LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

It has been 6 years or more since I got a really decent Linux laptop, and, after giving my macbook to my daughter for college, it was high time to do so.

I set out browsing the web for the perfect Linux laptop from places like System76 and ZaReason, who have absolutely lovely and brilliant laptops to offer, and then I checked my checkbook. Ugh. So, I decided to go to BestBuy where I have a line of credit and 18 month financing. Thanks economy.

It’s quite possible to buy a really expensive laptop at BestBuy too, but, trying to avoid that I searched around for the best (ie cheapest) decent deal I could find. That happened to be the Gateway NV57H26U. This 15.6″ core i5, 4gb ram, 500gb hdd machine looked to be quite a winner for the paltry sum of $450, especially since any comparable machine was at LEAST $100 more anywhere you looked (even online).

Of course *I* will not run windows, which the machine comes with, so I took it home, held my breath (hey, I can return it right) and stuffed in a Linux Mint 11 dvd. Within 30 minutes I was completely installed and running – AND FAST. Did I mention fast? You wouldn’t believe how fast this laptop feels to me, especially since the last one is sporting a celeron at 1.6ghz. This machine is a quad core 2.3-2.9ghz machine and it absolutely screams. What a nice change of pace. Why, I bet that if it were legal to use handbrake to copy your DVDs you could rip one in about 5 minutes

This thing has a glossy black lid which collects fingerprints just as you would imagine it would. The screen is absolutely HUGE to me at 1366×768, and it is SO BRIGHT that when I am sitting in a dim room, the brightness of the screen drowns out the keyboard lettering so much that I find it hard to type. No I am not a touch typist. Yes, I wish I were. Speaking of the keyboard, it has keys sort of like macbook keys. They are flat, squarish and separated nicely. I find it a pleasure to type on, when I can see it that is. It also sports not only a full size kb, but has enough room to include a full number pad as well. The machine has hdmi out, 3 usb, vga, gigabit ethernet, BGN wireless, webcam, and an sd card reader. It sounds pretty nice as far as laptops go as well. I have tested everything on here and verified it to work with the exception of the hdmi out, the sd card reader and the microphone.

Now on to the problems… Every machine has its quirks and this one is no exception. First up is the keyboard. While it’s nice to use and type on, they made it so that in order to use the function keys as actual function keys, you need to hold down the (Fn) button. If you do not, the keys are mapped to things like media controls, brightness controls, hardware controls and the like. It’s not that big of a deal but I just found it odd that it wasn’t the other way around. The next annoyance is the trackpad. Now it’s a nice looking and feeling trackpad, however, no matter what I do it’s detected as a ps/2 mouse. From my research, this appears to be a current kernel bug, so I am hoping that it’ll be addressed in the near future. I just hate to waste a multitouch trackpad like that. Lastly is the video. The video works fine for the most part. it’s one of those Sandybridge Intel HD 3000 video hardware and I believe support is not entirely all there yet. It does not seem that I have accelerated video, although I am not a gamer and don’t use it anyhow. Other than that it looks clean, crisp and sharp and has no problems keeping up with full motion video that I can see.

What’s Good;
FAST, good looking, FAST, nice kb feel, big bright screen, number pad, inexpensive, FAST.

What’s Not:
The way the function keys are laid out, support for the trackpad and accelerated video, Microsoft tax.

Verdict:
I really like this and you just can’t go wrong for the money, Microsoft tax or not.

On the last TechShow, we talked for a few minutes about eReaders before the show was over. I was pretty much on the fence about what to do about my pressing want of such a device and I was soliciting opinions and advice on the matter.

I have long wanted an eReader because I absolutely hate carrying piles of heavy books around with me, and getting an eReader gives me the opportunity to bring along a whole bunch of books wherever I go and they all fit into my pocket! The problem I ran into was which one to get?

I like the Nook because it supports more open standard ebook formats and it is locally available at Best Buy. I am on of those instant gratification people that has to be able to walk out of the store with my item in hand. Waiting for delivery drives me insane

I like the Kindle because of its general popularity, the ease of integrating it with my existing Amazon account, the book availability, and, really, I just like Amazon. I also really like that the Kindle has a keyboard (such as it is). The downside for me there was, again, I had to order/wait for the thing.

The iPad? Well, I really dig that tablet form factor, and, after having used an iPad for a few minutes, you can really see the draw of the thing. Lots of pretty applications, aesthetically pleasing, it’s the right size, I can read every kind of eBook on it, etc., etc., etc.. Downsides are its price is 4x the price of a Kindle or Nook.

What I really wanted was a 10 inch Android tablet. Unfortunately, you can’t even get a decently working 7 inch Android tablet yet. Also, when they do come out (still vaporware as far as I am concerned), they will be at the same price point as the iPad.

What’s a guy to do? Do I just keep waiting and waiting and end up never getting anything? Do I just go for the iPad and then get irritated with myself when a decent Android tablet comes out right afterward?

Well, the answer just sort of came to me yesterday. I had to go to Best Buy to pick up a movie for my wife and what did I see there? They had not only the Nook, but also the Kindle for sale. Of course I had to check them both out while I was there. It was, after all, clearly some kind of omen.

I ended up picking up a Kindle after comparing the two side by side. The kindle was faster, the demo unit actually worked (big plus), the Kindle was actually about $10 cheaper, I think it’s better looking as well, and I do remember reading about B&N having some financial dificultes recently as well. I have used the Kindle for a day now and I am still pleased with my purchase. I have to say that these things are pretty cool and I wish I hadn’t waited this long. If you are still on the fence about this like I was, go hit a Best Buy and check them out!

I had the occasion to need some extra filespace on the LVM’d root partition of a RHEL(or CentOS) vm. This is how to do it:

First off, VMWare allowed me to create a second HDD on the fly while the vm was running (YAY!)

Once that was done, I rooted into the server and:

# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host#/scan
(partprobe should also do the trick ??)

# fdisk -l
(Just to see that the new disk is available – in this case /dev/sdb)

# fdisk /dev/sdb
(create a new partition here)

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

# vgs
(list the volume groups here)

# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
(add new physical volume)

# vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my default volume group from the vgs command)

# vgs
(check to see pv and vg has another volume now)

# lvextend /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my / volume by the entire size of /dev/sdb1)

# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
(resize filesystem to match vol size increase)
(requires a 2.6 kernel to resize while fs running)

That was it! And remember that all this was done on the fly, on the root partition and filesystem, WHILE the vm was running.

Everyone wants to know what kinds of crazy hardware a computer geek has kicking around his house. If you are actually reading this post, I know your curiosity will drive you to find out. Here is what this geek uses at home.

A few weeks ago I saw that an Alpha of Google Chrome was available on Linux. I could hardly wait to try it so I quickly loaded it onto my Ubuntu 8.04 box and took it straight out for a spin. First impressions were that it was clunky looking and I immediately noticed that it would not handle html authorization. That is something I NEED to use (fail), so I just filed it away and went back to using my beloved Firefox.

Fast forward to today when I noticed once again that there was a package update for GC and I decided that since I had seen a few of those go through I should probably give it another spin. All I can say is “WOW”. This thing is shaping up to be absolutely fantastic. It’s blazingly fast and handles things with speed and grace that Firefox barfs on. The only thing I have had any trouble with on it so far at all is an ornery java application I occasionally have to use, but then again, it was difficult to get it working under Firefox as well and I haven’t spent *any* time on trying to get it to work so far.

If you haven’t tried GC yet, you really should. You are missing out! You can find the directions for getting it at:
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Linux

You have heard me tell you before that cssh (Cluster ssh) is one of my most favorite tools as an admin. There is only 1 problem I have with it, and that was getting it installed on CentOS or RedHat. Not I mostly use it on Ubuntu, and that’s just a quickie apt-get install clusterssh away, but on RedHat and CentOS it’s VERY difficult to figure out how to get it going. You can find the package without too many troubles, but there are a pile of dependencies that seem hard to fulfill. Well, after some digging, here’s a sure-fire way to get it running on RedHat5.x and CentOS 5.x:

wget http://yum.trixbox.org/centos/5/old/perl-Tk-804.027-4.i386.rpm
wget http://packages.sw.be/perl-X11-Protocol/perl-X11-Protocol-0.56-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm
wget http://dl.atrpms.net/all/clusterssh-3.21-4.el5.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh perl-Tk-804.027-4.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh perl-X11-Protocol-0.56-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh clusterssh-3.21-4.el5.i386.rpm

Do that on a command line as root and you’ll have a functional cssh. Now there is some wierd error that ends up on my console when this is running, but it does appear to function correctly. Have at it folks!

A Happy and safe Halloween to you all from the Fessendens!

Just got a note from a friend who is using the script now. Seems that I inadvertently left my own MAK in the curl script line. I just fixed and re-uploaded the file. All should be well now. Again, you can find the script at:

http://lincgeek.org/linc/docs/tivo/getmytivo.tgz

Thanks Allan!

By the way, while I was walking around the mall, I noticed that Suncoast Video (or at least my local one) has the 10 movie set of Star Trek movies (on dvd) for only $45 on sale. That’s a fantastic deal, and if you don’t yet have the full set, run out and get it right away before they are gone. My store only had 2 sets when I got there. Of course I felt obligated to pick one up

I bet you all can guess what I am watching today!

Happy new year everybody!

Yes, even I have a new years resolution, and it’s one that all of you should have too. This particular one is one that Dann and I know all too well…

DO YOUR BACKUPS!

You see I woke this morning to the horrible realization that I could not contact my web server, had no DNS resolution, no dhcp server and no mail among other things. These are all services that are handled by my trusty old thinkpad server. And it has been dutifully doing it’s job for 7 months now without a single backup

Lucky for me, a simple reboot started things working well again, however, it also brought me to the realization that I didn’t have any backups whatsoever on my now irreplaceable server. So, it was my friend and yours, tar, to the rescue.

I just happen to have a NAS here with some space on it, so I mounted that on my workstation and wrote a little shell script, that in part, looks a lot like this:

ssh root@server “tar czvf – /etc /home /var/www /var/lib/mysql” > `date +%Y%m%d`_server.tgz

What this does is ssh as root to my server and starts the tar process that is in the Parentheses. That tar command is making a compressed copy of each one of the filesystems listed there, and those are the important ones to me in this case, and sending this info through stdout back to the machine where the ssh command started. As the tar file makes it’s way back to my workstation, where I started the ssh command from, all that info is being redirected into a file on my NAS. The date command in there simply spits out, in this case, 20080101, and the rest of the filename is appended. So what I get is a file called 20080101_server.tgz and it gets all the tgz data from my server pumped into it. Viola, instant, or at least reasonably fast, backups.

You see, this is not very hard at all. It only takes a very few minutes of your time and is well worth the aggravation if you were to lose something important. It’s also important to note that I have, for a very long time, used the “round robin” approach to my home backups. That is to say that I save different machines backups to different machines. That way, if any single machine goes down, I will still have either a good working copy, or a good backup of that machine available. Backing everything up to one single location with no duplicate copies makes me a little nervous, but then again, I haven’t done *any* backups for the last 7 months.

So anyway, here is you wakeup call today. Take 20 minutes and DO YOUR BACKUPS! You’ll thank me later.