Beta Try

Very nice coverage of the 1 CD KDE 10.3 Beta2 of openSUSE by Linuxseekers.com. Plenty of screenshots and notes. I tried the Beta 1 and found it a really smooth experience, with barely a glitch (only a small one setting up the NTP daemon comes to mind).

Linuxseekers - Preview of the 1-CD openSUSE-10.3-Beta2-KDE-i386.

Broken Update

So I had my first broken update yesterday. Given how many different things I'm always installing, and how many different "unofficial" repositories I'm using, I would say openSUSE has done a pretty good job of maintaining its sanity. But I was trying to figure out how to check what apps I had installed that needed updating. This is one thing that Linux in general, and openSUSE in particular, have all over Windows - a central clearing point for application updates. On Windows, every vendor has their own update checker. But with the idea of central clearing spots for application updates, you don't have all this redundant checking going on.

So I wandered through YaST's Software Management to figure out how to get it to tell me what needed to be updated. It isn't obvious and every time I try to do it, I get lost. But actually, it isn't that hard. Package -> All Packages -> Update if newer version available does what I want. It shows a list of all the packages with updates. I don't generally do them all, en masse, but this time I took a chance (even despite the fact it was going to update some base KDE packages too).

All went smoothly, except for the Emacs update. For some reason, the big jump from v21 to v22 isn't available in the mostly standard places I use, but that's okay, as I'm not ready for it. My crfty old .emacs file will require some serious cleanup before it will work with v22 (I still have some v17 stuff in there!). But it did upgrade from 21.3 to 21.4, but in a very half-hearted fashion. It left /usr/bin/emacs, which was the 21.3 version and created a new /usr/bin/emacs21 (which was linked to a non-existent emacs21-nox), as well as a new emacs21-x version, which was the new 21.4. But even that didn't work too well, as it was expecting some lisp folders that weren't linked correctly. And there were some missing lisp files, like url, that I had to install. And then I needed to fix the /etc/emacs folder, as it created a nearly empty /etc/emacs21 folder. Ditto with the /usr/share/emacs and /usr/share/emacs21, where all the system wide lisp gets installed. The /usr/share/emacs21 folder was practically empty, except for the magic subdirs.el file, which I had to copy into the /usr/share/emacs folder. This files makes it so that emacs will find lisp files in subdirectories of /usr/hsare/emacs, like the url package.

So it took some tweaking to get Emacs to work again. I'm not sure what went wrong. Perhaps I grabbed the 21.4 update from a different repository, which used a different directory structure. Dunno. But Emacs is working again, so all is good with the world!

Game Linux

Yes, you can game with Linux. While many people, including myself, dual boot into Windows in order to get the latest and greatest games, there are a few interesting games that play on Linux. This group of hackers got together and created a Live (ie., bootable) CD based on ArchLinux that plays Linux games without anything being installed. What a great idea!

live.linux-gamers.net

The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way.

Collaboration

I am going to be contributing to the Linux Brain Dump blog, tossing a few posts over for James to use. I added in a little bit o' bloggage on how to restore GRUB. The Linux Brain Dump blog posts little quizzes, gives short, concise HowTos, and otherwise comments generally on the Linux world. I like the look and style, and have been looking for a blog to contribute to, so I'm glad to join up. Be sure to see James' post The 10 Commandments for New Linux Users, which has generated plenty of comments.

Linux Brain Dump

The goal of this site is to be a one stop source for Linux HowTo’s and Tutorials. While we don’t publish articles specifically targeted at any certain Linux certification test, the information available here would certainly help in attaining that level of knowledge.

Forecast for Linux

Whither the Linux kernel? Well, here's a page with your answer:

Linux Weather Forecast - The Linux Foundation

Welcome to the Linux Weather Forecast. This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distros sometime in the near future.

Display This

The newest version of the ATI Proprietary display driver is out, and maybe it is time to really give this a try. I guess there isn't anything too revolutionary in this release (it just went from 8.39.4 to 8.40.4), but I haven't tried this at all. I'm not really into fancy eye candy, so not begin able to run Compiz or some such isn't a big deal. And I don't worry about 3d gaming either. But I could be tempted, I guess.

ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver 8.40.4

Information Overload

One thing I've talked about before, coming from a FreeBSD world, is the vast amount of Linux information available. Everywhere I look, there's another  Linux news portal, blog, software review site... And that is not even taking into account the sites specifically for a particular distro! But one that I have recently added to my startup bookmarks is The Linux Home Page. Much like daemonnews, it is a news aggregator (in fact, it even includes daemonnews). It has a pretty stark layout, but is information dense and is a good overview of the major Linux and BSD news sites. I give it a quick once over when I fire up my machine and like what I see so far.

Linux Home Page

Underappreciated CLI

Eight underutilized CLI tools are examined and explained in this very interesting page from Novell. Here's the eight tools under the microscope:

• watch - a builtin command


• jumpgate - 3rd party utility


• lsof - builtin


• atop - 3rd party


• iftop - 3rd party


• pstree - standard command, albeit with some weird terminal requirements


• netcat - 3rd party GNU utility


• strace - standard utility

It's a little strange then, the title and the fact that half of them are third party apps. I would have thought it would concentrate more on standard tools that are underused, not 3rd party apps that you might not know about. But still, a nice list of CLI utilities. I only knew about lsof, iftop, pstree and strace, and only lsof and iftop are part of my standard CLI arsenal, so I was glad to get a refresher course on these tools. Off to YaST to install the 3rd party ones!

Cool Solutions: 8 CLI Tools that are Under-utilized, Sometimes Unknown, or Unappreciated and Yet Pack a Powerful Punch

Stick It to the Man

Cool free software project stickers you can print out and stick on your computer case, either over that silly  3D windows one or after removing it. As I always build my own boxes, I don't have any Windows stickers on them, but I like the looks of these!

Free Software Sticker Book

(from nixCraft)

Simple SUSE

An rpm I wish I knew of when I first installed openSUSE, konvenientSUSE does all the basics to make openSUSE truly usable. Like many Linux distros, openSUSE maintains a "Chinese wall" between the official release and many more-or-less closed pieces often found in the Windows world, like license MP3 compressions and Flash. There's a constant push 'n' pull between providing a "free" distribution and providing a usable one and trying to find a balance between them.

This looks like a nice compromise. The official release doesn't have things like DVD playback (licensed and copyrighted encryption), Java, and Flash. This rpm quickly and easily purports to add them to a base 10.2 installation, as well as adding in some recommended 3rd party package repositories and closed source display drivers. I still need to try and play with the ATI proprietary drivers.

 konvenientSUSE KDE-Apps.org

How SMART am I?

So I started getting a SMART error on my main hard drive, which means it is on its way out:

SMART Failure Predicted on Primary Master

WARNING: Immediately back-up(sic) your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Scary enough, eh? I think it mostly has to do with the fact it is pretty hot in my office these days, now that I've moved it all the way downstairs. It stopped complaining for a little while, but then started again, so I hurried my replacement steps. Although reading the Wikipedia entry makes me wonder if it really is that big a deal? Maybe I'll use it as a backup drive or something.

Hardware-wise, it wasn't too big a deal. I have an old 800mhz overclocked machine (my Frankenstein machine) that I had pretty much given up on. In it, there are two 160gb hard drives, so I had plenty of disk options. So I cannibalized the Frankenstein machine and off to the dumpster it goes.

One thing I had hoped to use from it was the PC133 memory sticks. It had 768mb of RAM (3 256mb sticks), and my Asus P4S533 motherboard said it could take two DDR sticks and two DIMM PC133 sticks. As I've been limping along with "only" 1gb of RAM, I've been looking to upgrade for a while now. So I figured I would throw in two sticks and get up to 1.5 gb anyway. But no such luck. After I put in the sticks, it was only reporting that I had 512mb of RAM. So I looked more closely at the manual, and there, in small print, was the warning that you couldn't mix the memory types. Oh well, back to 1gb.

Lucky for my hard drive problem, I had one more slot for a hard drive and two more IDE connections via the Promise IDE controller. So after much squeezing and pushing, I wedged one of the 160gb hard drives into the case and proceeded to try and figure out how to best copy my failing partitions.

My first thought was to just format the partitions and use 'rsync'. But of course, that wouldn't work with my NTFS and my DOS partition. I have four partitions on the disk:

sudo /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 164.6 GB, 164696555520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         261     2096451    6  FAT16
/dev/hda2             262        6629    51150960    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3   *        6630       20023   107587305    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5   *        6630       10453    30716248+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6           10454       20023    76870993+  83  Linux

So looked into some partition copying software. It seemed like there were four possibilities:

• Partimage and its closely related cousin, SystemRescueCd


• Clonezilla


• G4l, aka Ghost 4 Linux


• PartedMagic

Funny, while I was looking at this, I noticed a small article on Distrowatch comparing the GParted LiveCD and PartedMagic, I figured I'd also look into GParted, which I was going to use to originally partition my disk anyway. So I booted the GParted cd, repartitioned the new drive to match the old one (well, sort of, as the new one is 160gb and the old one "only" 120gb). Then I noticed you could copy/paste the partition right there in GParted, which I hadn't realized before, so I tried that. It took quite awhile but seemed to work. I rebooted into openSUSE, and /dev/hde looked pretty much like a copy of /dev/hda, which was good. The NTFS partition, however, didn't seem to copy very well.

So I decided to check out Clonezilla, but that experiment didn't last too long, as it refused to boot. A couple of lines of it uncompressing the image and then just hang city. So I tried the SystemRescueCd, which includes GParted. I had a problem with the refresh rates being beyond the ken of either of my monitors, but I tried the Ctrl-Alt-Keypad + trick to change the resolution and sure enough I eventually found one my monitors could deal with. It seems nice, but I'm not sure what it adds to the GParted package, so I tried PartedMagic. It too had a refresh rate problem, so I had to Ctrl-Alt-+ until I found a working one. But it is a pretty nice setup, as Distrowatch mentions. For whatever reason, GParted seemed to work slower on both SystemRescueCd and PartedMagic than on the GParted LiveCD. But still, all three are nice weapons to have in the rescue kit.

But none of them really made it clear to me what I should do next, so I went back to GParted and did the copy / paste thing again. It seemed to work a little better, and so I decided to play some GRUB games and see if I could get the /dev/hde partition to boot. I used the YaST->System->Boot Loader, but the "Suggest Configuration" option just generated a weird menu.lst file, so I didn't use it. Instead, I just copied the boot item for the /dev/hda5 openSUSE partion, changed the root options and booted away. My new entry looked like this:

title XEN -- openSUSE 10.2 - 2.6.18.8-0.5
root (hd2,4)
kernel /boot/xen.gz
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-0.5-xen root=/dev/hde5 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent showopts
module /boot/initrd-2.6.18.8-0.5-xen

But that didn't really work. It was weird, because the new partition, despite being on the third hard drive, insisted on being call /dev/hda after I booted it. After I changed the root= back to /dev/hda5 (which seemed weird), it would actually boot. I even created a test file, and sure enough, when I booted back into my original openSUSE, the test file was on /dev/hde5. So the drive letters aren't necessarily the "first" drive found (as that is the dying one), but the boot drive. So I went back into GParted, recopied the partitions, and started again.

This time, it seemed ready to try and boot. Oh, I also played some games with Super Grub Disk, which puts a prettier front end on GRUB, as I couldn't seem to get the boot to work correctly. But that just seemed more confusing that the grub commandline, so I gave up after it trashed the MBR for my BootITNg boot manager. After I removed the dying one, and plugged the new one into the old spot, I rebooted. Due to my Super Grub messing around, it booted directly into my openSUSE menu. I picked the default option, and voila, I was into my replacement openSUSE. Woo Hoo!

But my elation was short lived when I re-installed BootItNG. When I selected my openSUSE partition, I got the dreaded "GRUB..." in to the top left corner, then nothing. So I tried to find my page that told me how to re-install grub onto the openSUSE partition, but they seemed to have gone and ruined it on the Ubuntu wiki. There was a very short, concise, formula for installing GRUB onto any ol' partition, but now it has pages and pages of verbose instructions with nary a word as to what is going on. But I dug deep into my Google-fu and found the correct instructions. They are actually pretty straightforward, so I booted the PartedMagic CD, went to the commandline, and:

# grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,4)
(hd1,5)

grub> root (hd0,4)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0,4)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0,4)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0,4)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,4) /boot/grub/stage2 p /boot/grub/menu.lst "... succeeded
Done.

grub> quit

The first line finds all the partitions that have GRUB installed on them. The second line sets GRUBs root to a partition. The third line tells it to install the changes into the correct partition (as opposed to hd0, which overwrites the main MBR again). Then you quit and reboot. Once again, I was back in business.

So the end result was really just to use GParted. Like I said, I thought the GParted LiveCD seemed to work faster, although I'm pretty sure all the rescue CDs had the same version of GParted. I liked PartedMagic as a rescue CD and will continue to use that. Windows XP booted okay, but now it is hanging somewhere, so I'm not sure what to make of that. I just boot into it to play games, but I need to figure that out.

Beta Time

I figure as a plaything, I'll give the new openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 a try, so I'm downloading the DVD version via Bittorrent as we "speak".

openSUSE News » Blog Archive » Announcing openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 10.3.

More Wallpapers

A good list of high quality, free, photos to use as wallpapers. This includes really big sizes like 2560x1600 and really small sizes, like for an iPhone or iPod.

InterfaceLIFT: High-Resolution Widescreen Wallpaper (by date)

Kick the tires on an HP machine

Cool site using virtual technology that allows you to try out new HP hardware with cutting edge software.  I'm checking out a Blade server as we speak! Basically, you get telnet access to the systems, and you can try out some commercial software, like Intel's compilers and Oracle's database. Here's the list of operatings systems available:

1. HP-UX 11


2. Windows Server 2003


3. Debian GNU Linux 4.0


4. Mandriva Corporpate Server 4.0


5. Oracle Enterprise Linux 4


6. Red Hant Enterprise 5


7. SuSE Enterprise 10


8. FreeBSD 6.2

Otherwise, it is mostly just to check out some tools, mostly HP ones (like Code Advisor). Still, pretty cool.

Hewlett-Packard Test Drive

Want to try the latest technologies over the Internet? This program allows you to testdrive some of the hottest hardware and operating systems available today. Have you ever wanted to try out HP's exciting 64-bit Integrity and PA-RISC technology? Get time on SMP x86 and Opteron ProLiant servers? Try out a Blade server. Try different Open Source operating systems. Do it here! Just register for an account and fasten your seatbelt!

Faster Web Sites

Here are some rules to make your web site faster and gooder. These thirteen rules can be enforced via the new Yahoo Firefox plugin called YSlow, which will examine a web site and tell you how well it does using these rules. In my recent Javascript fixation, I am particularly interested in rule 11. Here are the rules:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site