Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I have heard of Gobby many times now, but when Daniel Stone blogged about it today, I finally decided to give it a try.

For those who don't yet know what I'm talking about:

Gobby is a free collaborative editor based on libobby, a library which provides synced document buffers. It supports multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

One apt-get install gobby later, I was astounded as to how mature it already feels. I think Gobby will be of great benefit when taking notes during conferences, talks and so on. It could also prove invaluable as a pair programming tool.

Anyways, I already hear you crying "but SubEthaEdit has been doing this for ages", which is true. But:

• Gobby is GPL'd, SubEthaEdit is not.
• Gobby is a cross-platform tool, SubEthaEdit is not (I don't own no Mac, you insensitive clod!).

There you have it.

(via Daniel Stone)

It's late at night, so what else could I do than watch the stars? Of course, as I am such a moron geek, I don't just look out of the window — I use GPL'd software to watch the stars.


apt-get install stellarium


Just to prove the world I'm doing Debian work sometimes: I have recently updated the flobopuyo package (needed rebuild because of the C++ transition), the bfbtester package (hey, it took me only three attempts until I f*cking figured out why I couldn't change the section), and cccd (cosmetic stuff).

Nothing to see here, move on.

A while ago I wanted to enlarge my /home partition (hda6), as it was getting full. After that partition I had another (unused) one, which I intended to merge with hda6 and thereby increase the amount of free disk space on /home.

Here's parts of the disk layout:

hda6 Logical Linux ext3 30848.00
hda7 Logical Linux ext3 8848.00

So, merging hda7 into hda6 should be as simple as removing hda7, and then resizing hda6 to swallow up the 8 gig from the former hda7. Basically, that's how it worked, but I had a few problems. First, at that time is seemed impossible to simply resize ext3 partitions. Neither ext2resize, nor QtParted, nor parted worked for me for some reasons (maybe that has changed recently).

After some googling I finally found a way to do it (which I'll document here, maybe it'll be helpful for others):

1. Boot from Knoppix, not mounting any partition
2. Run fsck on both, hda6 and hda7 (optional?)
3. Remove hda7 (e.g. using cfdisk)
4. Remove the ext3 journal from hda6 (effectively turning it into an ext2 partition):
   # tune2fs -O^has_journal /dev/hda6
5. Resize hda6 using parted. The xxxx is the original start of hda6 (you may not change that) and yyyy is the end of the disk:
   # parted
(parted) resize 6 xxxxx yyyyy
6. Enable the ext3 journal again on the now enlarged hda6:
   tune2fs -j /dev/hda6
7. Reboot

But this didn't work from the beginning either — for some strage reason parted didn't believe me that the space after hda6 was free. It did display it as free space, but the "resize" operation complained.

So what I did was this (instead af the above step 3):

1. Re-add the hda7 partition using, e.g., cfdisk
2. Start parted, and remove hda7 again from within parted(!):
   # parted
(parted) rm 7

It seems parted didn't like the way cfdisk removed the hda7 partition... very strange...

I intended to write up some sort of HOWTO for using the Toshiba Satellite A80-117 with Debian GNU/Linux for quite some time now, but I don't seem to get around to really finish it. So for now, I'll just release some quick hints about how to get everything working — I'll cover more details and stuff as soon as time permits.

Please consider this a draft and let me know if you have any comments.