April 8th, 2008 cmsj
You have new hardware (most likely server).
You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but….uh-oh, it can’t find the CD!
What do you do?! Well, realistically there’s not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed.
You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn.
You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you’re still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don’t have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen.
You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko.
Can you see where this is going? :)
find the .udeb’s on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules.
You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don’t do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of.
Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to!
Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
March 17th, 2008 cmsj
The Thinkpad X300 is a pretty tasty beast. Much nicer screen than the X40, and the SSD is a huge win for lots of IO workloads.
I’ve still got a fair few Linux support oddities to work through, but thus far people are being very helpful.
When the support is there, this will be a laptop to be highly recommended.
Posted in FOSS, Techie | No Comments »
February 27th, 2008 cmsj
luisbg has a blog posting of the very interesting looking flickbook, specifically a video which shows Terminator being used to launch the demo.
Woo!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
February 20th, 2008 cmsj
0.8 had a few annoying little bugs we decided to squash quickly, so without further ado, 0.8.1 is now out and on the homepage.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | 2 Comments »
February 15th, 2008 cmsj
This is a bugfix and feature and infrastructure release.
It should be a lot better than 0.7 in less focussed ways - e.g. icons, menu integration, better gconf support.
As usual hit up the Terminator home page for more.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | 4 Comments »
February 12th, 2008 cmsj
Terminator will soon appear in GNOME’s Preferred Applications preferences if you have it installed and as such I figure we need to support -x in the same way gnome-terminal does.
What that basically means is that *anything* which occurs after -x on the command line is the command to execute and its arguments, so:
terminator -x screen -U
should cause terminator to execute screen -U. By default, most options parsers will see this as the -U being passed to terminator and screen being the argument to -x.
After looking around the docs and asking on #python, optparse seemed to be a better option than getopts, so I switched it over and implemented a callback to extend the default argument processing for -x. It wasn’t quite working, so after another quick foray into #python I ended up reading this page which provided everything I needed. More than I needed, in fact, since their while loop has conditionals which affect whether or not the next arguments are added. I just want to gobble them all up and stop them from being parsed :)
Posted in FOSS, Techie | No Comments »
February 7th, 2008 cmsj
I just found an excellent post which includes some runes for getting the oh-so-ugly opensync to work with an n95. I just synced all my contacts to my laptop via Bluetooth \o/
Posted in FOSS, Techie | No Comments »
February 7th, 2008 cmsj
Maybe you’re fresh out of college or university, or maybe you just love tinkering with computers so much you didn’t bother with stuffy education.
We’re looking for someone to take on a junior role in our sysadmin team, so if you’re interested, take a look at the description and mail our lovely HR people!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
January 31st, 2008 cmsj
Some administrivia about my PPA builds of Terminator.
Firstly, and somewhat late (for which I apologise), the 0.7 release should be available shortly from the PPA. It’s just been accepted, so should be built for gutsy soon.
Secondly, as some people may have noticed, Terminator is now included in the Universe repository of hardy (for which I humbly thank all involved in making it happen).
When hardy is released, I will remove terminator from my PPA. at that point, we can consider publishing further gutsy packages in the Terminator team’s PPA, however, I’m not hugely keen on supporting old distro releases that I don’t run myself anymore.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
January 14th, 2008 cmsj
Yes that’s right, it’s time for another advance in the endless march of that most robotic of terminals, Terminator.
Head over to its homepage for all the links you need to ease yourself into the future!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
