. That is tooling I wrote between ten and fifteen year ago. In those days I owned a Psion 5 (and later the upgraded model, the Psion 5MX), a small PDA with keyboard running EPOC (also known as EPOC32, a precursor of Symbian).

A small tool

I wanted a simple thing: install some packages to support my wireless card. It seems I need a non-free driver for that, which is kind of disappointing; but that is life.

In some earlier experiment, I had installed the latest Linux kernel from the unstable archive (I am running stable on my laptop). No big deal, that: I have done it before on earlier Debian releases. There is always a small risk (both in terms of stability and of non-declared dependencies) but one can always decide to go back to the old kernel if there are problems.

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by Dr. Radut