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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The keys are a lot closer together than my current Nokia and this does mean I hit the wrong key quite often at present, but I’ll get used to it. I’m also getting used to the joystick style navigation. One of the hardest aspects of the joystick is getting it to push down, to start with I was always pushing up. There is also quite a few buttons on the side that provide different functions, and I don’t think I would have found the buttons above the screen if I hadn’t read the manual.

Talking of the manual, in the box came a Quick Start Guide, User Manual, PC Suite CD and a few other leaflets. The Quick Start guide does just that and is sufficient, the same can not be said of the User Manual. It’s best discribed as an advanced quick start guide. It shows you how the do a few more things and covers some of the quick start guide in more detai, but there is huge chunks of functionality missing. There is nothing about Bluetooth for example.

However the phone does has some great features that I’ll be exploring in the next few weeks, One of those is the digital camera. I’ll leave it up to you to find the specs and instead show you two photo’s. The first is of Billy, my budgie. While the picture isn’t as good as that taken with a deadicated digital camera it’s perfectly good for most day to day stuff.

The other picture is just showing off one of the features of the camera, that of a panorama shot.

(Click both to see larger)

It’s worth noting that K800i works with Linux to some degree. When you connect it to a computer via the supplied USB cable you are provided with 2 options, File Tranfer of Phone Mode. In phone mode it continues to opperate as a normal phone and allows you to sync your computer phone book with the K800i phone book. The down side is you can only do this using the supplied software which, you’ve guessed it, only runs under Windows.

In File Transfer mode the K800i reboots itself and then appears as a USB drive on your computer. In this mode all normal phone options are turned off, for all purposes it’s just a USB drive. This is great news for all as it means it works and most people will be able to access it. When plugged into my linux computer it was detected and a box popped up asking me if I wanted to open the drive. On the drive were several folders that reflect the applications of the phone. A music folder, images folder, video folder etc. In the images folder I was able to get to the photos taken on the phone, and into the music folder I copied a random mp3 from my music collection. Later I was able to play the mp3 with no fuss.
Upon disconnecting the phone from the computer it rebooted into normal mode. One thing that I did note while the phone was connected to the computer was that it was charging up the battery. This should save me carrying round an extra cable in the future.

It’s now late Sunday afternoon and I’ve been playing with the phone on and off over the course of the weekend. I’ve still plenty to learn about the phone but overall the Sony Ericsson K800i is a phone I suspect I will be very happy with using for the next few years.

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.

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.