HOWTO Upgrade from devfs to udev on Debian Sarge

This article was first written in November 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/186).

Some people used devfs under Woody, or under their previous Sarge install. When going kernel 2.6, it may be useful to revert or upgrade to udev instead. The problem is that their nomenclatura is different, so your system may be rendered unbootable. Let’s see what to care about to switch from devfs to udev.

First, the bootloader will no longer need the devfs=mount parameter on the kernel command-line. So, wheter you use GRUB or LILO, remove or comment the reference to devfs=mount.

Second, check in your /etc/fstab that you have nothing in devfs-nomenclatura, like /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3, but everything in the standard nomenclatura like /dev/hda3.

Third, install the udev package, it will probably bring some dependencies too. That’s ok.

Last, check the links in /etc/udev/rules.d/. There are probably two links to the upper directory: compat-full.rules and devfs.rules. Remove them and create a new link to udev.rules and to cd-aliases.rules like this:

# cd /etc/udev/rules.d/
# rm compat-full.rules devfs.rules
# ln -s ../udev.rules .
# ln -s ../cd-aliases.rules .

Now, reboot, and if you want, remove package devfsd.

Note: It may also be necessary to reconfigure some special packages which store device information in their configuration file, like XFree86.

HOWTO Use fgetty instead of getty on Debian

This article was first written in November 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/185).

Getty is known to be memory-hungry. Let’s replace it with something lighter, which works in most cases: fgetty

On Debian Sarge and up, it is already packaged, so sudo apt-get install fgetty will do the trick. But this is not sufficent for it to be installed instead of getty.

You will have to edit /etc/inittab. Warning: this is a very dangerous file to edit, as it may render your system unbootable. You have been warned!

The following lines call getty

:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
...

Lets replace it with fgetty, which takes less arguments:

1:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty2
...

And do that for as many virtual consoles you would like to have. If you don’t need many, comment the lines, but I advise you to keep at least 2.

Save the file and exit.

And then, restart init:

# killall -HUP init

You’re done!

Debian Packaging Web Applications Policy drafts

This article was first written in November 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/184).

Here are some links about interesting drafts of a Debian Packaging Web Applications Policy.

https://alioth.debian.org/projects/webapps-common/

http://people.debian.org/~seanius/policy/

DB Apps Packaging Policy

PHP Pear Packaging Policy

http://www.opal.dhs.org/involved/debian/apache/index.oml

Webapp Policy Wiki