Linux a better Windows partition manager

My inlaws were in town to help Liz through her surgery. They brought their machines to me for repair One of the machines had a full disk so I upgraded the 20GB to a 250GB drive.

1. made the 20GB drive a slave
2. installed the 250GB drive as the master
3. booted Fedora Live CD
4. create a partition of the same size on the new disk
5. copy the master boot record (MBR) using dd
6. copy the partition using dd
7. shutdown
8. remove power from the slave (old 20GB) drive
9. reboot to Windows, verify things look ok.

For detailed instructions visit:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

I stopped at the “Resizing the Partition”.

The best part of all this was I never knew the power of dd, ntfsresize, and fdisk. I was originally looking for a copy of PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost. Linux is far better than any of that.

Once I finished the dd, I shutdown, and removed power from the slave drive. I rebooted and Windows came up on the new 250GB but still appeared as a 20GB drive. Now I had to resize it.

The oddest part was resizing the partition, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the “delete the partition” then recreate. The delete part threw me off as I was afraid to lose the data. But it was an in memory operation so it didn’t affect it. WHEW! Then I ran ntfsresize -n -s 250G /dev/sda1, then rebooted back to Windows. After a chkdsk, I was all done!

So Linux is a better Windows partition tool than Windows
http://darkstar.ucd.ie/timosh/links/ntfsresize.html#cli

iPod + Banshee + Amazon = AWESOME!

I think I’ve found my iTunes replacement: Amazon’s MP3 store + Banshee + iPod is an awesome combination. The only thing that is missing is integration between Banshee and Amazon, now that would be an iTunes killer!
Hrm I smell a project Just another example of how Fedora can make a great desktop.

photo import misbehaving

Sigh when I need to upload photos in a timely fashion, gthumb-import begins to misbehave.

Update: rebooting back to the old kernel get import working again: 2.6.24.3-12.fc8.

sm-photo-tool

I released a new version of sm-photo-tool. It’s a simple script that that was originally written by John Ruttenberg wrote. I took it and packaged it in rpm form and have been maintaining it under source control (versus a forum).

sm-photo-tool help
Usage: sm-photo-tool create gallery_name [options] [file...]
       sm-photo-tool create_upload gallery_name [options] [file...]
       sm-photo-tool update [options]
       sm-photo-tool full_update [options]
       sm-photo-tool upload gallery_id [options] file…

       sm-photo-tool –help for complete documentaton

It’s create to upload an entire directory of photos to smugmug from the command line.

random firefox crashes

Liz was trying to work on her myspace page and started getting those wonderful bug buddy dialogs about gecko crashing. It seemed related to flash, because when the video was loading it would crash.

I’ve seen this happen randomly for me too. It’s VERY annoying. So I removed the flash rpm and reinstalled using the tarball. That didn’t seem to fix the crash. It was a shot in the dark. Then I found this thread: Firefox (gecko) Crash on Flash. I tried one of the other suggestions:
yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
That actually fixed the problem. So she’s able to use firefox with myspace again, except now there’s no volume control or sound. The soundcard detection plays sound just fine, but gnome-volume-manager pops up a dialog stating there are no gstreamer plugins, though reinstalling alsa-plugins-pulseaudio again doesn’t fix it. Time for more in depth investigation.

NetworkManager and WPA!

NetworkManager (0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3235) works with WPA security! That’s great news because every time I visited my in-laws I had to use a wired connection. I have been wanting to change their wireless to use WEP so I could connect more easily, but I don’t have to anymore. Kudos to the NetworkManager folks, you’ve made my laptop life that much easier.

xargs tip of the day

I use xargs a lot especially with find. Many times I want to pass the arguments as parameters to the command I’m trying to run with xargs usually somewhere in the middle. Today I found it

Time for an arbitrary example, this is completely made up to illustrate the point so don’t bother with “why are you using xargs for that comments”. So you want to find .png files that are different in /foobar/tmp and /tmp/.

cd /foobar/tmp; find . -name '*.png' | xargs -n 1 -I imagename diff imagename /tmp/imagename

The -I argument tells xargs to replace the string that follows -I in the command arguments with the values from standard input. This is totally cool, and beats the old way I did things which was to write a simple shell script and call that from xargs

There are many ways to do what I did above, but hopefully folks find this xargs tip useful.

RHCE!

Yesterday I passed the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam. I am now officially an RHCE! You can verify it here.

FUDCon

Since FUDCon is in Raleigh this year, I was able to attend this most awesome conference. Max did a great job with the State of Fedora address. He received a standing ovation and introduced the new Fedora project leader, Paul Frields.

Michael Tiemann had the 10:15 slot all to himself as none of the presenters wanted to go up against his talk on Fedora in the Enterprise (this is not a way to replace).

We had BarCamp which is a great model for defining a conference. Typically a conference defines the sessions and times upfront. With BarCamp the session topics are defined at the conference itself. They are placed on the board and everyone chooses what they want to attend. Based on the number of votes determines what rooms they are held in. It’s a great format.

In between volunteer efforts badging folks up to the 3rd floor, I’ve been able to attend a few talks. I went to the revisor talk after lunch. Revisor integrates with cobbler and allows you to create customized distros. I can’t wait to give this a try now. I’m signed up to see Seth’s yum talk as well as Adrian’s FUNC talk.

The one thing I have found out is that I seriously need a laptop. Everyone here has one and it’s very useful. I’m using an old loaner laptop from my department, but I need one for use all the time.

zmugfs roadmap

I released zmugfs 0.1 on October 31st, 2007, but I haven’t done anything else with it since then. I’m overdue for finishing it.

Next up is to add the write mode capability to the file system which will actually allow you to upload your photos to smugmug.com. Here’s a quick list:

• ability to create:
  • albums
  • categories
  • subcategories
• upload photos
• edit attributes of photos (not quite sure how this will work)

Stay tuned for more.