I'm a big fan of test driven development (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode...
It seems like I can't get a printer that "just works". I recently decided to replace our HP X476 printer with something nicer and bigger, an HP Color LaserJet M880 ( background story & review in German ). And of course there is something that needs fixing: The Chrome browser on Linux wouldn't let us print in color, even though all other applications had no problem to print in color. Even with Chrome color printing was possible, if one used the system printing dialog instead of the built-in Chrome print preview. This strange behavior of course piqued my curiosity. After some digging around I found out that the Chrome browser needs to parse and understand the printer driver PPD! Chrome tries to find out how to configure color or grayscale printing in order to offer the user the choice. If Chrome can't understand the printer driver then it simply doesn't offer the choice between color and grayscale — and then some printer driver default can ch...
Triggered by a provocative announcement for their The Cuckoo in the Tendering Process: When the vendor loses to itself panel discussion by Peer Heinlein ( Heinlein Support ) and Johannes Loxen ( Sernet ) on LinkedIn, I attended the 10th Bitkom Open Source Forum in Erfurt . This free one-day conference on open source in a business context has become a highly informative event - that is well worth attending. This year's motto of The future of open source - fair, regulated, intelligent was exactly what I needed at the moment, and I spent the whole day in the Open Source - regulated track. Cockoo or What Is My Business Model? The panel discussion was about the challenges Peer faces in marketing OpenTalk , the open source videoconferencing software that Heinlein Support has developed over the last few years. Competitors seem to be offering OpenTalk hosting packages in public tenders, even though they don't contribute to the code or fix bugs. In the end, Peer c...
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