As Debian Wheezy beta1 got released the other day I thought it was high time I updated my netbook from Fedora14. I was pleasantly surprised how little tweaking was needed to get to Sid, even Gnome 3.4 only needed a few extensions and CSS tweaks. For the sake of speed I only encrypted my /home partition, chosing not to bother with a swap partition, and as /tmp is on tmpfs these days, the only permanent storage that’s not encrypted is the OS like /bin, /sbin /etc and so on.

I’ve replaced the Fedora14 on my Revo 3610 with Ubuntu 12.04 now its a dedicated HTPC and not “the visitor box”. I found out pretty much straight away that Unity2D uses too much background resources for XBMC to run alongside, so I’m making use of the XBMC session, which doesn’t load a window manager underneath and can stream 1080p over PowerLineHD to the NFS server just fine. I compiled XBMC 12 alpha (Froyo) from git but found that the database schema has changed so much that XWMM 2.

I initally added instructions here for compiling ColdFusionX as I was helping to maintain the project. Now that it looks like we’ll get an official CM9 for ZTE Blade, its been deprecated, so here’s the CM9 build instructions. It takes about 50mins to compile (including kernel) which is only about 10mins more than CM7+kernel would have taken on my 12Gb RAM, 3.2GHz Intel Core i5 Linux box with SSD. Download CM9 (use repo sync to update) this is about 15Gb worth: mkdir -p ~/cm9/vendor/zte/blade curl https://dl-ssl.

Nessus 5.0 just got released, and if the forum is anything to go by, people are not impressed, me included! First off its a major new version number, but appears to have no new functionality whatsoever. All that has changed are the report templates, and they’re totally screwed up. You’ve got HTML that doesn’t wrap properly and takes an age to render the XSLT, the Synopsis and Solution are no longer output at all (WTF?

I thought I’d play around with backups as a continuation of my btrfs experiment. Well basically btrfs can’t do it without dd’ing the entire drive as the UUID’s can’t be changed. So I thought I’d stick to ext4, and I’ve finally figured out how to do full root filesystem backup including LUKS encryption (without LUKS its easy, you could even do it with tar) using rsync of just the files instead of using dd to backup every bit (17Gb of files instead of 64Gb drive size in my case).