I've recently started to encrypt my backup drives, so I had to learn how to do this instead of just letting debian's init scripts to take care of it for me. Turns out it's quite easy. In my case, I was encrypting /dev/sdd1 and named my partition "backup". Substitute those values for whatever device and name you use.

# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdd1
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 backup
# mkfs -t xfs /dev/mapper/backup 
# mount /dev/mapper/backup /mnt/backup

That's it, when you're done with the device, umount the /dev/mapper/backup device, and then do a cryptsetup luksClose backup.

I just went through the process of getting my older nvidia card working on debian, and decyphering the exact list of steps was a bit irritating, so I'm recording it here for everyone (including myself) to enjoy later on. I'm writing this down after completing the process (and I'm certainly not going to start over again), so this is from memory, and hopefully I'm getting all the steps in the right order.

1. First off, you need to install the linux headers (and possibly the linux source) for your kernel. I did these steps out of order, so I can't say if the linux source tree is really required. Things started working for me once I installed the headers, so those are certainly required. apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r).
   
   
2. Next up, idenfity what card you have, and what nvidia-glx package supports it. Run lspci and it will show you a list of hardware installed.. my card is shown below.
   01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV37GL [Quadro PCI-E Series] (rev a2)
   Take the card type, (in my case NV37GL) and do a google search for NV37GL glx debian. This will produce a list of debian packages, and hopefully you'll see a results that looks like Debian -- Details of package nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx in sid. The version doesn't matter, we're just looking for the name here. Apt-get can handle the details. (there should be a way to get this info from apt-cache, but it's not producing results for me. Feel free to send comments on how to make this work.)
   
   
3. Run apt-get install nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx (or whatever package google found for you.) This will install the module you need and whatever dependencies it requires. If you have the require kernel source installed, you should see a message about it building for your currently installed kernel. If you see a message that looks like Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed., it couldn't find your source tree and you need to try step 1 again.
   
   
4. Once you're done that, get into console mode by doing init 1 or /etc/init.d/slim stop (substitute slim for gdm, kdm, xdm, whatever), and then go over to /etc/X11 and run X -configure to generate a new X configuration. Move the file over to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then edit the file. Find the line that says Driver "nv" and change it to say Driver "nvidia".
   
   
5. Save, exit, restart X. Once started, you should be able to open a terminal, run glxinfo and get results saying that glx is working.
   
   
6. Celebrate! yay!

If you find any errors, or better ways to do that, please send me and email and I'll update appropriately. Good luck!

So, I recently bought a new computer, and this one is a dual core and supports all kinds of dynamic speed adjusting goodness, which apparently my last CPU did not. While this is all great, there is a bit of a downside.

Down in the status bar of the window manager I use (wmiirc-lua), there is a little box indicating the current scaled CPU speed that each core is running at. As a result of the new dynamicness, the contents of that box are changing all the time. I was going to remove it entirely, but instead decided to write a graphical version of the same. The result of this effort is a wmii plugin called CPU Graph. Upon configuring wmii to load this, it'll create a 10 character scrolling ASCII bar indicating the current CPU speed.

I've got it up at github for the moment, until bartman gets a chance to merge it into the tree.

Download. Install. Enjoy the ASCII goodness.

I searched for this options for 15 minutes, so I'm posting this here so I don't have to again.

If you're like me and find the magnetic nets always connect to the wrong stuff, you can turn them off! You can do so by adding (magnetic-net-mode "disabled") to your ~/.gschemrc or to a gafrc in your project directory.

So, I recently had to fix an ubuntu install after Windows had been reinstalled onto the drive.. end result: of course Windows tromped over the MBR and wiped out grub, making the computer automatically boot into windows. The fix is to get booted into Ubuntu and reinstall grub. If you're a debian user, the best way I found to do this is:

1. Download the Ubuntu liveCD for whatever version of ubuntu you are trying to fix. Don't forget to download the 64bit version if you're trying to fix a 64bit install of Ubuntu.
2. Do a google search for the usb-creator package for a not quite cutting edge version of ubuntu. While it would be awesome if this package were in debian, I'm sure the demand for it is pretty low, since it seems to be an Ubuntu creation. I am running Debian Squeeze/testing, and had good results using the usb-creator from Jaunty, which can be found here. (It'd be nice if you could just dd the iso to the usb drive and have it work, but alas I tried that, and it does not boot.)
3. Download and install usb-creator via dpkg -i
4. Insert a USB disk that you don't mind getting wiped, run usb-creator, select your liveCD iso file and usb disk, click format, and then Create disk.
5. Wait forever.
6. Pop the USB stick into the busted machine, and boot from the usb drive into the first menu with the install options.
7. Move the cursor over the first option for "Try Ubuntu Live CD without changes" and press <TAB> to edit the menu command. Replace the boot=whatever parameter with root=/dev/sdXY, where sdXY is whatever partition your Ubuntu install is on.
8. Press <ENTER> and boot up into your Ubuntu install.
9. Open up a terminal, run sudo bash to get to a root shell.
10. Run update-grub to update your grub configuration file.
11. Run grub-install /dev/sdX, where sdx is whatever drive you boot off.. probably sda. (NOT sda1)
    
    Once that finishes successfully, you should be able to reboot the machine and grub will start up, allowing you to select what install you which to use. There might be an easier way to do this, but since I'm not a regular Ubuntu user, this is what I found through web searchs and trial and error. If someone has an easier way, please do fire me an email and I'll update this post.