Apr
23
“I’d Like To Preseed My Order Please”
Filed Under Randomness | 3 Comments
This post is dedicated to the conversation I had earlier today with cjwatson…
This evening I went out to dinner with _MMA_ from the Ubuntu Studio crew. One nice thing about my traveling job is that I get to meet Ubuntu community members from around the country. I generally like to take them out to dinner and we can catch up in-real-life. I’ve actually been out here to Raleigh quite a bit lately so _MMA_ and I have spent more than a few nights out gorging ourselves on steak and BBQ!
Tonight we went out to Longhorn Steakhouse and brought the family. _MMA_, his wife and his two kids. Quite the event and we were ready to eat! So, the waitress came around and took our orders. Never in my life did I know ordering steak could be so complicated!
Question after question after question. How would you like it cooked? Options are… What kind of salad? We have… What kind of dressing? We offer… What sides? The sides are… On and on she went. I didn’t know ordering food was that hard!
As soon as she was done I turned to _MMA_ and said:
“I’d like to preseed my order please!”
After running .iso tests the last two days that’s the first thing that came to my mind! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could preseed (pre-answer) things like this! _MMA_ thought it was hilarious so we figured we should blog about it.
In any event, we’ll now take you back to your regularly scheduled programming. Ubuntu release is imminent!
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Apr
23
Upgrade Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 8.04
Filed Under Randomness, Ubuntu | 3 Comments
With Ubuntu 8.04 being the second LTS (Long Term Support) release it is also possible to upgrade from LTS to LTS releases. This means upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 8.04. I have tested this in a previous post, “Dapper 6.06 to Hardy 8.04 Direct Server Upgrade“, which you might also be interested in (that post is regarding the Server and not the Desktop release.)
Upgrading via Update Manager
Step 1: It is suggested that you make sure your BIOS is up-to-date before you try such an upgrade. This is based on some changes in the latest kernel releases which can conflict with older BIOS firmware.
Step 2: You’ll need to make sure that the dapper-updates software channel is activated. (See my previous post linked above for an example of which repositories can/should be enabled.)
Step 3: Press Alt-F2 and type
gksu "update-manager -d"
Step 4: Click the Check button to check for new updates.
Step 5: A message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release.
Step 6: Click Upgrade
Step 7: Follow the instructions as the Update Manager utility will walk you through each step of the upgrade. You will still have a chance to back out after clicking Upgrade if you feel you’re not yet ready.
For more information and other information from the Wiki see: Upgrade Notes
Feb
20
Twitter Casualty
Filed Under Randomness | 3 Comments
So I’ve finally, somehow, become the latest casualty of twitter. I don’t know how it happened, because for the longest time I did not get it. Well to give you some idea I get twitters to my phone… yeah, shameful I know.
In any event, if you’re a twitter user drop by at https://twitter.com/zelut and join the ‘ol network.
…Thanks a lot bordy!
Sep
15
Getting the source package with aptitude?
Filed Under Randomness | 4 Comments
Ever since I learned about the benefits of aptitude vs apt-get I’ve switched over. It’s been great and I’m sure I’ve preached about the benefits before (/me does some digging and pulls up links) here.
Well, I ran into something yesterday that I haven’t been able to solve with aptitude. Is it possible to pull down the source code from the deb-src repository via aptitude and not apt-get source?
I’d sure appreciate if anyone can tell me a way.
Sep
9
I was just looking through my swag-bag from the Utah Open Source Conference and noticed something a little off on the SUSE Linux Enterprise “evaluation” CD that were included from Novell. On the back of the CD set, under the Novell logo it reads:
…”*Linux is a registered trademark of Linux Torvalds”
Linux Torvalds? I have so many directions I could go with this, but I think I’ll just leave it up to your imaginations.
Aug
29
Mutt Question For The Masses
Filed Under Randomness | 3 Comments
I’m back on another phase of “all email clients suck” and back to Mutt again. I *almost* have it configured to all of my (needy) specs, except for one thing. I can’t seem to open encrypted email. I can sign fine, I can encrypt fine, but when I try to open an encrypted email sent to me I get:
"Could not copy message"
Can any of you other Mutt gurus take a stab at what I might be missing? A link to my .mutt_gpg here.
Aug
24
So as you read earlier I’ve rebuilt my laptop today using Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Tribe 5. I’ve been on a bug-rampage today (I need to get my LP karma up!), one of the bugs being that I have no wireless out of the box.
Now, I want to present you all with the options and see which is less evil.
Option 1: ndiswrapper + windows driver
Option 2: madwifi and the non-free binaries
I asked around in IRC today and the closest answer I heard so far is:
“[Use] madwifi, because ndiswrapper makes baby Jesus cry”
…that may be true, but what do the rest of you think? Non-free ndiswrapper or non-free madwifi?
Aug
16
Action-crap modems and DSL…
Filed Under Randomness | 4 Comments
First, I apologize for not having any tutorials most of this week. Things have been a bit busy in just getting back from a month on the road and I’ve been catching up. I’ll get things going again, I promise.
Last nite I finally got most of my new network figured out (for those that didn’t know, we recently moved into a bigger house). I’ve been spending time replacing the house phone jacks with Cat5 connectors and I’ve ordered a few 10/100/1000 switches from newegg. Those should get here today and then the house’ll run on gigabit-goodness!
The one major problem I’ve had is that I haven’t had to (settle) for DSL in years! In our other house we had Fiber Optic (15M/15M connection), and previous to that it was a 6M/1.5M Cable connection with Comcast. Downgrading to a 1.5M/680K connection with Qworst has been a poor experience. As I usually tell anyone that asks, if you have a choice between Cable and DSL, pick the Cable.
In any event, last nite I hacked the Action-crap DSL modem/router/headache into submission and the bulk of my networking is routing through a Netgear wireless router. I’ll end up chaining the Action-crap to the Netgear and then into the two switches, hopefully by days end.
In the long run I’d like to setup one of my local servers to be the DHCP / DNS / Firewall, but that might have to wait until this weekend or something.
In any event, if you’ve read this far I appreciate it but I really don’t have anything important to say. I’ll get back to the regular tutorials soon… just as soon as the rest of my network is up and reliable.
Aug
13
Apparently My Senator Needs a Mail Admin
Filed Under Randomness | 4 Comments
It’s things like this that remind me the people trying to represent us in government really don’t understand us. Particularly in the way of Technology. Recently I sent an email to my Senator expressing my concern over the recent rape of our privacy in the HomeLand Security “we can spy on you if we *think* you might be a terrorist-international communication act BS”. This is the reply I get.
Thank you for your e-mail. If you would like a response please use the
web based e-mail form on my official Senate website at
http://bennett.senate.gov/contact/email_form.htmlThe number of Utahns that communicate with me via e-mail has increased
dramatically over the last few years. The use of a website contact form
provides two primary benefits. First, discourages third-party
organizations from using individual’s names without their permission. Some
third-party e-mail contractors collect information from their web form,
use it to contact members of Congress without the knowledge of the
individual or sell the information to other organizations. I have had a
number of constituents express concern about receiving a response from me,
when they have not written. Second, an e-mail web form helps me to manage
incoming e-mails, its reduces the amount of spam I receive, and it allows
me to respond more quickly to e-mails.I regret any inconvenience using my web form may cause you. However, I
hope you will consider using it. Or if you prefer, please send a letter,
a fax, or call one of my offices to express your views. You can find my
contact information on my web site at
http://bennett.senate.gov/contact/contact.html. Again, thank you for
writing.Sincerely,
Robert F. Bennett
United States Senator
What I get out of this is “Sorry you took the time to write me using the standard communication form of email. Please re-write your entire message in a BS web-based form because our email servers can’t handle normal email.” They probably use Exchange.
Jun
21
It has been one of those days. I’m getting ready to head back to my hotel soon, but I just had to share a story with everyone. If nothing else it is proof that the Linux command line is a very powerful tool.. if you take the time to learn it.
Here is the setting. I’m teaching a class this week in Boston, MA. It is the RedHat 300 “Fast Track” course, for preparing Linux administrators for the RedHat Certified Engineer Exam. I’ve got a room full of very experienced geeks that have definitely kept me on my toes. Some of the questions they’ve come up with… well let me tell you. One in particular I just had to share.
One student decided to see what would happen if he filled up his drive using yum. (For those not familiar with yum it is the RH/Fedora equivalent of apt-get or aptitude). So he proceeded to do the following until his drive was at 100% capacity:
yum install a*yum install b*
yum install c*
yum install d*
…. you get the idea.
He then posed the question: “How can I clean that up without re-installing the system?”
The first thought was to simply revert what he had done. ‘yum remove a*’, etc. We quickly realized that would not work because it would also remove packages that were required for the system. Hmm.. we’d have to come up with something more specific. Here is what we put together:
for i in `rpm -qai | grep -B5 'Thu 21 Jun 2007 03' | grep Name | awk '{ print $3 }' | grep -v kernel` ; do yum -y remove $i ; done
For those of you familiar with scripting and work in the shell it should make some sense. For the rest of you, I guess I might have to explain.
This one command actually fixes his problem and keeps the system intact.
First we’re creating a loop so that the command will repeat itself for every package installed on the system (rpm -qai lists info for all installed packages). We then grep through that output for todays date and the hour he began (grep -B5 ‘Thu 21 Jun 2007 03′), including the 5 previous lines. Based on that we grep for ‘Name’ within that output (grep Name). We then print a value from what we find there, which ends up being the package name (awk ‘{ print $3 }’). We throw that through one more grep to search for anything that *doesn’t* match the kernel (grep -v kernel). The output of all of this filtering is then assigned to the value of i, which then is run through the package removal command for each instance (yum -y remove $i).
In other words it scans all the packages on the machine, finds anything installed today during 3:00, pulls out the package name and removes it automatically. I’d say this is proof yet again that the Linux command line is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it, and this is a good example why you should learn how to use it.
Can anyone think of a better way to do it?
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