fidzu : debian

In the past few years, the size of the kernel images in Debian have been steadily growing. I don't see this as a problem per se, but it has been causing me trouble, as my /boot partition has become too small to accommodate two kernel images at the same time.

Since I'm running Debian Unstable on my personal systems and keep them updated with unattended-upgrade, this meant each (frequent) kernel upgrade triggered an error like this one:

update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.17.11+deb14-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
 error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This would in turn break the automated upgrade process and require me to manually delete the currently running kernel (which works, but isn't great) to complete the upgrade.

The "obvious" solution would have been to increase the size of my /boot partition to something larger than the default 456M. Since my systems use full-disk encryption and LVM, this isn't trivial and would have required me to play Tetris and swap files back and forth using another drive.

Another solution proposed by anarcat was to migrate to systemd-boot (I'm still using grub), use Unified Kernel Images (UKI) and merge the /boot and /boot/efi partitions. Since I already have a bunch of configurations using grub and I am not too keen on systemd taking over all the things on my computer, I was somewhat reluctant.

As my computers are all configured by Puppet, I could of course have done a complete system reinstallation, but again, this was somewhat more involved than what I wanted it to be.

After looking online for a while, I finally stumbled on this blog post by Neil Brown detailing how to shrink the size of the initramfs images. With MODULES=dep my images shrunk from 188M to 41M, fixing my issue. Thanks Neil!

I was somewhat worried removing kernel modules would break something on my systems, but so far, I only had to manually load the i2c_dev module, as I need it to manage my home monitor's brightness using ddcutil.

12 Jan 2026 6:45pm GMT

A new release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN, just a little short of two years since the previous release.

RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours-originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms behind (drum roll …) vector search as it finds approximate matches very quickly and also allows to persist the data.

This release contains three contributed pull requests covering a new metric, a new demo and quieter compilation, some changes to documentation and last but not least general polish including letting the vignette now use the Rcpp::asis builder.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.0.23 (2026-01-12)

• Add dot product distance metrics (Benjamin James in #78)

• Apply small polish to the documentation (Dirk closing #79)

• A new demo() has been added (Samuel Granjeaud in #79)

• Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

• Several updates to continuous integration and README.md

• Small enhancements to package help files

• Updates to vignettes and references

• Vignette now uses Rcpp::asis builder (Dirk in #80)

• Switch one macro to a function to avoid a compiler nag (Amos Elberg in #81)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

12 Jan 2026 2:55pm GMT

Xterm misses the convenient option to resize the fonts with Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> like xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal do out of the box.

This feature can be added on Debian systems by dropping a configuration snippet into /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-xterm-fontsize:

Any new X session will inherit this configuration and Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> will work to adjust the font size (and taking the window size along).

The font sizes that Xterm iterates through can be viewed on the Ctrl-<right click> context menu:

NB: The context menu allows to switch the fonts on systems where the above snippet has not (yet) been installed. So good enough for a one-off.

Credits: Stack Overflow/Ask Ubuntu, Matthew Hoener.

12 Jan 2026 12:15pm GMT