LinuxPlanet Blogs

Playing catch-up

linc — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:19:34 +0000

I decided that on my vacation I would do some catch-up work. I have many times mentioned that I am a consummate procrastinator, and if you combine that with me being just generally whooped tired after 12 hours away from home on any average day, you understand why my computers seem to go uncared for. I think it’s the same as the whole “the mechanics car is never fixed” thing.

I mentioned a couple days ago that I installed ESXi on one of my home servers (redundant servers) to fix a strange problem I had been having with VMware Server 2.x. That was the first job I needed to so, or at least the most important, and so far it has been doing beautifully.

Next on the list was Mint 8 on the old laptop. It has been running Mint 7 since the distro was released and it was time for an upgrade. Everything was working just fine on 7, I just wanted to catch up the latest/greatest. As expected, the upgrade was a no-brainer and it’s running gorgeously, as Mint does.

Today, so far, I decided to upgrade my desktop machine to Mint 8. This machine, a P4 3Ghz with 3Gb of ram runs like absolute crap. I don’t exactly know why, but it always has. Now I have replaced the cpu fan a couple times and also the power supply at least twice. The computer is noisy, whiny, but not physically broken that I can tell. It just seems to run slower than hell and always has. The installation of Mint 8 on it did make it prettier, but sure didn’t make it seem to run any faster. I think it just dogs over the dual display and craptasticly old Nvidia card. Perhaps if I bought it a new quiet power supply, a better working and quieter cpu fan, a new better video card and a new dvdrom drive (yeah that’s pretty broken too), I could resuscitate this thing so that I could stand using it again. But then again, I could probably buy a whole new desktop computer for what I would spend on repairs to this one. Dang.

So, what’s next? Well, I should install ESXi on my redundant server now that I am satisfied with how the other one is running. I should also upgrade to Mint 8 on my Acer Aspire All In One netbook (notice a pattern here). Other than that, I am not sure.. Maybe work on some code projects I have been stringing along for months and months.

So what kinds of great computery projects are you all up to? Or what SHOULD you be up to

The Ubuntu App Store’s Elephant In The Room

ThistleWeb — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:39:46 +0000

A few weeks back Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, asked it's users which non-free applications they'd like to see made available in their Apps Store. The idea as far as I can work out is to take these figures to vendors like Adobe to try and convince them to port applications like Photoshop and Dreamweaver to Linux. The idea is to prove to Adobe that there's a market for their investment. There's one small problem however.

Firefox Addon: Fox Clocks

shredder12 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:07:24 +0000

So, today I was hanging out at IRC, which I usually do and is totally awesome, a friend of mine, duanedesign, told me about this new Firefox addon, Fox Clocks, which lets you keep track of different timezones. The best part is that you can create watchlists for your different international friends and keep a better track of their sleeping and working timings. Let me show you how it works.

In the default installation, you will see it in the status bar. Right click on it and select fox clocks.

In order to add a particular time zone in the list, just search for the city or the country and add it in your watchlist.

Barber Johnson Chart Desktop Edition

tantos — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:02:25 +0000

Check it out : http://code.google.com/p/barberjohnsonchart

*more updates later

Barber Johnson Chart Desktop Edition

Weekly Rewind #50

Dan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:47:16 +0000

Greetings all and welcome to Weekly Rewind number 50. The big “five oh”, I’m referring to the number there and not using ghetto slang for the police. I do listen to a lot of hip hop but it hasn’t completely taken over my brain just yet. I once got a royal ripping (Liverpool slang for skitting) from my band mates for using the term “five oh” as a police car drove past. We laughed hard about that. Anyway this is all by the by, so let’s get into it.

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan

Videolan declares VLC 1.1 feature freeze

shredder12 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:58:07 +0000

Videolan declared a few hours ago the feature freeze of the upcoming release of VLC media player, VLC 1.1 in a tweet. Currently the developers have started working on fixing bugs and preparing its release. I have already kept you up to date with the new features, the addition of extensions and visualizations, in VLC 1.1. So, I am pretty sure you are as excited as I am to start using the new and probably the most awaited release of VLC media player, VLC 1.1 .

Dentiquette

ThistleWeb — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:58:37 +0000

With every new form of communication we need to find how existing etiquette fits in and what is considered crossing the line, but first we need to find where the line is generally accepted to be. This is different for everyone and is mostly in the eyes of the beholder. This Dent triggered this post, but I'll address this further down.

Steganography – Some new fun

CafeNinja — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:31:00 +0000

After reading an article in Linux Magazine, I've been playing with the steghide program available on most linux distros and popular repos. I am quite impressed with this programs ability to insert quite a bit of information into an image or wav file.

The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" (citation wikipedia). Really, as a word it is just describing covert messaging. It offers no context in which it must occur or any kind of standard. This technique is designed to put the message in a quite public place, kind of like the symbology clues you might have heard about in "The DaVinci Code". The concept of security through obscurity is primary here.

The program recodes color codes in a jpg file to replace a shade of color with another and then uses the digit difference to insert the message. The steghide program actually takes the image and the message and shuffles them together on the level of the data. The receiver would NEED to know to look for the message since there is no visible indicator of a hidden message.

The application steghide is a command line tool. There is a gui tool called steg-gui, but I didn't feel like compiling it, and since not in my repos I didn't use it yet. So I won't offer any opinion of it here, maybe in the future if it can manage to be included in the repos.

As another example. The image of Bettsy above, is also a steganograph. Feel free to have a go and treat the image like a captcha. After steghide is installed the following will produce the message that is this blog post, give it a try.

wget http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_G7rEKBT_L3s/S24IB-RIzFI/AAAAAAAAAUA/aIZAVsJLfeE/s320/steg-post.jpg && steghide --extract -sf steg-post.jpg

Enjoy,
--

CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Moving LVM partitions to a new system

sCrIpTmUnKeE — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:33:03 +0000

A few months ago I lost my main workstation that also doubled as my backup server, my web development server, the white noise generator and over all everything machine for my home network.

On that system I run Arch Linux, like do for all of my systems except for my daughters which runs Edubuntu 8.04. I had all of my internal hard drives setup on LVM2 (Logical Volume Manager) partitions. When that system went down I was a shocked. To this day my beloved system still isn’t up and working correctly. So, in the mean time I was able to gather some old PC parts I had sitting in boxes and build out my “official” storage solution.

My storage solution is built up using a dual Pentium III 700 Mhz system with 256MB of RAM, a 4 port SATA PCI card, four 1 Terabyte hard drive & a 20Gig system drive. Over all it is a clunker besides the 4TB of hard drive space. But you are hear to read about my storage system & to know how to re-access your stranded LVM2 partitions.

Step 1: Move the functional hard drive(s) into a system that can read the LVM mappings (This means you have all the proper kernel modules installed & corresponding LVM software). Now if you have multiple drives that make up your LVM mappings, then you need to be able to have all drives accessible in one system. For me I only had one large drive mapped out to different volumes. I was able to add my drive to my storage server by using an external USB case.

Step 2: Once that the drive(s) is physically accessible in new system, you need to know what are the Physical Volume(s) (PV), Volume Groups (VG) & Logical Volume(s) (LV). To obtain this information run the following commands with root privileges & take note of the VG & LV names.

Step 2a: Show the list of available physical volumes by running su -c ‘pvdisplay’ .

[testuser ~]$ su -c 'pvdisplay'
--- Physical volume ---
 PV Name               /dev/sdf3
 VG Name               VolGroup00
 PV Size               150.56 GiB / not usable 2.66 MiB
 Allocatable           yes
 PE Size               4.00 MiB
 Total PE              38542
 Free PE               14222
 Allocated PE          24320
 PV UUID               YSFO73-x3IY-wNTg-CUND-e3wT-7Whb-yLk4iO

 ...

Step 2b: Show the list of available volume groups by running su -c ‘vgdisplay’ .

[testuser ~]$ su -c 'vgdisplay'
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               VolGroup00
  System ID
  Format                lvm2
  Metadata Areas        1
  Metadata Sequence No  25
  VG Access             read/write
  VG Status             resizable
  MAX LV                0
  Cur LV                2
  Open LV               0
  Max PV                0
  Cur PV                1
  Act PV                1
  VG Size               150.55 GiB
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              38542
  Alloc PE / Size       24320 / 95.00 GiB
  Free  PE / Size       14222 / 55.55 GiB
  VG UUID               oGX7wj-BLCd-6M8Q-3hPc-8wVN-r7jR-3Z6dgU

  ...

Step 2c: Show the list of available logical volume by running su -c ‘lvdisplay’ .

[testuser ~]$ su -c 'lvdisplay'
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/VolGroup00/Root
  VG Name                VolGroup00
  LV UUID                lnKn4G-BH0d-tn38-KJuz-o1ci-afVD-ncm5Zn
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available
  # open                 0
  LV Size                15.00 GiB
  Current LE             3840
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:2

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/VolGroup00/Home
  VG Name                VolGroup00
  LV UUID                l7oeK7-YKNV-KS2c-fXvO-hXpe-hIQP-LsqFxR
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available
  # open                 0
  LV Size                80.00 GiB
  Current LE             20480
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:3

  ...

Step 3: Now that you have the volume group name you need to make the volume(s) accessible on the new system. That is done by exporting (aka removing) the historical volume mappings, importing the volume group into the new system & activating the volume group.

Step 3a: Export the volume group with su -c ‘vgexport ’

[testuser ~]$ vgimport VolGroup00
 Volume group "VolGroup00" is not exported

Step 3b: Importing the Volume Group using pvscan & then su -c ‘vgimport

[testuser ~]$ su -c 'pvscan' PV /dev/sdf3 is in exported VG VolGroup00 [150.55 GiB / 55.55 GiB free] PV /dev/md0 VG RaidArray lvm2 [2.73 TiB / 1.17 TiB free] Total: 2 [897.09 GiB] / in use: 2 [897.09 GiB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ] [testuser ~]$ su -c 'vgimport VolGroup00' Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully imported

Step 3c: Activating the Volume Group by using su -c ‘vgchange -ay ‘

[testuser ~]$ su -c 'vgchange -ay VolGroup00' 2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active

Now that you have imported & activated the volume group, you should be able to list the available logical volume drive mappings under /dev/mapper/.

ls -l /dev/mapper/

Step 4: The next step is to mount the logical volumes to check the integrity of the data. I would also suggest doing an file system check (fsck) of the partitions on logical volume before mounting them.

That it. You are ready to resume using your LVM partitions on your new system.

- Ken

LVM resource used for this post:

HOW-To http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/#recipemovevgtonewsys

Helpful link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/remounting-a-lvm-partitioned-disk-on-new-box-136693/

The “dist-upgrade” misnomer & confusion

Mackenzie — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:38:00 +0000

Yesterday in #ubuntu, someone asked, "I am still confused about this. Everything claims that dist-upgrade actually *upgrades* distributions...can someone please clear this up for me"

So I told them:

<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade differs from apt-get upgrade in that it will remove obsolete packages and add new dependencies, while apt-get upgrade will not. this is necessary when upgrading from one distro release to another, but it is not the *only* time it is necessary. thus, in aptitude, dist-upgrade has been renamed to full-upgrade
<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade will only change you from one release to another if you've modified /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a newer release, but this method of upgrading is not recommended

They also asked "and if i do want to upgrade the distribution (not that i do), how do i go about that?" to which I responded:

<maco> the recommended way to change distro releases is sudo do-release-upgrade

They said it was the best explanation in the shortest amount of text, so I'm posting it here, hoping it'll make it easier for people to find. By the way, man apt-get does explain all this…just in slightly more technical terms.
From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com