Crux and Mercurial view

I've spent quite some time trying to make hg view to work on my Crux. All time I got error message:

hg view /bin/sh: hgk: command not found

I could not understand what going on. I enable hgk in /etc/mercurial/hgrc or ~/.hgrc. I specified the full path to hgk.py in there as well. I even modify default python path. It didn't work.

After some time of googling, changing various variables I found somewhere (probably on Mercurial page), that some Linux distro missing hgk even if they provide hgk.py. Now I know that Crux is one of them. I copied hgk from contrib directory in source package to /usr/bin and now hg view works fine.

Aptitude advance usage

Some time ago on the Debian mailing list there was a discussion (there are many discussion over there ;). That one was extremely interesting, not because of the problem (I don't remember it), but because of the Jörg-Volker. Peetz mail with information on advance aptitude usage:

"I would try the following:


- to find out what is installed
    aptitude search '~iapache'


- why it is installed
    aptitude why apache2-mpm-worker
  maybe this one is only recommended by another package


- and what depends on this package
    aptitude search '~i~Dapache2-mpm-worker'


- finally, see what would happen, if it is removed:
    aptitude -s purge apache2-mpm-worker"


In the same thread Bernd Semler suggested following command:

apt-cache rdepends $packagename


The original thread can be found here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2011/10/msg01472.html

XenDebian.py to install Debian on XenServer/XCP

Recently, I've needed to install many Debian VMs onto XenServers and, of course, wanted to automate it. One of my colleagues pointed that rather use existing tools like Cobbler I should take opportunity of working with world leading XenAPI developers and learnt it by writing some code. I took that advice and started to write a python script.

During that I decided that I could improve XenAPI documentation. I spent some extra time on my program and tried to write the code clear and with as many comments as possible, so other can learn from it and reuse it. I hoped to write even more documentation (some tutorial) based on my experiences, unfortunately I haven't had enough time.

Please find short XenDebian.py documentation on Xen wiki:

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XenDebian.py

and code on GitHub:

https://github.com/wawrzek/XenDebian


The script is called XenDebian, but with minor modification (new preseed file and change distro name in few places) you should be able to use it with Ubuntu. With a few more modification it should works for any distribution.

Finally, thanks to Project Kronos you would be soon able to install use XenDebian to install many Debian on Debian!

xe-patch

Recently I wrote a very small script to apply XenServer patches from command line.

#!/bin/bash

unzip $1
filename=`basename $1 .zip`.xsupdate
echo "Applying $filename"
xe patch-pool-apply uuid=`xe patch-upload file-name=$filename`

To use if first you need to download a patch (you might try to find any new patch here), and next use the script:

./xe-patch hotfix.zip