General IT

Ubuntu 7.10 to PCLinuxOS 2008

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I started a new project at a client's office a month or so ago. On the first day I turned up, and managed to work for about an hour, before my laptop died. Somewhat embarassing. I tried for about an hour to resuscitate it, but couldn't get it to boot at all: it just died and froze before the KDE login screen. It seemed to be some sort of graphical mishap, and no amount of fiddling with xorg.conf from rescue mode would fix it.

I excused myself, went back home and after some more fiddling, decided to backup and re-install. Having made this decision I was looking through my pile of install CDs, and I came across PCLinuxOS 2008, which I'd downloaded a few weeks previously, and I'd been meaning to try out. "So why not try it out on this laptop?" said the evil part of my brain — the same part which forces me to spend time on Facebook instead of working.

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Thunderbird Calendar Rearrangement

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There are some tasks which are just right for Friday afternoon. I've got a to-do list with a number of urgent items on it, but none of them seem very appealing on a Friday afternoon. Especially when there's a holiday Monday coming up. So of course I not only chose a non-essential item to spend my energies on this afternoon; I chose one which wasn't even on my to-do list.

My calendar in Thunderbird has been bothering me lately. I like to keep all my appointments in it from when I first started using an electronic diary, which is now quite a few years' worth. This makes Thunderbird very unhappy, as it struggles to index and display all the events every time you use the Add-in Calendar (Lightning). Chug chug chug.

And there's another problem. I have an online synchronising service, the excellent Scheduleworld (http://www.scheduleworld.com/) with which I synchronise regularly. While it normally only syncs the events which have changed, Thunderbird will occasionally decide that it really must sync Everything, which it subsequently does. This takes it about 15 minutes, during which time I can't do much with my computer.

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Big Switch 7: Shake your Booty

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OK, in the last post, I had moved my partitions around substantially, so we were obviously in for a few problems booting. To recap, the new layout looks like this:

  • /dev/hda1 – 20Gb – Linux main system (moved and enlarged)
  • /dev/hda2 – 100Mb – /boot partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda4 – 1 Gb – swap partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda3 – Extended partition containing
    • /dev/hda5 – 17 Gb Data partition (enlarged)
    • /dev/hda6 – 17Gb /home partition (newly created to house all the VMs)

The first problem was getting the thing to boot up. The MBR was still on the boot sector of the drive, but it was telling the computer to boot from the wrong sector. I pulled out the Mint / Ubuntu install CD and booted from that.

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Eee and Me.

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Among all the hype for the wafer thin object of desire, the Apple Air, I have maintained perspective. While my Mac-oriented friends swoon and drool, I did the proper geeky thing and focused on the key question "What do you actually get for your money?" The design is superb of course, and that has value in itself, but for USD 1800, you're effectively getting low-spec hardware and a machine that's missing a few useful features.

I personally use a DVD RW for backing up files when I don't have access to a portable hard disk, or when I want a more permanent archive. I also install a lot of software, and alternative OSes, so I use it for that too. And not to mention the DVDs I play on it, so I'd definitely miss having an optical drive. However I do understand that the main reason for axing the optical drive is to keep the unit slim, so I can see why they excluded it. However, putting on a few more USB ports might have been a good idea, so you can plug in an external one along with your mouse.

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Smart gets Dumber

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So I probably didn't mention the incident last weekend when three Smart Broadband employees came and sat at my house and watched files download. I was demonstrating to them how slow my connection is, and the fact that it is impossible for me to download any large files, or watch any streaming media. I've been complaining about this for the last 5 months, on and off, so I was delighted to finally get some response.

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