Beta Testers

We all know that pre release projects will have bugs, and for as long as they do we will need people to beta test. Beta testing is rather simple, you push on it until it breaks, then you document what you did or what was not working when you got it. You aren't going to be held accountable for fixing what you find ... just pass it on in a documented and usable form. You may be asked to try a few things to see if it fixes the problem, which means again, you need to know what steps you took that put you in the position that your in, if any.

The other night, and not for the first time mind you, one of the folks from the beta team came wandering in to the support channel looking for assistance. There isn't a thing wrong with that at all. However ... you knew there was a however coming didn't you ... do not assume you know more than the support folks. Face it, if that were the case, you wouldn't need support in the first place. Don't argue or ask why three hundred times when one of the support crew asks you to run a command. We realize that you want to understand why we are doing something, but our time is valuable too, understanding can come later, or it may come moments after you run the command or do what you are asked to do.

Folks, being on the beta team does not abrogate you from the same rules of conduct we expect of anyone else. We expect a little courtesy and a willingness to follow directions so that we can diagnose and hopefully fix your problem (which by the way as a beta tester YOU get to document). If your coming in for support, we do not expect you to be argumentative, we don't ever expect you to be appreciative either, most of us got over that hang up a long time ago. There are some awfully smart folks who volunteer their time to do support. Never assume you know more than they do, because odds are you don't.

So for those beta testers who think that their positions allow them to step outside the bounds of civility when seeking support ... think again. We rightfully expect more from beta testers, not less. Work with us and we will work with you, argue with us and we will ignore you. Argue with us to much and we will remove you from channel, and pass on to the boss that we are having issues with you.

p.s. who am I to make these demands? absolutely nobody. Just one of the folks who spends time doing support or researching and documenting. So you can take what I say with whatever size grain of salt (and/or tequila) that you choose.

Funtoo too

Well, I spent the weekend getting Funtoo set up and working, well not the whole weekend. I started puttering after dinner on Saturday, grab the base files and such, chroot in and do the kernel. Went to bed while my first pass world update was processing. Got back around to playing with it again after lunch and spent a few hours tinkering.

All done now, or as done as it needs to be for the moment. The urge to add more to it will likely strike many more times. In all though it only took a few hours to get a nice ~amd64 set up going. Very minimal global USE flags, I keep dumping things off to package.use to keep it tight. I'm happy so far, the new system is speedy as I could wish for, no real bells or whistles. Just a Fluxbox desktop and using Slim as the log in GUI. Both being nicely configurable and neither having any of the over the top dependencies that come with KDE/KDM or Gnome/GDM.

Still even with all it's lean mean speed, it's not enough to drag me off of using Sabayon as my primary OS. But I wouldn't be a computer geek if I didn't at least play around a little bit, and if your going to play, I might as well play with something that is designed to kick the crap out of any other distro out there.

Thanks Daniel for both Gentoo and Funtoo, I would never have learned what my computer was really capable of without them.

Mounting LVM

Mounting an LVM may seem a bit intimidating, it's not. In reality, despite the length of this entry, you will only be running a handful of commands, and most of those just to get the needed information. Do not despair, this will be as painless as possible. All of these commands will be run as root from a terminal. Please also remember that your volume names may differ from the guide, please make sure to adjust accordingly.

# pvs

This should give you an output similar to

sabayonx86 sabayonuser # pvs

PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 7.88G 32.00M

If we look closely we can see that /dev/sda2 holds a lvm that is 7.88 gig in size. In this case, thats the one we want, as it is the only one.

So now we want to see what is actually in that lvm

# lvdisplay /dev/VolGroup00

sabayonx86 sabayonuser # lvdisplay /dev/VolGroup00

--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID SWp2V0-1xPU-0tOP-UnPs-snxF-THUl-pZMKb2
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 6.88 GB
Current LE 220
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 251:0

--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID MGBeJP-ohrX-KLju-5V78-iJOi-pP3w-huaOmC
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 992.00 MB
Current LE 31
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 251:1

We are looking for two things out of that list. LV name and LV Size. We have one that is 6.88 GB and one that is 992 MB. We can safely assume that the smaller of the two is /swap so the larger must be our real filesystem. That one is named /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00.

So now we have all the information that we need. We need only to make a mount point and actually mount the volume.

# cd /mnt
# mkdir lvm
# vgscan --mknodes
# lvchange -ay /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/lvm

If all went well then can now get inside and look around, make changes, chroot in, or whatever caused us to want to mount the LVM in the first place.

See that wasn't so hard now was it. ~Az