barns.blog

With the imminent arrival of my Acer Aspire One A110, I have been preparing myself for setting it up to my satisfaction. The A110 comes with Linpus Linux Lite, which isn’t really a product for power users. However, the debate is what, if anything, is better, and what will the A110 run.

I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!

Well, The Intrepid Ibex has been with us for a few days now and the update of my Xubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 went as smoothly as could be expected. As always, the only thing to break was Xorg, this time because the nvidia-glx-new package has gone. A simple install of the new Nvidia drivers package and an execution of nvidia-xconfig and nvidia-settings and we were on our way again.

However, despite the fact that Xubuntu had numerous new features – most of which can be found in other versions of Ubuntu, I have really grown tired of the minimalist look. Having seen KDE 4 in action on another Kubuntu 8.10 installation, I thought that I would migrate. Now they say that this should be as simple as installing the kubuntu-desktop package, but I disagree. What follows is a guide to switching between the ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop packages (and any others such as Gobuntu). Read more »

Well, its been six months since the Release of Ubuntu 8.04 and its almost time for us to say goodbye to the Heron which has been with us for such a smattering of time. It will continue to live on in the Ubuntu servers…

Get ready to welcome the Intrepid Ibex, as it makes its appearance on October 30th.

So, with the countdown edging ever closer, what can we expect from 8.10? The official Technical Overview of the Beta release indicates that we can expect GNOME 2.24 (which is unsurprising as Ubuntu’s releases track the GNOME releases) which includes a few new features. We can also expect the 2.6.27 release of the Linux kernel, and X.Org 7.4. On the feature side we now get support for an encrypted private directory, and guest sessions (don’t those go hand in hand, so well).

That’s just some of the new features, but I cant help thinking that another new X.Org and the new Network Manager will make Ubuntu even easier and more likely to break.

Writing code to draw graphs rather than using a tool such as Visio sounds like a dream come true, but it comes at a price. Graphviz is a nifty tool which does just this. In this sense, I refer to real graphs, those which have nodes and edges connect nodes together.

Conceptually, and practically, it works pretty well, but its layout engine does not always produce something visually appealing, or simple. It tool a wile to discover how to force it to draw nodes in a specific order. It turns out that you connect them with an edge. Sounds silly to add unwanted edges, but you can tell Grahviz that these nodes are invisible. This allows the problem to be solved.

In practice, it still takes forever to do, as it really is a trial and error process. Despite this, it still produces very nice graphics. Unfortunately it cant produce EPS out of the box, but it will create PostScript. If you use the “ps” type (rather than the “ps2″ type) it is a simple matter of running ps2epsi on it.

I spent a little time yesterday looking for information on how to set up a CVS pserver in Hardy. Whilst I did find some useful information, ultimately I had to set it up with the exclusive help of the CVS manual. In Debian distros there is a package called cvs and another called cvsd. Now having never used CVS before, I assumed that one was a client and the other a server. How very, very wrong!

By reading the manual, it was clear that CVS can run in server mode – also known as pserver, but it is a single binary. After spending some time browsing the Internet, I understood that cvsd is simply a chroot wrapper to cvs which attempts to overcome the security flaws in CVS.

This is the process I took to installing a working pserver: Read more »