Scott's Blog

After a few power failures during a week of storms I rebooted my Ubuntu Linux computer and fsck found some errors. Next time I booted it found (and corrected) even more errors, until, eventually I wasn't able to boot anymore (couldn't find grub). I have a good backup system * so I wasn't too concerned (although this was my first real test).  I had run smartctl on the first sign of trouble and it didn't give any errors, so it didn't appear to be a hard disk failure. I figure this is an opportunity for me to setup 64bit version of Ubunt and I've also been thinking about dual booting to Windows ® because Steam looks like an easy and cheap way to install games. I put an old version of Windows XP in the drive and... it blue screened.  It just didn't want to install.  I tried two other versions and it also failed.  I then got the Ubuntu disk and it installed with no problems.  I tried Windows again, again it failed to install even though I had reformatted ...

I'm buying a new computer, but the new computer is without a hard drive nor a video card. My computer is going to Victor who's has increasingly found it difficult to buy games for his computer, even games that are 4 years old. Victor will get my old 120 Gig drive and I'll just use the 450 Gig drive that's also been on my computer for a while. I've been running my computer off an older 120 Gig Maxtor with another 450 Gig used for backup and some larger files. My idea was to offload all the files off the 450 Gig (to my 1 TB drive my video server) and move all my stuff from the 120 to the 450 and just use the 450. I searched the Internet but it was not clear what the best method was to use. In short I: Copied off all the old files off my 450 Gig drive using rsync. I used GParted to clone the 120 GB drive to 450 GB (using copy-paste!). I created a bootable "live" version of GParted CD from here . I unplugged the 120GB drive and just left the 450GB in it...

My wife, Renata, has been complaining more and more that Windows is getting slower and it's a pain downloading and installing anti-virus software all the time. I occasionally tease that I don't have any of these problems, I don't even have an anti-virus installed on my Ubuntu machine. So finally, this week, she said that she wants to a dual boot machine, like Victor has. Compounding the issue is that over the past few weeks our Internet provider had been getting slower and slower, of course, making Windows appear even slower than normal. I downloaded the DVD version of Ubuntu 8.10 which took a week with this slow connection and, of course, it didn't work (I believe her machine does like booting with a DVD). Luckily, some time on Friday our Internet provider fixed their problems and I was able to download the CD version of 8.10 in about 40 minuts. In the meantime I backed up her machine to my hard drive which was much slower than it should have been (about 8 hours). I...

The last two time I upgrade Ubuntu I had a lot of problems. After rebooting, my X windows was usually messed up and I had additional problems with the last upgrade. However, this last upgrade was relatively painless, but it did fail the upgrade and then leave the Update Manager without any hint what to do. Of course, now I'm pretty experienced and know all the apt commands by heart. I ran "sudo apt-get -f install" to find the problem then "sudo apt-get remove python-setuptools" which seemed to be the problem package. Then I ran the Update Manager again and it went on it's way. For some reason, after installing everything the Update Manager said it was finished and never asked me if I wanted to reboot so I was a little extra hesitant the first time I rebooted. I crossed my fingers and rebooted and a new Ubuntu came out without any errors. I'd say the nicest thing I've seen so far with the new Feisty Fawn is running "python" and seeing ve...