New and changed items

For a long time I have problems with pulseaudio and kmix. When the soundcard in on of my computers changes and pulseaudio is installed, all channels (master, pcm, …) in kmix disappear and only one single channel remains. The new soundcard in kmix is then “Audio Analog Internal Stereo” and you are not able - I tried with paman, pavucontrol, … - to change the soundcard.

The solution is pretty simple: Logout of KDE, login in on the command line with the user you are working within KDE and remove the following files:

rm -rf ~/.pulse* ~/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc

Login again and everything is fine. You have a 'normal' soundcard again with multiple channels (master, pcm, …).

It's always a problem to find a combination of brake levers and brakes for a touring bike with drop handlebars. So far I used the Avid Shorty 6 cantilever brake. It worked good but not satisfactorily.

An improvement was the use of the Tektro Brake Cable Housing Stop. It improved the braking, but the arrangement of the cable housing stop, the headlamp and the fender was very poor. The parts encumbered eath other.

I justed changed to the Xtreme Pro CC-R5 Comp with Xtreme Pro Converter Adjust. This gives you a V-brake with very good braking characteristics.

The installation is a little tricky since there is no manual for the installation of the converter. The trick is simple if you know it. Put the brake cable holder into the inner pocket, loop the cable around the small wheel, through the hole onto the big wheel and then through the exit hole to the other side of the brake.

Migrating virtual machines from ESXi 4.1 to a KVM host was easiert than I thought. It was nothing more than copy the .vmdk file from the ESXi to the KVM host, create a virtual machine and add the .vmdk as a disk.

A command line say more than a thousand words.

scp -r root@esxi:/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vm1 /tmp # Copy VM to KVM host
lvcreate -n /dev/VolGroup/vm1 -L 12g VolGroup # Create partition for VM
dd if=/tmp/vm1/vm1-flat.vmdk of=/dev/VolGroup/vm1 # Transfer raw image to partition

After that create a virtual machine and use the partition as disk. You could also use the .vmdk file directly w/o transferring it to a partition.

Bonus round:

dd if=/tmp/vm1/vm1-flat.vmdk | pv | of=/dev/VolGroup/vm1 # Show progress while transferring

I always forget how to get the password dialog at X start-up that allows me to enter the the ssh key password. It is pretty simpel:

• Install ssh-askpass.
• Add ssh-add to the autostart of your favourite window manager.

That's all.