Archive for March, 2007

Preinstalled Linux? Thanks Dell!

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Here come the Dell Linux desktops, laptops http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8436091466.html

To me this is a HUGE step for getting Linux onto family computers. I’m fully aware that Linux is not for everyone, and many shoppers will stick with Windows (cool with me). The beauty of this is not only that people will have the option of purchasing a computer with Linux on it, but if sales are up, more OEMs will want/need to develop Linux drivers (or make hardware specs available to kernel hackers). How sexy is that?? If this is something that’s important to you, take a look at this article. We don’t have all of the details yet, but it’s certainly something to think about and look forward to.

Note: There are already vendors shipping computers with Linux pre-installed, take a look at http://www.system76.com/ (among others). I’ve heard nothing but good about System 76 and when I’m in the market for a new personal laptop, they are on my list of vendors to evaluate. I mention this because Dell won’t be the first vendor to make Linux available, but they will be the most well known.

I just wonder, how MS will attempt to punish Dell for this bold move. I personally believe that it’ll happen, I just wonder how public it will be. Time will tell, this is a great time to add some tech news sites to your RSS aggregator if they aren’t already there :D

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Evaluating Wikiware

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

I need to document a lot of things both personally and at work. I’ve always just created static documents or web pages and just made them available to others. It works, it may not be elegant, but it works :)

I’ve just downloaded 2 VMware appliances, one includes Twiki, and the other MediaWiki (of wikipedia fame). I’m going to take some time to evaluate both (yeah I know I’m supposed to be reading about LVM, this is in addition to). I’m going to document what I learn about LVM in my Wikis and see which “feels right” to me.

I’ve already started using Twiki, I don’t find it difficult, the shorthand is easy enough to learn, but I have nothing to compare it to. Hence the download of MediaWiki. I can muck it up, see what I like, which package I prefer, and then see about installing my own wiki and migrating my work over. Should be a nice learning experience.

This is just another killer use for VMware appliances. Just start the VMs up, play and delete. No muss, no fuss. Love that!

You can download the Twiki appliance from http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev.TWikiVMDebianStable

You can download the MediaWiki appliance from http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/vehera-base/

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LVM: Getting Started

Monday, March 19th, 2007

LVM is an acronym for Linux Volume Management. Simplified, LVM allows you to lay out a logical partition scheme with the ability to increase or decrease the volumes as need arises (among other things). That’s WAY over simplified.

As it turns out, building your own study guide is a fairly complex process. Which how-tos and docs are the best/most accurate? I’ve been lightly reading over what I’ve found and here’s what I’m using to attempt to teach myself how to utilize LVM.

Notes:

I will most likely be using Debian (etch) for my testing and the server I’ll be building after the fact. I find that Debian and it’s derivatives tend to be well documented and have oodles of software available “out of the box”. Even if software isn’t available, I’ve had luck compiling on Debian (probably due to good documentation). Debian has slow official release cycles and that’s perfect when your building a server based on their stable branch. I don’t want to have to worry about upgrading the machine every 6 months :)

Reading material:

Reading and practice material:

  • A beginner’s guide to LVM (howtoforge.com) – Not only is this inspired by the linuxdevcenter.com & debian-administration.org docs above, but it comes with a VMware appliance already set up and ready for you to hack on and ruin and start all over with. Now THAT is how you learn!
  • Once I’ve mucked about with the VM image above and feel comfortable, I’ll be building a few of my own VM images and seeing what I can do with LVM myself.

Thoughts before getting started:

  • Can one use a live CD to recover data from a machine with an LVM configuration?
  • Can one have a multi-boot system and read/write data on another Linux install if that install is configured to use LVM?
  • If one was to have a multi-boot system, would LVM be a really bad idea? (that sorta depends on the answer to the question above)
  • What am I not thinking of? (always the last question I ask myself)

So now that I have something to read, I just need to start reading. Hopefully I can find some night this week to plow through the docs once or twice and then start ruining VMs :) – This is my first month long learning project, I reckon I’ll start the timer whenever I start actually reading.

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A Different Approach to Learning

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

I need to take a new approach to learning. I’m at a point where I’m exploring more complex programs and utilities, things with long configuration files and long man pages. I need to actually learn how to use the programs properly to use them effectively.

From here on, I’ll be devoting at least a month to a particular topic. This is the basic rule, some topics may require more or less time. If something requires less, I’ll be spending some extra time practicing and honing the skill. If it requires more, I’ll keep going until I feel that I understand what I’m doing and have time to practice.

Why a month? Doesn’t that seem like a lot of time? To me it doesn’t, I’m finding that to learn how to use one tool you need to expose yourself to others. This is what happens when you’re using such a modular OS and toolset, programs build on each other. For example, if you want to use procmail (a mail processing tool) effectively, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with regular expressions (which are fascinating, this wikipedia entry is a good place to start). Giving myself *at least* 30 days to roll with something, helps me to actually learn and not just get past something in order to do something else.

What this means is that my blog postings may not be as frequent, but I believe they’ll be better.

I believe my first 30 day course will be implementing LVM. I’ve decided to start here because I’ll be setting up a new personal server shortly and I feel that configuring it properly now will save me a headache later on. I’ll be posting about the guides and tools I’m using to learn how to use LVM on a fileserver and then about the success and failures I encounter while putting everything into practice. Should be fun, more soon :)

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A Happy G3 B-day to Me!

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

For my birthday, I’ve decided that I’m getting an audio player for myself (from Mrs. Neophyte and the dog). I’ve pretty much become addicted to podcasts and listen to them almost exclusively (save for my forays into the off color radio of Opie, Anthony & Lil’ Jimmy Nort(d)on). Since I’m loving my Linux and I want to be able to use my player with my OS of choice, I needed to do a little shopping around.

I’ve done research on and off over the last few months and I kept coming back to the Cowon product line. Since that’s where I’ve been leaning, I decided to go with my gut and pull the trigger. I just ordered myself the 2GB iAUDIO G3. It’s not the newest player on the market, and not the fanciest, here’s why it’s best for me.

  1. It cares not which OS I’m using (Linux, MAC, Windows.. pfft it’s too cool to care). It mounts as a USB Mass Storage device and I can add or remove files and folders as I see fit.
  2. Insane battery life. It uses a single AA battery and boasts up to 50 hours of playback. How can you beat that? Even if it falls 10 hours short, it’s terrific! I like that it uses plain old fashioned batteries as well. Things that re-charge tend to have a short life when I own them *shrugs*.
  3. It plays (almost) everything; OGG, MP3, WMA, ASF, & WAV. I doesn’t play FLAC. meh, I’ll cope with that. I have 3 albums in FLAC and I can just transcode them into OGG if I want to take them with me. Never mind that those files are just a little too large and IMO, don’t belong on a 2GB player.

Those are my main reasons. There are a lot of other features that I’ll probably never use, voice recording being a prime example. That said, they’re available and just increase the cool factor :)

I can’t wait to replace my ancient Sony MP3 Discman. Yes. That’s what I’ve been using. I’m burning through at least 2 AA batteries a week (10 to 15 hours of listening) and at least one CD. I’m just so lame, not only is this going to reduce the time it takes to prepare for my commute, it’s going to cut down on a fair amount of waste. I should have picked this up ages ago.

There are plenty of reviews for this device out there on the web, so I don’t think I need to put up another. If it turns out to be a lousy investment, I’ll be sure to complain about it here. If you hear nothing more, then assume that I’m happily listening to (in no particular order and in OGG where available) The Linux Action Show, JaK Attack, Linux Reality, The LottaLinuxLinks Podcast, Security Now, TWiT, The LIP, Going Linux and the Linux Link Tech Show. Kinda makes you wonder how much driving I have to do in a week huh?

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Copying large files to CIFS mount (XP) may corrupt data!?

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

I’ve been being extremely careful with my files, I’m not 100% convinced that moving files between my Linux and Windows machines via Samba is flawless. As it turns out, there is a problem…

I’m copying FC-6-i386-DVD.iso, which is 3.3G (3525195776 bytes) from my home dir to a Samba share (hosted by a fully patched XP box). Before I copy the file, I create an md5 sum of the ISO. After the copy, I compare the file to the sum and it always fails :(

I can transfer the file from the Linux box to the XP box via FTP without issue. So what the hell is happening when I copy it to the box via Samba? The only difference I’m seeing is that the date and time on the file after the transfer has changed. That’s perfectly normal. Just comparing the file sizes doesn’t tell me anything, they match. The only indication that there is a problem with the file is that the md5 hash is not passing.

It’s not just this file either, it seems that most but not all (???) large files fail when I check them after copying. It also seems to be limited to this install (Edgy). For fun, I tried mounting the same share using the same options (rw,guest,file_mode=0660,dir_mode=0770,uid=<myuid>) and was able to transfer a large file from a machine running Dapper without issue. Both machines seem to be running the same versions of the samba tools. This is FRUSTRATING.

Before I post this, I’m going to poke around and see what I can find out about the issue.

…………………………… (<– those dots are an indication of time passing)

Well! I think I have a work-around. I ran the command dmesg and found “alotta” errors that read “CIFS VFS: No writable handles for inode”. I popped that into Google and found this page with a “fix”. I remounted the share with the “forcedirectio” option and things seem to be working as expected! Damn glad I found this. I’ll continue to monitor my copies for a while, but at the moment I feel pretty good about the fix.

Here’s what scares me, how many people are ending up with damaged files and don’t know it? I haven’t tested the ISO I used in the example after learning that it failed verification, for all I know it’s useless. What if somebody is copying files from his Linux box to his Windows box for backup? How many people are using md5 to compare files copied across the LAN? This could be really ugly for some. :(

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Password Manager Migrated

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Well, it’s done. I’ve moved my passwords from Password Corral to KeePass. As expected, it was tedious and seemed to take forever.

It’s nice keeping my password manager on my main workstation. I hadn’t realized how much I disliked having to hit the other machine every time I couldn’t remember one of my passwords.

Anyway, I can’t stress enough, there is a lot of value in cross platform applications. Now I have something else to keep in mind when evaluating software :)

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