Raw Matter

Adeodato Simó complains about the many ways to regulate sound volume on his system. I can only add that on my Dell Inspiron 9300, the “Master” is actually not usable because it is mapped only to the tiny stereo speakers while leaving the subwoofer alone, which is mapped to “Master Mono”. So I have to use the pcm mixer.

At least I can map the buttons (both Fn+keyboard key and the additional buttons at the front of the laptop) to the pcm mixer. But it took quite some fiddling for something the non-technical user will expect work out of the box.

Going just from the title of Cameron's post about his apt-p2p tool: How about automatically running a zeroconf-enabled webserver serving /var/cache/apt/archives (and any mounted local repositories?) during install and while aptitude is running (and, if the user allows, as a daemon by default on a running system) and of course a corresponding sources.list line and apt retrieval module. This would hugely improve installation time for people with just a few machines who are too lazy to set up their own apt cache.

Obviously, the details would be tricky, but since there is a security chain from Release.gpg to the .deb, downloading packages from untrusted peers shouldn't be a problem, even if the package name / version pair is not really unique (or even if someone actually tries a spoofing attack.)

(There's a thought: running a tftp / dhcp server with a fai network boot in addition would be a step towards world domination, too, closely followed by automated hacking tools to install Debian on all computing devices on the network. Support call: “My printer only prints one page saying debian:~# after power on and then stops.”)

Update 2008-05-07: Both Nijel and Florian Ludwig himself pointed out his apt-zeroconf project, which is unfortunately not very actively developed at the moment. Yet another thing I should/could do if I had the time.