Of Penguins & Coffee

I’ve been doing alot of messing around in Ubuntu recently and there are lots of tweaks I like to make. One of them being to show the contents of my home folder as my desktop; I don’t need any more pointless folders….

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Sick of having dozens of old kernels sitting under your /boot/ dir? Want a simpler boot-life? Well we’ve got the solution for you. (more…)

I’ve been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few days involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios (This was after trying different things to solve my problems with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ; After each attempt I’ve reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives.

Now, however, I’ve been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill!

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Updates(26/3/10): Thought I’d give the liveCD another go (this time using the dailyx64 image and using unetbootin), thinking it must be something simple; so during boot i just kept pressing escape, before the splash screen came up. This got me around the splash screen issue and it seems as if everything is fine. Also, I found a matching bug report on launchpad, but no resolution as of yet. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Updates(25/3/10): With the greatest thanks to the guys at serverfault, I’ve still not been able to fix this issue, and will be lodging a bug report to launchpad whenever I get a chance

I’m a big Ubuntu fan; have been since my first Dapper Drake install, but I have never had such weirdness as I’ve had so far with Lucid.
I am at a loss to explain or even describe the trouble I’ve had with this.

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My lil-NAS has plenty of space but is maddeningly underpowered.

I came across a permissions issue where, depending on how the files in question got there, they would not be accessible to my windows boxes because they were owned by root (I have no doubt that its my fault!)

So, first attempt was nice and easy.

$chown -R smbusr:smbusr *

But this was taking a horrific amount of time, so I thought “There must be a better way”.

Chown does whatever you tell it to do, whether its needed or not. So why not check that first with ‘find’.

$find . -user badnastyawkwarduser -exec chown -R smbusr:smbusr {} \;

and it worked brilliantly!

If you have any shortcuts, let me know in the comments!

An Example of network simulation using NS

NS-3 Appears to have a staggeringly steep learning curve so I hope these posts help out someone else (or me, when i forget all this in a month).

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So, say you have a long list of instruction (like multiple apt-get install lines) and you want to eliminate common words?

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Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions:
/dev/sda1:Windows File System
/dev/sda2:Linux File System
/dev/sda3:Data Partition

I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all.

Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point.

/dev/sda3 /media/Shared ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0

Then change your Dropbox location to wherever you have the folder under /media/Shared/ (or as I do and just symbolically link it to under your Home folder, This is also a good idea because Windows defaults to calling the Dropbox folder “My Dropbox” whereas in *nix its simply “Dropbox”)

Last but not least

sudo umount /dev/sda3

sudo mount /media/Shared

dropbox start

Then just enjoy the 2.5Gb of hard disk you just saved.

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ‘
I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection.

I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’

Anyway, as such i will be moving in to a house in Ebor St in Belfast with my long term partner and my little brother (in this economy who can blame him for grabbing coattails?) .

Now, while that will make for many personal and social changes, those are outside the scope of this blog; what it REALLY means is that for the first time, I’ll have a hackable (within partners aesthetic reasoning) house. Were planning on holding on the the place for 2 years so i can justify the investment.

This is the plan of things i want to set up, and I will be updating this page with some extra links and notes as i make them.

In no particular order

1. Shared media storage area for the whole house (probably using my MyBook) that will work with games consoles aswell as laptops/desktops internally and externally.
2. Shared calendars and timetables availiable.
3. Festival based alarm clock with dynamic alarm times based on respective timetables. (2)
4. VPN access for all housemates.
5. Some form of SFF pc in the living room to act as a Skype box attached to big-screen (My partner has ‘attentive’ parents that will be 3000  miles away, and mine will be about 500 miles away, i expect them to be in contact somehow, so it may as well make it as inexpensive as possible…)
6. Secure wireless (obv)
7. Centralised logging (syslog/snmp trap) across all ‘applicable’ machines, with some form of visualisation (mrtg)
8. X10 automation of (at least) lights, could be augmented by basic motion detectors and environmental montiors
9. Remote webcam (may turn this into a robotics/machine learning/machine vision project with the old eeepc and have a kinda roomba on steroids)

Its a big list and i dont expect to finish half of them, but what gets done will be documented here!

So, I’ve decided that each weekend i wanna have a fiddling project and document it for the blog. This week I’m gonna do a free bsd 7.1 install on the wreckage that is my old laptop. I’ll update when i get pictures ( Sorry, no VGA scanner, digital camera will have to do)