Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Boys

We had some kittens born in the neighborhood this spring. Here are two of the boys that are still around. MommaCat is still hanging around too.



That's Junior on the bottom and Slim on top. I'm wondering if these are the rare calico males. They are almost identical; Junior is larger and has more white coloration. These guys are available for adoption from the Forsyth Humane Society waiting list.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Natty Dist Upgrade

Is in progress on my main desktop box. About 20 minutes to go on the package download.

I'm posting this from an older box that is already running Natty using LXDE for the GUI environment.

Updates to follow:

Quick updates update from almost a month out. The package download did end up taking about 20 minutes. I don't have an accurate time on how long it took to install the new packages. I walked away after about ten minutes when I returned there was a dialog window open asking if I wanted to keep my existing CUPS configuration. I don't know how long the process had been waiting on me to answer that question. With my ten minute absence it took around 30 minutes; previous dist-upgrades have taken as long as ninety minutes.

Upon reboot I logged in to Unity. I have to say I just don't get it. I found some tips and tricks online that helped learning how to use it; changing my mouse focus to click to focus made the top bar (name check) usable, the desktop switcher is pretty much useless if one can do everything it does with keyboard shortcuts, then there are the freezes. So I switched to Classic and still had the freezes or lockups.

Overall the dist-upgrade process was painless. I'm not sure I like where Ubuntu is heading with Gnome.

Friday, March 4, 2011

March Post: USB Wireless

The obligatory March Post

Spinach is dead. Well his motherboard is dead his hard drives; one is failing one is still good.

I have two USB wireless devices and thought I'd compare the performance of each on the current Ubuntu release. I like sticking command lines in my posts.


mark@flounder:~$ cat /etc/issue.net
Ubuntu 10.10


I'll try to control myself by using screenshots this month. The two devices are a TP-Link TL-WN422G and a Netgear WG111v3. The TP-Link has an external antenna.

The first thing I did was unplug flounder's ethernet cable from the switch so that I know that I'm only using wireless to connect to the internet. I used Speed Test dot Net to test each device. I used Gnome's builtin screenshooter thingy to take the screenshots. Gimp worked well to edit out my IP address from the screenshots.

My procedure was to plug in each device and let the network manager connect to my router. Note here I've previously connected each and saved my network's password for each so the authentication step is skipped. I then ran two commands, ifconfig and lsusb, to show that I had only one configured network device and which USB device was in use. The network manager dropdown is called by a left click on the icon.

First the Netgear WG111v3.



Things to notice: download speed was 9.95 Mb/s, I was not able to connect to the open "linksys" network.

Now the TP-Link TP-WN422G.



Things to notice: download speed was 16.5 Mb/s, I was able to connect to the open "linksys" network. Download speed was 3.9 Mb/s using that network.

Anybody want to buy a slightly used Netgear W111v3? I think I'll keep the TP-Link. I've not had a chance to test either in a mobile environment.

seizure
-mark

Sunday, February 20, 2011

DD just works

About 8 hours into using my cloned hard drive everything seems fine. My virtual machines provided by VirtualBox are fine; I've updated 2 and deleted one.

In all the years I've used computers this is the first time I've cloned a hard drive. Usually I wait until the hard drive dies, buy another hard drive, and recover from backups. To just make a complete, at this point, apparently perfect copy of a hard drive with a bunch of partitions to another hard drive is just TOO painless.

I started off trying to use an 8 Gig USB stick. That particular device will not boot. $20 for another USB stick; dang I just spent $62 for the new hard drive and cable! Well burn a 25 cents CD.

Which I did and then booted into the live cd with the existing hard drive and the new one installed. The new one had nothing zero on it.

I started out with this:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000bffd0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1824 14647296 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1824 14468 101561345 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1824 5471 29295616 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5472 13982 68358144 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 13982 14468 3905536 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table


That's a great command line. The sudo and password bit is because root privileges are required to run fdisk which then lists the drives detected by the system. In my queries of the network (googling) I found instructions on how to do this with an Ubuntu Live media and the dd command.

Now I'm familiar with both I haven't used dd since I made boot floppies. Back then it was something like
dd if=pathtofilename of=/dev/fd0
But now with the information I have I can use dd to copy the entire contents of /dev/sda to /dev/sdb. Do NOT copy and paste! Change the values of /dev/sdx to match your system.

Now here is the biggie. Do this wrong and well I'll see you in a month or whenever you get a new install of any os. Input file, Output file; so I did, while running the liveCD,
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
Device sda had about 50 gigs of data on its 160 G capacity. Here's what I had after the dd command completed, 5739 seconds later.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
312581808+0 records in
312581808+0 records out
160041885696 bytes (160 GB) copied, 5739.27 s, 27.9 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000bffd0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1824 14647296 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1824 14468 101561345 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1824 5471 29295616 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5472 13982 68358144 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 13982 14468 3905536 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000bffd0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1824 14647296 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 1824 14468 101561345 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 1824 5471 29295616 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 5472 13982 68358144 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 13982 14468 3905536 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdg: 1012 MB, 1012924416 bytes
32 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1013 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1952 * 512 = 999424 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$


Disk /dev/sdg is another USB stick that I used to save things to while using the liveCD. But there it is; two identical drives except for their overall size of course. Here is the output of the fdisk list command now.


mark@flounder:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for mark:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000bffd0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1824 14647296 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1824 14468 101561345 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1824 5471 29295616 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5472 13982 68358144 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 13982 14468 3905536 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdf: 1012 MB, 1012924416 bytes
32 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1013 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1952 * 512 = 999424 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System


See how important the exact paths or filenames are? What was /dev/sdg is now /dev/sdf which contains my notes taken during the liveCD session. Please read the man page for dd. You have been warned.

I used a mix of GUI, the liveCD ran Gnome, and command line, it was all command lines in a terminal.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

New Year's Resolution

I resolved to post once a month about Ubuntu. I failed in January.

Oh well, there has been a lot going on in my daily life. I got a part-time job for D-L Construction. Part time; I've averaged 16 hours a week over the last 4 weeks. And a guy named Jim had to die for me to get this job. So it is not the greatest job in the world or my area.

The whole job thing is, well I could write a novella on my experiences over the last five years. But I won't.

Today I splurged and spent $62 at Intrex. I bought a 500 Gig SATA hd and data cable. I hope to use this to clone the hd of the machine I'm using now; take that hd and revive spinach (spinach has at least one bad hd). Right now I only have one working computer. This is just soooo unacceptable.

However, since I'm working making sawdust this may take a few days.