Creative Relief

Well after a lot and not enough thought, I decided to remove XP from my eeePC. Now as it stands, my Hard Drive is divided thusly... around 10G for XP, then 20G for OSX, 80G for 7, and the rest is an extended partition with a 8G Logical mounted at /, a 20G Logical mounted at /home and a 2G Swap Partition. In that order on the drive.

So in order to do this, I am removing the first Partition, and bumping everything towards the from, expanding as I go along. So after much consideration, I popped in my trusted Gparted Live disc (0.4.4.1) and went to work. I deleted the XP Partition, Move the OSX to the front, tried to resized it but later found out it is not possible while Journaling is enabled. So I left the 8G partition alone (RAW) and resized the 80G 7 partition to 70G, and expanded the Extented Partition 10G, Moved everything to the front, enlarging the /Home partition 10G. After not thinking, I hit the Apply button and and hour and a half later, it finished with 3 warnings. But warnings are for suckers and upon reboot, my grub menu popped up. No way, this is to good to be true. OSX booted fine, Ubuntu booted fine, but 7 did not. So, having been this route before, I eeked out a plan. First I booted into Ubuntu and edited my grub menu.lst. It used to say hda 0,0 but since I want to boot off of the 7 partition instead of the XP I changed that to 0,2 (OSX being 0 and 1 being that blank partition).... upon reading what i just wrote, I'll probably have to change it from 2 to 1 after I merge the OSX partition with the blank one, but let's not get ahead of oourselves. So I did that, popped in the 7 disc, booted up, went to Repair Windows. It asked to do some automatice repairs, I let it. It reboots. I boot off of the disc again, click Repair Windows, Select Startup Repair, let it do its thing and BAM, reboots, I let grub come up, and select Windows 7... And it works. EVERYTHING ACTUALLY WORKS. Even better, since XP is gone, I don't see another boot loader. Everything is going according to plan.

**********************************
One caveat I'm noticing about multi-booting my eeePC is that Windows 7 will work fine no matter what, but if I boot into 7 and then restart and boot into Ubuntu, I lose sound, the only remedy is shutting down and starting up again. If I boot into 7 and then restart into OSX I lose mouse/trackpad functionality again only remedied with a shutdown and startup. Weird but since that's the only thins I can see that is causing it, I'm good.
**********************************

Now let's see If I can screw up resizing the OSX partition...

So I boot into OSX and open up the Disk Utility and, following instructions I found on the web, I click the OSX partition and then click the File menu and look for Disbale Journaling. Greyed out. So still following the web advice, I open a terminal and do the following:

cd /Volumes/
ls

it spits out this:
Apple OS X Leopard Windows 7

so I counter witha diskutil uppercut:
sudo diskutil enableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/
(yes you need all those "\" when you have spaces in the name of your hard drive)

it replies saying, it's already enabled , dawg.
I'm just following instructions. I respond with
sudo diskutil disableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/

and it's disabled. I pop in my trustyl Gparted Live disc and reboot... and apparantly It can't resize HSF+ partitions. After some careful reading, it seem I need to boot up off of my mac osx disc. I'll try that later.

Late

**** UPDATE ****

I guess you can't grow HSF+ Partitions, only shrink or delete. Lame. or is it? First person to show me how to do it, well, I'll make you famous... semi-famous anyhow.

Late

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Just a few things on the mind...

Well, first off, anyone who touts that the Blackberry Storm is superior, or even preferred, over an iPhone is smoking some serious chronic, shooting heroin, and freebasing his brain into a stupor.  This is coming from a guy with a slight (it's getting better) bias against Apple.  I have spent a couple of days here at work trying to get a guys Storm to communicate with our Exchange server.  Due to security issues with our server I couldn't get it to work just yet, but the touch screen is a pain to deal with, it's slow (not slow-slow, but sluggish), and is overall a piece of crap, compared to the iPhone.  Now if this thing came out 3 or 4 years ago, it may have had a place in history, but as soon as the iPhone would appear it would be forgotten in time.  I never want to get my hands on a Storm ever again, at least the 1G ones.  Hopefully they will fix these issues with the 2G or hopefully no one here will buy one for me to configure ever again.

I'm still having fun with my eeePC.  And wouldn't you know it?  The two OS's I'm using the most right now are Ubuntu 9.04 and OSX Leopard.  SHOCKING.  I've really had to learn OSX as we support a few systems and I recently formatted an old PowerBook G4 (677MHZ PowerPC Processor, 512M SD RAM) and loaded it up with OSX Tiger.  I have to hand it to Apple, they made pretty things even way back in 2002.  Look at any Windows based notebook from that era and wretch.  Using Leopard on my eeePC, I've installed some handy apps to read NTFS hard drives that have made my life so much easier (MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, both free/open source).  Now if i could find some games that would be enjoyable and run on the eeePC.

On the Windows 7 front, it will be released this Fall/Winter Late 2009.  That's pretty awesome, since it is a pretty awesome OS.  Just shy of 3 years since Vista.  For once Microsoft beat its own forecast, but expect Windows 8 either in 3 years or 6 depending on if they scrap 2 years of development like they did before Vista.  Both OS run great at the moment (as they are pretty much 1st cousins if not siblings.)  so don't give me any of that "Vista SuX" nonsense.  You only show how ignorant and biased you are to the rest of us... unless you are running Vista on a old, pre 2005 machine... then I'll let you slide... but remember, Vista wasn't made for you.

I'm  playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately.  I'm actually enjoying myself immensely and dreading the ending which will show up all to soon.  There is a lot of downloadable content available (free and pay) so we'll see if I continue past the prescribed ending, but I have a crap-load of games to play and since money is tight, it will force me (well not against my will) to play them instead of going ADD with my current library.

And on another awesome note.  Those who like Star Wars and are getting into the novels and then see the 22 book epic New Jedi Order and feel overwhelmed?  Well Dark Horse is putting those stories (well at least the era) into comic book form (which I believe they wanted to do all along, but then Lucas Books gave it to Del Ray to make novels) called INVASION.  It looks awesome.  Did I just saw awesome a bunch of times?  You bet I did.  Awesome like Transformers 2.

And yes, I did see Terminator:Salvation.  Great movie, I can totally recommend it.  Great story and action.  Go see it.  Need to see Star Trek, Wolverine, and then Transformers.... but probably just Transformers seeing as I'm broke.

Late.

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Maybe PURE Ubuntu with XP in Virtualbox

Well, I can't believe it works, but I installed VirtualBox 2.2 on ubuntu and installed XP and got it to join the domain. How sweet is that? And the best part? It runs great. I can full screen it and can't even tell I'm running virtually. It really is awesome and I'm almost at the point of wiping the XP partition off the hard drive completely. Maybe even 7 as I do most of my gaming on my other notebook. So it might just be a dual book of OSX (mainly for troubleshooting OSX issues at work) and Ubuntu. I'm pretty pumped. A couple of things I had to do in order to get things to work properly though, again this is just for my reference only and maybe to help others who are coming across the same issues.

I needed to set up 2 network connections in VirtualBox. One as a NAT and the other as a Bridged Adapter. I might be able to remove one of them... I think the NAT, because I needed the Bridged Adapter to put me on the same network as the Domain. I really don't know if that is the issue, but before it wouldn't work and now it does. I also installed the Guest Addons and Wine D3D addon (must install in Safe Mode). I enabled 3D Video, Audio (ALSA Audio Driver, ICH AC97), and USB. I needed the following advice I found in a forum in order to get it to work though:

1) # sudo gedit /etc/fstab
at the end of the file add this line:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

(46 is the standard ID group for plugdev in ubuntu 9.04)

2) save the file
3) # sudo mount -a

Now that I got this up and running and pretty much doing everything I need it to do, I'm going to installed another Virtual Machine (XP) and use it for my Windows games (old games, 98~02 old). Wine is killing me right now. One day I may get it to work properly but I find myself spending too much time setting it up when I'd rather be playing.

I can't believe I am using Ubuntu so much. I really am drawn to it at this point. I hope this gets the bonfire lit under me and I start absorbing the OS like a sponge. It really is great... and FREE... but I still need XP... which is great as well... just not free.

Late

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Ubuntu 9.04 and Asus EeePC 1000HE, What I Did.

Ubuntu 9.04 eeePC 1000HE Install

What I did with lots of help from the Internet.

I used at least 10 different sources, ranging from personal blogs and message boards to the official Ubuntu site. Help sought ranged from partitioning the hard drive all the way to installing flash and such. I'm posting this in the odd case that someone can use this information, as well as for my own purposes. Enjoy.

Partition the harddrive

I'm quadruple booting on my netbook, so space is limited. After setting up partitions for Windows XP, OS X, and Windows 7 (all primary partitions), I set up the rest of the hard drive as an extended partition and set up logical partitions the following way:

30G Extended Partition
8G ext4 Mount as /
20G ext4 Mount as /home
2G linux-swap

Then booting off the Ubuntu Disc, selected the Live Disc mode (boots into Ubuntu without installing it), and clicked on the Install icon on the dekstop. It's a pretty simple install. The more complicated part is setting up the partitions (making sure they mount at the specific place) but it's pretty much a breeze. Once all the information is entered, it installs and the following is what I did once Ubuntu was installed.

1) System > Administration > Update Manager
Update and install all available updates.

2) Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse 5000
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bluez-compat
hcitool scan
You should see something like
Scanning ...
00:1D:D8:98:90:B1 Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000
Copy the hardware address found above.
sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf
device 00:1D:D8:98:90:B1 {
name “Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000”;
}
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
You should see some thing like
* Restarting bluetooth [ OK ]
sudo hidd --search
Searching ...
Connecting to device 00:1D:D8:92:59:F6

3)Install WICD (for using 64Bit WEP)
sudo apt-get install wicd

4) Connect to wireless network (note, I swapped out the default WiFi card with an Apple Airport Broadcom BCM94321MC. This is what I had to do to get it to work)
Open Wicd (I put a shortcut by the Bluetooth and Sounds shortcuts in the notification tray)
Click on Preferences
Under General Settings enter "eth1" (no quotations) where it asks for Wireless Interface
System > Preferences > Startup Applications and remove "Network Manager" from the list.

5) Add repositories
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty universe multiverse
sudo apt-get update

6) Add Codecs
System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
mplayer
mencoder
mplayer-skins (optional)
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html#binary_codecs
After installing mplayer files
As of this writing it is essential-20071007.tar.bz2.
Accesories -> Terminal
sudo nautilus
/usr/lib/ and make new folder name it as codecs,
extract all the files to /usr/lib/codecs
System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad,
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

7) Install Flash
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

8) Edit Grub menu.lst
sudo gedit /boot/grub.menu.lst

## ## End Default Options ##

title Microsoft Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Apple OS X Leopard
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Ubuntu 9.04
uuid c7b3a2b3-4e7a-41ce-b1b8-f73bdc827552
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=c7b3a2b3-4e7a-41ce-b1b8-f73bdc827552 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
uuid c7b3a2b3-4e7a-41ce-b1b8-f73bdc827552
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=c7b3a2b3-4e7a-41ce-b1b8-f73bdc827552 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Memtest86+
uuid c7b3a2b3-4e7a-41ce-b1b8-f73bdc827552
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet


The Microsoft Windows option loads the Windows 7 Bootloader, giving the option of booting into XP or 7. Would be nice to just have an option for both on the Grub menu, but it's not a big deal to me. If anyone has an easy way to do this, by all means leave a comment, and I'll try it out.

And there we go. Everything is working... well, I haven't checked the webcam yet or the microphone, so I'll give those a whirl later. Good Luck.

Late.

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Ubuntu 9.04 is great

So, I'm earnestly trying to use Ubuntu and learn it better. I already feel more comfortable with Linux than I did a year or two ago. Hardware support is getting really good and software... well there never was a shortage of good, engaging software for it. I guess the main problem some people have is knowing just enough to get yourself in trouble. I really don't see a reason why the average interenet/facebook/messenger user can't use Ubuntu as once it's set up it's pretty easy to get around. There is a menu, shortcuts, web browser, etc. I'm not going to turn this into a debate, as I still feel Windows is a front runner, mostly due to widespread adoption and it does a pretty good job for what it is. My main reasoning is to learn. Learn Linux (Ubuntu for now) and get comfortable enough with it that I feel as confident with it as I do with Windows (as in, that I could realistically put it on my resume). And it's been pretty fun so far. I've had some hiccups and upon resolving them, I feel better about the system as a whole and with myself. One of the problems I had was a classic case of I know just enough to get myself in trouble. And then I knew just enough to pull myself from the hole I dug. I may venture a little into OSX as well. It's still on my netbook but I did back it up yesterday so any moment I get the urge I may purge it from the hard drive... but it very well may stay. I thinking more and more that the two OS's that will remain on this machine might very well be XP (not my decision though, I'd rather have 7) and Ubuntu. I'm going to try using just these two for a few weeks and see how it goes. I won't even bring up the fact that Ubuntu can run my Windows games if I run into some problems using Wine.

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News-Waiting...

Just finished reading "Millenium Falcon" by James Luceno. Really easy read and fun adventure in the Star Wars Universe. Basically takes place 40 years after the original film, yeah there are a lot of stories after the movies. Anyway, it's good stuff and sets up some of the event leading into another 9 book story arc called "Fate of the Jedi" starting in April. I'm really looking forward to that.

So I finally started a facebook page. Kinda weird searching for childhood friends and thinking "that's them" but I'm not to sure about "adding them to the list" so to speak. I have a hard time staying in touch with old buddies. I know I suck, and I want to be the guy who has "friends from way back" but marriage and kids kinda take up all the time. Maybe this will afford me a better way to stay in contact... if they would just accept my adds.

I'm thinking of selling my Gibson electric guitar and Ibanez bass with my Peavy Amp. I really, really, really don't want to, but I have no place to play (Town Homes don't lend to loud amps) and I have little interest in playing electric guitars acoustically. I would like to get an acoustic, but really, I could just use the money. This is an epic struggle for me. I have one other guitar, my first chery red no-name electric, that I will keep no matter what. And I probably won't end up selling, but it's on my mind... and it hurts.

I've been listening to the music that I made during a stretch from 2000 up to 2004. I got a collection of about 50 songs. I recorded them complete with drums, guitar, bass, and vocals. I haven't recorded anything in 4 years. But listening to these songs really makes me want to start up again. Having little kids around in a small house makes it tough, not to mention the time required, but every time I drive home and I'm blaring (yes, blaring, I likes my musics loud) stuff that I actually wrote and am still amped on, I really just want to lock myself in my room and start up the studio again.

I've also been listening to a lot of Thrice lately. They released a live album back in December that is pretty rocking, kinda retrospective of all their albums. Really good. I also picked up an acoustic album written by the Thrice's lead singer. It's really good. I like that it's some haunting lyrics, based on moral dilemmas and bible themes. It's only 8 songs, but I'm pretty stoked on them all.

I'll have some other news on Friday, a lot of people already are in the know, but it'll make it official. But that will have to wait.

P.S. I recently moved my Ubuntu server to a different box. Due to not planning right, I had to install Ubuntu 3 times on 2 different machines. What can I say, practice makes perfect, as now, I think I can do the install without notes or help. w00t, me.

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Ubuntu 8.10 Server Install Succes Story.

A while back I decided I wanted to try out Linux.  That didn't last too long.  It was functional, but too cumbersome for day to day tasks I perform.  I'm sure it can do everything I need it to, but I just didn't have the time to learn a new operating system... which is what I really want to do with it.  To know Linux as well as I know Windows is a goal of mine, albeit not a very urgent one.

That said, circumstances arrived that actually had me look into using Linux, instead of Windows, for a project.

We have a "server" at work that just serves files.  It was running Vista Ultimate and it worked for a time.  Until many people started telling me that they couldn't access it.  A restart would temporarily fix the issue, but  I knew that since this wasn't a "server class" OS, it would continue to have these issues.  I looked for ways to up the number of concurrent connections for the "server" but, alas, none were forthcoming.  Mostly replies to said questions were, "YOU NEED WINDOWS SERVER".  Well, I thought, I could do that.  I have those disks, but... and here's the thing, I don't have a license for it.  I could have just installed and cracked it, yes, but 1) that's illegal, 2) cracks usually don't last forever, 3) I was itching to try Linux in a server capacity.

So I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Server Ed. and with the help of a couple of websites and some consulting with my brother (who has experience with setting up his own Linux/SAMBA Server) I plunged head first.

http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-home-fileserver

Here I found the install instructions.  Since I had 2 Hard Drives (besides the one for the OS install) instead of the one he uses I had to think a bit to get it to work (hint: instead of mounting to /media/store, I used /media/ntfs1 and /media/ntfs2 for the mount points).  I knew that one Unix/Linux class I took would come back to me.  I also changed the workgroup to one we all use here.  We're actually on a domain, but putting the domain name there worked fine.  And the fact that I can keep the 2 data hardrives the current file system (NTFS) was also great.  Since both are 1T drives and pretty full... let's just say it would have sucked to have to change the file system... unless it's as easy as converting FAT32 to NTFS.  Then it would now have been bad.  But I didn't check out that possibility... for now anyway.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/156

Here I found a light GUI to smooth the process along.  Working in the vi editor with a wonky keyboard just sucks, so I installed the GUI and used gedit to perform all the text editing.  Just remember to open it (gedit) from the Command Line as root (if you are following the tutorial replacing vi with gedit).

http://www.debuntu.org/guest-file-sharing-with-samba

And this helped me out with being able to share to folders without someone having to login.  Please note, this is not exactly secure.  I am fully aware of this, but given this situation (we're behind a firewall, and none of the files are exactly confidential/security risks) it works for me.

Here are the fstab and smb.conf currently being used, for reference.

fstab

smb.conf

It's working great and multiple people can connect and browse the folders.  Now the only slowdowns will be hardware dependent, not software.

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Linux Day 6

Well, it's been interesting getting things working. Right now, I have Fedora 9 installed in a dual boot environment on my main Asus F8SA notebook and Ubuntu 8.04 on this old Dell C600 notebook. I must also mention that I am using a Verizon Broadband PC5750 card to access the internet. Yup, there's ways to get virtually everything working in Linux. Hardware is hardly an issue nowaday, unless you have some weird proprietary piece of hardware that no one else even uses. Frankly, I was surprised that the Linux community had gotten these Broadband Cards (PCMCIA, USB, Express) to even work but I'm doing it right now. Fedora on the Asus is running swimmingly, Bluetooth pretty much worked out of the box as well as wireless. Not so on my Dell running Ubuntu, but I think that has something to do with my wireless card (PCMCIA) and not having the drivers yet.

But there are some downsides so far, if you can call it that.
1) You NEED the Internet
2) You NEED to know HOW to search for answers.
3) You NEED patience to get things set up.

It will be interesting to see how much tweeking will be needed once everything is set up and working. But regardless, installing programs and such can be easy and hard at the same time. Most distributions include a sudo Add/Remove programs that let's you search their (meaning the distributions {Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc}) compatible program database. The downside to this is that new versions of programs don't automatically show up on these lists. For most things I don't see much a problem, but I have already run into an issue where I wanted the latest release, in this case the program Wine, and I couldn't get it via the Add/Remove Programs(Packages) system. Here's where the INTERNET and KNOWING HOW TO SEARCH comes into play. In a few minutes, I found answers on how to install the latest version of the programs directly from the source.

So far, I am liking what I am seeing coming out of the Linux scene. It's come a long way and it is solid. Would I recommend it to a client? Right now, no way. But I think after setting up these systems and seeing how much tweeking or troubleshooting is needed after the fact I might be persuaded to change my mind. So far my experience has been pretty positive. I'll keep you posted.

Alex

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The Great (Linux) Experiment

Well, I've been thinking about doing this for, well, forever. See if I can survive using Linux. Now, I can't (or can I?) realistically use this all the time as I have specific work situations that may prevent me from soley working from a linux derived platform, but we'll see. The following are my specific goals:

Use Linux exclusively for an extended period of time. Probably something around 30 days.
-Try to exhaust every possible avenue, to get things to work.
-Take into account extreme measures, before recommending certain procedures to pass on.
-Be able to setup a computer in such a way as to be able to recommend the install and software package to clients. <-the supreme goal, actually as it could potentially save LOTS of money.

Pretty simple.

I'm going to start out using Ubuntu 8 then on to Fedora 9 (if I'm that ambitious, that is.) Now I don't have internet at home, so we'll see how this goes, but I think it's past time I dive into this and get as acquainted with the Linux platform as I am with Windows. I'll try to post my progress every couple of days, Starting with the install and ending with my conclusions. We shall see how it goes.

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