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.
Jul 25
I was reading a blog post from Caitlyn Martin about CentOS on her Netbook and noticed on her sidebar that she is also a ferret person. Of course I had to read about her ferrets too. You’d understand if you were a ferret person 
Anyhow, after reading about her ferrets I felt compelled and obliged to create a ferret page about my ferrets too. If you are interested in my critter collection, you can find them right here.
Jul 16
A few people have asked about a way to make a donation to help with the costs here on any of the lincgeek.org sites (tllts.org, linuxforchristians.org, linuxplanet.org, freelinuxbox.org, etc). Since it’s time to re-up for another years worth of bandwidth and *I’m broke* I figured it’d be as good a time as any to put up a paypal donation button. You can find it at http://lincgeek.org. If you can see fit to help out at all, you get my eternal thanks and a promise for me to keep things going on my end
Jul 12
Late last ‘week I noticed that my new nagios server was not responding anymore. Well, I checked it and it was down. Not only that, it was a vm on my test server and the entire server was down as well. Arrrgh.
Usually I use this as a foray to tell you all to remember to do your backups. Well, in this case I didn’t do them either. Hey, it’s a test vm server right? Yeah, well I am kicking myself about that anyhow. I just got nagios working really well the way I wanted. Oh well, I guess I get to practice some more right
Well, as it turns out, my server had a catastrophic drive failure. I did EVERYTHING to try and resuscitate this thing. To start with, it had no partition table at all. Luckily I bought 2 of these servers and they were identically configured, so I checked out the partition table of the one and used fdisk to apply it to the broken one. After that I was able to fsck one partition, but as it would happen, that partition was only boot. Feh. The other partition had lost all it’s superblock info. I couldn’t even use a backup superblock. Nada. I noticed that mkfs had a command line switch of -S, which writes the superblock info on a artition without formatting or touching the inodes. I tried that and it appeared to be successful. At leat I could run fsck on the partition now and it was fixing the inodes. YAY! except that after a few hours of fixing, I still got nothing but a few system files in a pile under the lost-n-found directory. Shortly thereafter the drive lost it’s partition info again anyway. That’s life I guess.
So, it was off to Microcenter to get a new hdd. I brought that home and did a fresh CentOS 5.3 32 bit install and played with it a bit and thought to myself, hey, maybe I should run some kind of burn-in test on this server before I go investing a lot of time into it again.
That is where Sys_Basher comes in. Sys_Basher is a multithreaded memory and disk exerciser. That’s what the website says. It makes a pretty good burn in program by continually testing your memory and disk (which pushes on your cpu as well) for any length of time you specify. I kinda like it actually, and that is a good thing because there are woefully few burn-in or stress test type programs available to the Linux community. In fact, if you are a programmer and looking for a great project, you could generate a lot of traffic and interest by making one. Not that I don’t like Sys_Basher, mind you, but variety is the spice of life and certainly the way of open source!
Anyway, I ran Sys_Basher overnight on my new machine which passed with flying colors. Then, this morning, I decided that maybe I should run 64bit Linux on this box. Some days I am so fickle, but I decided it would be in my best interest to change up the OS before building a bunch of new test vms on there
Maybe this time I’ll even back the darn thing up too! Wish me luck and, btw, do your backups!
Jul 11
Many many upgrades to the backend of linuxplanet.org today. Just checking to see if everything syndicates like it’s supposed to.
Jul 09
Wow, for those of you still looking to get a netbook, Woot.com has the Acer Aspire One 10.1 inch 6-cell netbook for $259 right now. As with woot.com, you never know how long that deal is going to last, so hurry over there. A good while ago, I purchased the Acer Aspire One 9 inch version (Linux w/ the SSD) and I absolutely love it. This 10 incher gives you a little more viewing area and fixes the one irritation I have with the smaller version. It puts the touchpad keys on the bottom instead of on the sides. Like I said, great deal, go get one!
Jul 08
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
Jul 05
I had a little trouble on the last TechShow with my audio. You see, I use a CyberAudio USB headset on the show, and I recently upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.04 and pulse audio makes a nice hum the entire time now with my headset. Obviously this irritates me and I decided to fix it by swapping distributions until this problem gets straightened out.
I decided I would try Fedora 11. It sure looked sweet at the South East Linux Fest I was recently at. I had heard that there was some issue with the installer and it’s handling of ext4 in the partitioner and I *thought* I heard it was better to install from dvd as opposed to the live cd. I grabbed them both to be sure. Well, neither of them worked and bombed during the install. I have heard many people going through the fixes for this and a host of apologetics, however, let me just say that this is really bad form for Fedora to issue media that you cannot install from. I can tell you for certain that I was not going to try and beat this on my laptop especially with so many other options out there. I suspect the same can be said for many many other people. Fedora folks, you’ll really have to get it together for your next release!
Next I decided to go for Slackware. 2 opposite ends of the same coin. I have run Slackware for a long long time, but mostly use it as a server. I haven’t used it in a desktop setting for quite a while and the thought of it sounded like fun. I even recently did a vm install and was thrilled with the results, giving sbopkg a whirl and really enjoying it! Well, as expected, the install went flawlessly. You just can’t beat Slackware’s text installer. The problems I had were after the install, but I’ll get to those later.
Since I actually had some work I needed to do that day, I decided to reach for a quick install that I knew would just do the right thing right away. That was Linux Mint 7. I popped in the cd (yes, you can still get a great linux OS on a CD – not DVD) and in a minute I was using the live cd. About 20 minutes later I was completely installed and working. There is definitely something to be said for that! I am still using it now, in fact, that’s what I am writing this post from, and I will probably continue to do so until something better seems to come along. As I have said before, if you haven’t tried Mint yet, you probably should.
All that being said, this post is really about Slackware. I said I had some problems with Slackware on my laptop, and probably, some of them are just related to using Slackware on a laptop. Things like wireless and widescreen displays are issues that I would expect to see, mostly… By this time, I figured Slackware could do a decent job of autodetecting your X configuration and making my laptop display work. Nope. I just put that on the mental “I need to address this” list and plod on. I add my user and startx, and find that I have no wireless. Now, it’s been a while since I have used KDE, but I was sure there was some program like networkmanager to get my wireless going. What I find out is that my Atheros is not even detected. Strike two for the laptop install. It was after that that I remembered the biggest barrier to using Slackware as a Desktop solution. There is no useful codec support in there. Can’t play any of my media files, watch flash video, etc., etc., etc..
Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Slackware. It’s a fantastic distribution and I have long held that if you want to learn RedHat, you install RedHat, if you want to learn Ubuntu, you install Ubuntu and if you want to learn Linux, you install Slackware. Some of my problems, as I said before, I will just chalk up to the oddities of laptop installs, even though I think, at this point, that’s making excuses. I would, however, still like to get my main workstation at home running the Slack again. That being the case, I am going to want some things on there to make my life easier. After all, that’s the name of the game right? You have a computer to help make things easier for you and not more complicated.
I WANT MY CODECS/FONTS/DVDs/FLASH/ETC.
Now, years ago there used to be a program called Automatix that did just this sort of thing for Ubuntu. Later it was replaced by Ultamatix, and recently, you can just pretty much install VLC and be done with it. What I would like to see is something similar for Slackware. I see that you can, fairly easily, get some of this done by using sbopkg and weeding through the menus and selecting the appropriate things, if you can find them, from the menus. I, personally, think this is still too cumbersome, How about an sbopkg like system, or even a simple script that does what automatix used to do, but does it for a modern Slackware? Anyone willing to bite? How about it Chess?Dann?Anyone?
Jul 05
A little while back I picked up a couple Appro servers from geeks.com for an outstanding price and also managed to convince Dann to do the same (after making a public plea on TLLTS to raise the moolah). Shortly thereafter, the deal was a bust and there were no more of those servers available. Well, today, Tyler, a listener of TLLTS, sent me an email letting me know that there were more of them available at geeks.com and they are only $109 a piece! Well, what better blog post to break the no-blogging ice with than a great deal like that! Let me say that these servers, are referbished and work GREAT. I have been using mine as a VM server for months now and it works flawlessly. Thanks again for the heads up Tyler!
Need some great and inexpensive servers? You can pick yours up if you hurry at:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=APPRO-1122HI-2B&cat=SYS
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