Archive for the Linux Category
I distinctly remember reading about SCO v. Novel when I started my university placement in summer 2003. At the time I talked with a long term unix user and colleague who hadn’t seen the news. While I don’t remember what my colleague said I do remember that the general opinion from Linux users around the world was that SCO couldn’t win – and that it would damage SCO badly.
 Well it did damage SCO badly, especially when they lost the court case. But today comes the ultimate news: SCO files for US bandruptcy protection
Good bye SCO.
Looks like the root partition on my main pc is corrupt. Turned it on tonight and it wouldn’t boot. fsck.ext3 wasn’t able to repair it, luckily I was able to get a copy of /etc and a list of installed packages.
Reinstalling as I speak.
Update: Basic reinstall done, now just to reinstall all the packages. The main disk appears to have gone, when my computer boots the BIOS gives a S.MA.R.T. error. Not good. Fortunately I have another disk spare so I’m using that,
For months now I’ve not been able to get the VMware Server web interface working. At various points I’ve tried to debug it, looking in the log files, commenting various bits of the startup script out, running httpd directly, etc.
Turns out the startup script just runs in the wrong shell for Ubuntu. The default shell is /bin/sh, if this is changed to /bin/bash then every thing pops into life all of a sudden.
It’s always the small things. 
If after an upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy VMware server doesn’t work try adding the following lines near the top of /usr/bin/vmware
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3
export LD_PRELOAD
Thanks to this page for pointing me at the bug report of the problem. In particular the 7th comment.
In short – I want one.
So what is it? It’s one of these:
I quite often have by pc up and running, but I’m only using it to browse the web, keep and eye on my e-mails, and listen to online music or my collection of mp3′s. With this I could only boot my pc when I need to spend the evening on it, the rest of the time I could just boot the Linutop. Since it runs from the onboard memory, which is much faster than a hard disk (it doesn’t even have a hard disk), I could even switch it on and off at will as the boot time will be fairly swift.
According to the Register it’s going to cost “£190 plus shipping”. As yet there isn’t a date when it will be released, but I’m going to keep an eye on the web site.
Having recently signed up to Facebook (please don’t hate me) I’ve been trying to add friends, and generally do the rest of the stuff that you do on facebook. Except I ran into a problem with the image verification process.
It always failed after I submitted the verification code, saying I hadn’t entered the correct code. Friends I spoke to didn’t have any problems so it must be me or something to do with my setup here at home.
On a hunch I by-passed Squid and was able to successfully complete an image verification. To test this wasn’t a fluke I reset things back and it failed. I by-passed squid and again it worked.
So if your having problems with facebook and use squid to do your web caching, then be aware of this problem. I’m going to investigate this and try and work out why this is happening as I never have any problems with other sites.
For reasons I hope to announce in a few weeks I’m currently the owner of the the brand new D Sonny Ericson K800i. Don’t worry, I don’t have a new number 
I got the phone Friday afternoon and had a play with it that evening. Being a person who has always opted for Nokia phones in the past I did struggle with it for the first few hours. The naviagtion and layout of the menus is very different from a Nokia device. Still, I was able to work out how to do the important things, make calls, access my address book and send text messages.
On Saturday I continued to struggle until I came to the realisation that initial and main menu was designed like a computer, complete with Start Menu, task bar, and desktop shutcuts. With that and rapidly getting used to the keys I was able to use most functions of the K800i.
My primary hard disk has been on the blink for quite a while now, since at least the New Year. Once it’s up and running 8 times out of 10 it will be just fine, the other 2 times it crash with DMA errors in the logs and bring the whole OS with it. But if it doesn’t start up at boot time then I’m in for a 30 minutes of fun. It’s got to the stage now where I can’t put up with it any more.I had already moved /home onto another disk (actually I just removed the LVM partition from the LVM volume) so all that remained on it was the operating system. My plan was to move the OS from the primary disk to the second disk and then make that the primary disk. The current primary disk would then be left unplugged.
Yesterday I started by moving the important virtual machines to another computer, and the rest to my backup disk. This morning I did a backup of /home – once I managed to get the disk to boot! Then booting the Ubunut install CD I deleted the LVM volume, ordinarily I wouldn’t have to do this. On this occasion it was needed asI found the paritions on the second disk had become a little confused over where they were suposed to be. Once I had removed the LVM partitions and other partitions on the second disk I recreated them all, and rebuilt the LVM volume with partitions.
The current primary disk was mounted alongside the now empty second disk and a simple cp -axv oldroot/* newroot/ copied the OS from the primary disk to the second disk. Repeat for the /boot partition and the OS was on the new disk. The contents of /home where then restored from the backup onto the LVM partition.
I then shutdown the computer, unplugged the primary disk and made the second disk the primary disk. Booted the computer with the Ubuntu install CD again and mounted /boot and / onto top of the CD’s /boot and /. At this point the file system in /boot appeared at have a problem so I formatted it, rebooted with the original primary disk plugged in and copied it over again. This time it worked and I had a clean /boot file system. As I wasn’t changing where the disk would be booting from I didn’t have to change any boot files to point to the new disk, instead with help from the Gentoo wiki I ran grub and then typed
root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit
to install the MBR on the new primary disk. With anticipation I rebooted, only to be greated with “No OS can be found, please instert a medium to boot from and press any key“. Once again I booted from the Ubuntu install CD and mounted the partions. This time I tried the other suggestion on the Gento wiki: grub-install /dev/hda.
It worked! After rebooting the Grub screen came up and then started to boot Ubuntu, it stopped and scanned /home but once complete I was greeted by the logon screen. Success. I’ve now copied over the virtual machines and got these working. On the next reboot/shutdown I’ll unplug the old primary disk as I don’t trust it any more. At some point I’ll get around to running the S.M.A.R.T . tools and manufacturer utilites on it to see if they come up with anything. I don’t really want to waste a 120GB disk, but neither do I want to be using a near dead disk.
The 2.6.17 kernel (released in the past 24 hours) includes a new feature:
X86 “SMP alternatives” (optimizes a single kernel image at runtime according with the available platform)
An artice on LWN.net (http://lwn.net/Articles/164121/) explains what this means. If I understand this correctly it means the kernel can now change itself when it starts, and while running, to cope with different instruction sets in different processors and different hardware changes.
The implications are interesting, no x86, 64, or SMP (etc) kernel versions any more. Just the one version that works over all hardware. This will bring down the work load for those the manage the kernel in the different distributions.
But then again I could be miss understanding the article and talking absolute crap.
