ricketyclick

I just finished upgrading my Ubuntu Linux installation to 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

The biggest difficulty is that many temporary files are put in the /var and /boot folders. Normally, this is not a problem, but when I set up the system, I gave them dedicated partitions. I sized them according to the advice I found on the web, and in fact oversized them.

Not by enough, apparently. I gave /var a gigabyte, and /boot 100 megs, and they both came up short, by more than half.

I couldn’t easily resize them, because they’re always mounted.

Finally, I booted from the live CD of Ubuntu 7.10 in Hudson and Hudson’s Ubuntu Unleashed, which doesn’t require those folders to mount.

I moved /var (and /tmp) to a 500 GB SATA I’ve installed but not set up yet. This was an interesting exercise, involving hand-editing the /etc/fstab file.

The /boot partition was a bit trickier; I’d hope to use the space recovered when I deleted the old /var and /tmp folders, but unfortunately, they were in an extended partition, and boot is in the primary; apparently, the extended partition cannot be resized. I ended up stealing a couple hundred megs from the vastly oversized /swap partition.

For the most part, the upgrade went smoothly after that. There was one glitch with only the root account being able to log on to the desktop; somehow the permissions on the /etc folder were screwed up.

All done now, though, and I believe 8.10 is noticably snappier than 8.04. Biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the file browser, particularly in folders with heavy graphics content.

Aside from the problems I caused with an overly-spiffy disk layout, the upgrade was essentially painless.

I think I’ve mentioned that my computer was stolen awhile back. I’m just about done getting everything sorta back to where it was.

I’ve been borrowing my sister’s monitor, a 17″ 1280 x 1024 flat screen. My original plan was to go with another of the same, but amazingly, those monitors are dying out. For only a little bit more, I could get a 19″ wide screen, at 1440 x 900.

Problem:
1280 x 1024 = 1.4 MPx
1440 x 900 = 1.3 MPx
a net loss in real estate for a noticeable bump in price.

Instead, I waited for a nice 20″ to go on sale, and ended up with a LG/Flatron W2052TQ. The W52TQ line was LG’s “Flagship” on release, but today Fry’s had it on sale for $240. Total real estate:
1680 x 1050 = 1.8 MPx
This is so much extra room I’m actually having a little trouble adjusting to it, but in general, I like being able to have a standard browser window open, and another few inches of space on the side for helper apps, like the calculator, notepad, terminal, and so forth. The GIMP likes the extra space too, of course, given its little flock of windows.

Color, brightness, sharpness, and so forth are all fine. I am not a graphics person, so I can’t speak to color balance and the like, but it all looks good.

A few minor installation/useability issues:

• Putting the pedestal together was a bit of a puzzle. There are three separate pieces, the base itself and a couple of smaller bits that reinforce it, but unfortunately the instruction flyer in the box does not include an assembly diagram, and I spent several very confused minutes until I realized I was missing a crucial piece, buried in the packaging. Yes, there’s an assembly diagram in the PDF manual on the CD, but you know, it’s hard to read when the monitor is laying face down in your lap.
• Also, the front panel controls are very unobtrusive buttons (as in, on the bottom edge, not the front panel itself), and the labels for these buttons are very faint white markings on a silver bezel, basically invisible. Guys, you’re willing to clutter up the frame with advertising medallions, which, since I already bought the damn thing, do me no good at all, but you hide the buttons I actually need. Gah. (And one of those stickers advertises the FUN feature, which is activated by its own special invisible button. Insult to injury, all that.)
• For security, I’ve been thinking about getting a monitor arm that would bolt to the wall. Unfortunately, looks like this monitor doesn’t accept the standard VESA FDMI mounting plate. The pedestal mount has holes laid out as 400mm x 700mm; the nearest VESA pattern is 400 x 600.
• If you are using the analog video connector, the thumbscrews are awkwardly placed. It’s difficult to tighten them by hand, and the base interferes with a screwdriver.

When researching the widescreen monitor, I found that the 400MX could not handle the 1680 x 1050 resolution, and so I picked up a new video card as well.

I had very, very few choices: my current motherboard (an ABIT NF8-V2) is AGP, and just about every card on the market these days is PCI-Express. I finally found a PNY GeForce 2600-256, which uses the nVidia chipset, for $60. I’m pretty sure GeF 2600 cards were going for in excess of a $200 on release; procrastination has its rewards. A quick forum check turned up no angry rants about this card under Linux. Fine.

After getting Fry’s to remove an unwanted $43 “installation” fee, which somehow snuck onto the invoice, I brought everything home.

The monitor turned out to work fine on my old card, which now displayed the wide screen resolution.*SIGH* I very nearly returned the card, but decided to keep it.

Installation was quick, the driver installed itself automatically, and it looks fine. I’m not doing any gaming, but ordinary window-handling seems to be happening much more smoothly than before. We’ll see about stability over the next few days.

All in all, I’m pretty happy. Now I have to think about putting a secondary system together in case I get burgled again. I’d also like to put it a closet and use it to store surveillance video. You can take the desktop system, and but still leave my personal and work files here, along with pictures of your ugly goblin mug.

This time, though, I think I’m ready: everything I own worth stealing is prominently defaced with the phrase “Stolen from KE5IKY”, my ham call sign. I’m hoping that will drop the resale value to “not worth the trouble”. I’ve also finally forced myself to keep an off-site database of all my steal-able goods, with manufacturer, model number, serial number, and so forth for each item.

That’s it for now. Sue gets her monitor back, so I no longer have to worry about it getting stolen.

I’m not actually sure if this was there before or not: my desktop is effectively twice as wide as it was. I can have a bunch of stuff open on side of the desktop, then drag my current window over to the right edge, and look at a whole ‘nother set of clutter over there. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to to use this, or if it just means that now I’ll lose tools on my digital desktop as well as my physical desk top, but at least the virtual desktop has some indicators to help me find things that have been buried or pushed aside.

I think I like this.

Shamus over at Twenty Sided recently had a drive go bad. I commented on my recent hard drive adventures:

Corrupt hard drives aren’t the worst that can happen. I recently lost my entire home computer to thieves. No work related stuff–but I lost my anime torrents, and I can’t find working seeds for some of them. (Some have since gone into R1 release, which means I can at least rent them, or even get them through Crunchyroll and pay for them for reduced guilt (Thanks, SDB!). Then there’s 4chan–you know, pictures of origami, cooking, weapons–four or five years worth, all gone.

Yeah, XCOPY is OK — but the best tool from MS is ROBOCOPY, one of the Resource Kit utilities. The current version even maintains all the permissions and security stuff (which used to be handled by yet another RK utility, SCOPY). RC has all sorts of options for retrying copies of intermittently bad files (such as, for instance, files being copied over a flaky network connection). In fact, the last time I fooled with it, you had to be careful to set retries to 2 or 3, instead of the default 1000. With the VERBOSE option, it creates a textfile log of each file and directory it attempts to copy, and what the outcome was.

Hard drives are so cheap now there is absolutely no excuse for not mirroring your drive. I just picked up a 750 GB Seagate Barracuda for $100, and a 500 GB for $80. (I should have gotten two 700s, but these were both one-day-only one-per-customer sales at Fry’s, and being an idiot, I didn’t think to just go to an ATM, take out $100, and go back. Sheesh.) The 500 is my new data drive (with a 170 GB bootable drive), and the 700 became my external backup drive after mounting it in a Firewire capable enclosure ($30, plus a $20 FW card). (And although USB is nominally faster than FW, apparently the FW protocol is more efficient.)

I just recently converted to Linux, so I’m still figuring out the best way to do drive mirroring. Of course, I really should be doing father-grandfather backups, so I need two external drives….but the fact is, I’ve only got about 200 GB of data, so I can partition the 700, and copy into alternate partitions. Close enough, and better than trying to choose only the stuff that will fit on a 70 GB tape, which was what I had before.

Beside, in another couple of years, 100 GB SD flash cards will cost $20, so I’ll be able to keep three-generation backups, and take quarterly permanent archives.

(Then there’s micro-SD flash, which puts 2 GB on a chip the size of a fingernail. Sweet Electra, where could you not hide one of these things? Data smuggling just became undetectable.)

There’s a simple registry hack that forces Windows to use a drive or partition other than C:\ for the Documents and Settings directory. It’s best done when setting up a new machine, but there’s a Profile utility that can move an existing profile on C: over to D:. That’s been useful more than once, because my experience is that C: fails more often than D:. Let me know if you want it, and I’ll dig out the procedure.

I just bought a wonderful little tool called a DriveWire. This is a USB dongle that plugs into any IDE or SATA drive. I love it, because it allows me to test all the suspect drives I have lying around without having to repeatedly turn my computer on and off, and without worrying about a bad drive blowing out my on-board IDE controller.

Finally, I also just discovered some utilities that monitor the so-called SMART tests built into almost all modern drives. SMART allows the drive to test itself, to report all kinds of internal conditions such as cumulative error counts and even temperature, and to log the last five errors it encountered. It looks to be a fabulous tool for predicting imminent drive failure, and I don’t understand why it’s not in wider use. I’m still trying to figure out if the Linux-compatible SMART utilities can work over USB connections, but I’m for damn sure going to start using it on my internal drives.

[Slightly edited for my purposes here.]

I was in Fry’s yesterday and on impulse, for $20, bought a plain brown cardboard box from Logitech labeled “QUICKCAM FOR NB DELUXE REFURB”.  “NB” stands for “NoteBook”.

Naturally, the enclosed CD does not include a Linux driver.

However, Logitech’s QuickCam Team has a very nice website with many resources, including Linux links.

I’ve done a certain amount of fumbling around, prior to starting this post, so I’m including some stuff in the order I wish I’d found it, rather than in order.

Hidden behind the spoiler tag is, essentially, a step by step whine log of my attempt to manually install the open source GSPCA driver.

Show ▼

Bus 003 Device 009: ID 058f:6362 Alcor Micro Corp. Hi-Speed 21-in-1 Flash Card Reader/Writer
                                 (Internal/External)
Bus 003 Device 008: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp.
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 152d:2338 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JM20337
                                 Hi-Speed USB to SATA & PATA Combo Bridge
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04b8:0007 Seiko Epson Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 051d:0002 American Power Conversion Uninterruptible Power Supply
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:c018 Logitech, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046e:5542 Behavior Tech. Computer Corp.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 046d:08d8 Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

You know what, guys? Piss off. Just Piss Off. Back to Google.

OK, I find a link to the EasyCam project, “A tool for installing webcam drivers”. OK, that doesn’t look too bad; there’s one odd step, “Adding Repositories”, but at least these folks give short, coherent instructions on how to do that.

I go through the hoops.

Easycam is in French.

Fortunately, it’s a very simple program. It correctly identifies my camera. I do a quick check to translate “Lancer” (”To throw, launch.” OK, then.) and, Voila! Except the progress bar doesn’t run, but eventually, a partial bar appears with the words “Drivers installe!” which I take to be a good sign. I click the “Forward” button, and am presented with:

I take a deep breath…

And click the Apply button.

There is no “Outils” menu on my desktop, but I do have Accessories…no…Graphics…Ah! “Cheese”, as in, I presume, “Say Cheese!” I click, and the application starts. It is worrisomely blank for too long, but eventually I get:

(I tried to take a screenshot, but the screenshot utility cannot grab the live video image. This is a frame-grab of the SATA cable the camera happened to be pointing at.)

Woo Hoo! I haz webcam!

Now if only I had something usefull and entertaining to show you….

My thanks to the folks who put EasyCam together. It really was easy, for a Linux install, and it works.

[Much later...]

OK, I am unable to get VLC to record any video. It displays cam video well enough, but will not stream to file.

Cheese records the video, but doesn’t grab the audio stream.

Again, if I were running Windows, this would be trivial.

I’m logged in to ricketyclick via Firefox running under Linux-Ubuntu. I stopped for dinner before posting, but basically, once I figured out what I was doing, it was less than half an hour from booting up the installation CD to rebooting into the root desktop. Absolutely clean, no problems with hardware.

Comes up loaded with Firefox, Evolution Mail, Open Office (Word processor, Presentation, Spreadsheet), the Gimp, and a bunch of tools, games, and utilities.

The Windows XP disk I use runs for about an hour. Office is another hour.

I was easily able to install Flash in Firefox for the root account so I could watch Youtube, but I haven’t figured out the trick for doing it under my personal account. I may need to give myself root powers for long enough to do that.

I ran through setup a few times to play with the file system options.

I have an NTFS data drive from when this machine ran XP. Linux recognizes it, but the word is the Linux NTFS driver is not stable for writing, so my plan is to copy it to the dev/sda/home, reformat the drive as EXT3, then copy everything back.

When I was in the partition manager, I failed to recognize this drive, and marked the partition for deletion. Fortunately, I caught the mistake before committing the change.

That out of the way, I then tried to set up the linux partitions in SDA (Linux equivalent of C:). In order, I set up /boot, swap, /tmp, and the root directory, /, all as “primary” partitions, a total of about 4 gigs. The balance of the drive then showed as “unavailable”. My intent had been to make the /home partition a logical partition in /. That turns out not to be the way.

Second try: /boot, swap, and / as primary, then /tmp and /home as logical. That worked, but I haven’t figured out how the partitions actually lay out on the drive, and there’s some other details I need to learn about, but the thing basically works.

Be advised that once you go past the partitioner, you shouldn’t click the “back” button to revisit it, or all  your unsaved changes will be lost, and you’ll have to set the whole thing up again. (The changes aren’t applies until Linux actually begins to install.

All that aside: as a Newbie user setting up your desktop machine, don’t worry about the filesystem. All you really need is a swap area, and the root / directory (not to be confused with /root, which is the home directory of the root administrator account). Everything but swap can be EXT3, which is very mature, reasonably robust, and reasonably fast. I wish the partition manager gave a bit of guidance for the newbie, but it is simply not all that daunting once you find the right reference.

I still need to install a printer, download pictures from my camera, and see about playing video files in various formats.

In essence, though, for ordinary desktop users, Linux is not remotely forbidding. It really does just work.

Unless you have Windows specific apps or hardware you are wedded to, it’s time to free yourself.

Linux has arrived.

As predicted, I did indeed take my Ubuntu book (Ubuntu 7.10 Unleashed)to bed with me, and forgot it when I left this afternoon, but I don’t care–it was almost useless for helping me plan how to set up and organize my system.

After yesterday’s debacle trying to figure out how to set up the file system, I spent some time researching file systems on line, and checked out the books available at Fry’s–not a great selection, and not current, but at least I knew what to check for this time.

Check the index for “file systems” “EXT3″ “ReiserFS” “XFS” “/TMP”. Any book without references to these items is simply not worth the trouble.

Of the books available at Fry’s, only one was useful: Stanfield and Smith’s Linux System Administration, 2nd Ed. This is fairly heavy going, being command-line oriented, and I wouldn’t recommend it for my Mom–but for anyone remotely computer savvy, it’s excellent. A little out of date, perhaps, but the basics haven’t changed.

===

File systems:

After a lot of back-and-forth, I am indeed settling on EXT3, simply because it’s the current standard. The future of Reiser is in doubt, and the standard tools do not work with it. XFS is perhaps another good option, particularly for the /home directory, because it supports the advanced permissions system known as Access Control Lists.

Microsoft’s NTFS is apparently fairly well regarded as a file system, but only under Windows. The Linux drivers aren’t considered robust–because NTFS is an unpublished, proprietary specification, and the Linux drives were reverse-engineered.

My revised disk layout plan:

I’ve seen suggestions for more detailed arrangements, but this seems to be a common compromise between the simplest swap+root arrangement and a more complex scheme with basic performance tweaks.

Slightly modified from mhelios’ partition scheme for Fedora.
Here’s Red Hat’s recommendations.

OK, enough quibbling. Back to actually setting the damn thing up.