thesauri sapientiae et quisquiliae
Posts tagged ubuntu
The Liberation of My Workstation
1“DAMN you, Vista! I shall liberate my workstation from your death-grip forthwith!”
With this clarion declaration which, in my oppression-stoked rage, was made with all of the sentiment and perturbation of rebels and patriots gone before me, (is the analogy a bit Philistine? Certainly …) I threw off the chains of The Beast and replaced Windows forever with my favorite Linux distribution.
I’ve long since made Linux my sole operating system on nearly every box on my network. To date, though, I have retained Windows on my primary workstation, running both Debian and Ubuntu in virtual machines, due to my dependence on several software packages which are not available (either to me or at all) for Linux. I was determined this evening, however, to inch away from this by dual-booting Linux with Vista. Several hours later, to my fury, my plans were thwarted when, twice, the NTFS partition would not resize with gparted! This was particularly frustrating as I waited nearly 2 hours each time for gparted to fail on the resize operation. Bloody NTFS!
So, with Eddie Izzard’s beguiling comedy as a soundtrack, I dumped a back-up of my files onto my archive hard drive on the workstation, and deleted that bloody NTFS partition once and for all! Let the death knell for Windows ring out! I’d rather virtualize Windows on an as-needed basis than be strong-armed into what I can and cannot install on my own hardware.
Superfluous fstab Entries After Upgrading to Lucid LTS
0A quick post to outline a stupefying problem I encountered after upgrading one of my machines to Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) this weekend. By way of background, I am anything but an early-adopter of OS releases — especially on my production hardware. I haven’t the time to debug network-critical software on systems on which I rely heavily, so I typically lag a major-version-release or so behind the “cutting edge”.
Yesterday I finally made the move to upgrade to Lucid LTS on one of my servers on my home network. The automatic upgrade apps downloaded and executed without a hitch, so I was optimistic upon reboot. For reasons which surpass understanding, however, I received an error indicating that the hard disk upon which I had installed the OS refused to mount at boot time — although, to Lucid’s credit, I was given an option to skip this mounting and continue with the boot.
The whole episode was absurd, as the disk was clearly mounted and booting — how else was the OS loading at all if the disk upon which it resides would not boot? Upon logging in, a quick cat /var/log/boot.log suggested that there was, indeed, an error in mounting /dev/sda1. cat /etc/fstab made clear what the problem was — somehow there were additional entries in the fstab file which tried to mount the partitions on /dev/sda subsequent to their initial mounting. I’ve not the slightest idea how these entries made their way into the file. I am, however, confident that they were not there prior to the upgrade as this error was entirely new. A few keystrokes in vim and I had commented-out the offending entries. Upon reboot, all was well with the server.
Most perplexing …
Ubuntu in VirtualBox
2899 days
by captivus
in General Posts
I travel nearly every week to my clients’ offices. I have recently become quite keen on the idea of videoconferencing with my wife and children each night, as a means to span the miles between us. Skype is the software I’ve settled on, as the most promising open-source competitor (Wengo) didn’t instill much confidence. The firm I work for blocks Skype installation through its use of McAfee’s enterprise product — a fact which makes me a saaaad panda! (If this turn of phrase is foreign to you, might I suggest viewing the South Park episode from which it emanates?) (Tangentially, my firm is also staunchly anti-open source, as evidenced through our open source software policy — a fact which makes me an equally bereaved bear!) I digress …
The solution to my predicament? Sun’s brilliant VirtualBox open source virtualization package running the latest Ubuntu release — currently 9.04 (or “Jaunty Jackelope,” as they call it). The installation of VirtualBox took a bit on my lappy, but it went fairly seamlessly. The only hitch was that the installation of the VirtualBox Host-Only Network adapter in Windows XP SP3 broke my wireless networking. (It may well have broken all networking, but I didn’t try plugging a cable in to check.) The solution to this was fairly simple — disable the newly installed adapter! It seems that VirtualBox doesn’t need this adapter enabled in order to provide the virtual OS networking. (I’ve no idea what this adapter is used for at the moment. Perhaps I’ll figure this out as I work with VBox a bit more.)
The only Ubuntu image I had lying around was a Hardy (8.04) disc I burned some time ago. I added a new machine to VBox, installed Ubuntu from the disc, updated to Jaunty using apt, and installed Skype from the Medibuntu repository. So, I’ve got a virtual Jaunty up and running and, I must say, it is bloody fantastic! Good show, Sun!
recently on cg.com