With kernel.org being down for the past few weeks, there isn’t a clear indication of when they’ll be back up. In the meantime, its a good time to check if you are using mirrors.kernel.org on your Linux apt sources so you can continue to get the latest updates. As for developers, many are using github or other repositories to host their code. For instance, Linux Torvalds has released the latest build of Linux 3.1 via Github.

If you encounter the following error in Debian Lenny while installing Sun-Java-6:

This package is an installer package, it does not actually contain the
JDK documentation. You will need to go download one of the
archives:

jdk-6u12-docs.zip jdk-6u12-docs-ja.zip

The quickest way to fix this is to go to the Sun/Oracle Website and download the latest version of the jdk documentation. Place the file in the /tmp folder.
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/

Is your Debian install of Tomcat 5.5 not working with your Webapp?

Just a heads up for anyone with problems trying to get webapps working with Debian. I highly recommend installing Tomcat 6.0 from source. It helped clear a number of issues for me. Debian only supports Tomcat 5.5 in their package management system. I could have gone with unstable to get Tomcat 6.0, but I prefer not to deal with their folder organization layout (see below)

Here are a few resources I’ve used to install Tomcat 6.0 in Debian Lenny.

1. How to Install Tomcat 6 in Debian Lenny. This is an excellent step-by-step tutorial. A+ in my book.

2. http://www.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/ Connector/J, MySQL JDBC Connector download.

3. http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html. Tomcat 6.0 configuration with MySQL Connector/J JDBC.

Upon updating Webmin, I noticed that there is a new package dependency that breaks the updates.

To fix, you will need to get the phpini package from Webmin http://www.webmin.com/standard.html and extract the folder to your Webmin system folder. In Debian, its located in /usr/share/webmin/   This should also apply to any other Webmin packages that are missing from your system.

Scponly is used for chroot to limit server access for SSH and SFTP users. Unfortunately, the Debian package for scponly does not work with Debian 5.0.

If you upgraded from Debian 4 to Debian 5 and are using scponly, you may notice that the clients are unable to connect. Possible error messages include:

• “failed WinSCP compatibility mode” error message
• WinSCP closes unexpectedly after authenticating
• Connection failure after successful authentication
• Client logs two attempts to connect to the /home/username home directory before failing