Free As a Font

I love free software without patents, I love free art without royalties. And I am falling in love with Gentium font. There are a bunch of free fonts, but most of them don't have Cyrillic letters. Gentium has. I like serif fonts, and Gentium is a serif. And it's stylish.

Oh my Darwin, I love it. There are no words to describe how much I do. But there is a Beatles' song which tells how I feel about Gentium.

Whatever happened to
the life that we once knew?
Always made me feel so free.

Free as a bird.
It's the next best thing to be.

Return To Innocence

Last Saturday my wife and I finally decided, that one computer is not enough for us two. We went to MediaMarkt and bought a Lenovo S9 netbook. I don't know, if it is a problem in your country, but in Russia you cannot easily buy a notebook, which wouldn't have Microsoft Windows installed on it.

Kudos to Lenovo for it is one of those few manufacturers, that has a Microsoft Windows return policy. That was one of the reasons why I chose Lenovo. But still it can take up to 10 days to get your money back, and you should give your computer away for that period. That wasn't an option for me, because that day I had to do some free-lance work I got and that was what I bought the computer for that very day.

So I took it home to boot from live USB, since you cannot neither activate Microsoft Windows, nor sweep it away before you give it to a service center, if you want your money back for it. I asked my wife if she got 1 Gb USB flash drive to boot Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and she said she had.

Alas. The only USB flash drives we got were all 512 Mb. I googled, but found nothing about if I can run UNR from 512 Mb flash drive. Aardvark didn't help me either.

Then I downloaded Debian Live USB. The image with XFCE flavour didn't fit on 512 Mb flash drive, though the file is less than that. So I booted my netbook with LXDE-flavoured Debian Live USB.

They give only 300 roubles (about $10) for the Microsoft Windows XP installed on the netbook, but it would be just enough to buy 2 Gb flash drive (299 roubles) to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It's somewhat symbolic, I think. Ten bucks is not much, but I adhere to the principle.

Today I finally gave my netbook to the service center. Now I'm waiting ten days to get my netbook with COA brand removed, innocent, pure and free as a baby. The music will better tell how I feel now.

Be yourself don't hide
Just believe in destiny

Don't care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don't give up and use the chance
To return to innocence

That's not the beginning of the end
That's the return to yourself
The return to innocence

'Cannot allocate memory' Error When Ungzipping 03modlist.data.gz

If you've got the following error:

Going to read /root/.cpan/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz
Could not pipe[/bin/gzip --decompress --stdout /root/.cpan/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz |]: Cannot allocate memory at /usr/share/perl/5.8/CPAN.pm line 5728.

you are likely using VPS (Virtual Private Server) with little RAM. Fortunately, last versions of CPAN.pm handle this problem better, though CPAN.pm will likely go to swap anyway, so get prepared to wait. Unfortunately, you cannot use CPAN.pm to upgrade your CPAN.pm because of this error.

What you need to do is to install CPAN.pm manually. Go to http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN/ and download the latest stable version, e. g.

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/A/AN/ANDK/CPAN-1.9402.tar.gz
tar -xzf CPAN-1.9402.tar.gz
cd CPAN-1.9402/
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install

Stop as many daemons as possible, particularly those requiring much memory, such as Apache and MySQL. Then proceed with

sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell

Enjoy!