Pic de la Belle Étoile

La randonnée pédestre en montagne allie plaisir des yeux et plaisir de l'effort. Ce lundi 15 aôut, l'effort fût le seul plaisir ! Roland et moi sommes montés au pic de la Belle Étoile (2718m) dans le massif de Belledonne. Une marche de près de 8 heures, dans le froid—glacial au sommet—, la grisaille et les pierres (illustration). Le ravitaillement du sommet, où nous étions protégés par un mur de pierres, une couverture de survie et un verre de vin rouge, fût express. La première heure de descente difficile et éprouvante. Pour la prochaine randonnée, je souhaiterais que le plaisir des yeux s'ajoute à celui de l'effort :-)

Linux Hibernation

I thought I should talk about hibernation on Linux...

I recently decided to give Software Suspend 2, codenamed swsusp2, and the hibernate script a try. My goal being to power off my desktop PC and quickly retrieve my session when powering it back on.

So I downloaded a 2.6.12.3 Linux kernel, applied version 2.1.9.9 of the Software Suspend 2 set of patches, and compiled the whole thing. Then I diligently followed the instructions provided in the HOWTO to set the swsusp2-enabled kernel.

My first suspend attempt didn't work because I haden't installed a recent enough version of the hibernate Debian package. (I had downloaded it from a debian/testing mirror.) So, as indicated in the HOWTO, I added the line deb http://cp.yi.org/apt/hibernate ./ to my sources.list file, and downloaded the hibernate package from there.

This time suspend worked, but resume failed badly with a kernel oops. I figured out that the oops was due to Preempt The Big Kernel Lock (CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL) configured in my kernel. Re-building the kernel without it resolved the problem.

The only remaining issue I have is with the keyboard: from time to time it comes back frozen after resume. This problem is known, and apparently not yet resolved.

First blog

My very first blog post. Email me if you know what I'll be talking about here...