Linux

Ubuntu 7.10 to PCLinuxOS 2008

by

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.

Read more

More Power

by

We're getting into summer in the Philippines, and I was just worrying how hot my Thinkpad R51e was running. Its 32 degrees in the room, and my CPU is running at a consistent 73 degrees, according to cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature which seems a bit unhealthy. My motherboard fried itself twice last year, and I figure that … Read more

Big Switch 7: Shake your Booty

by

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.

Read more

Eee and Me.

by

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.

Read more

Big Switch 6: Virtually there.

by

OK a quick recap from my last post, where I realised that then next step was going to take some explaining … A week or so went by without incident and it was time to consider the final stage: moving Windows to a virtual machine and getting rid of the old Windows partition. Here are the main stages.

  1. Make a windows install CD from the install files on the windows partition (Thinkpads don’t have an install CD, they use an Install partition)
  2. Install vmware on Ubuntu and make a Windows Virtual Machine.
  3. Delete the old Windows and IBM Install partitions
  4. Re-arrange the remaining partitions to suit the new arrangement.

    Read more