Azerblog

Swamp Ass PSA starring Nathan Fillion

2011-07-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

This is absolutely great. Our good Captain Reynolds to the rescue. Gamers and Geeks owe him a lifetime debt for this simple solution to one of our most plaguing problems.

Demotivationals

2011-02-08T12:14:00.003-09:00

Just a few that struck my fancy today:

The New Year A*****e

2011-01-02T17:30:00.002-09:00

My second reaction was to fire myself from #sabayon, with thanks to someone I respect to get me thinking outside my ego. I promptly did so, you can find the thread on the mailing list. Several conversations with the team members and project lead talked me out of removing myself and to chalk it up as a lesson learned. I had to sleep on that one, but decided that if they were still willing to have me I had more to offer.

I have no excuses for my reactions and comments, there can be none. What I did was uncalled for and for that I apologize to sje46 and to my team mates at Sabayon. To sje46 I invite you back so that I may apologize to you. Either in #sabayon-social or #sabayon-dev, I am stepping away from #sabayon for awhile to regain some perspective.

Sorry you wont find me posting this in the same manner you chose to. Your decision on location to vent your justified frustration is a place I usually wont touch with a ten meter cattle prod. I will hope that through the various internet channels that it will get back to you.

nuff said.
~Az

Free Markets? HAH!!!

2010-12-27T08:44:00.004-09:00

I was asked, do I really think we don't have free markets. That it is free market that has landed us where we are now, isnt it?

No, since the base of all business has been under federal control for the last 70 years. They have been following the meanderings of Keynesian economics which demand the use of supply side averaging while ignoring 2 major facts. 1: that keynes averaging ignores 40% of the economy in entrepreneurs, and 2: that propping up the supply to await a return of consumer demand. This presupposes that consumer habits will return to the previously wasteful and unsustainable habits of debt loading that were in place before.

It also relies on the fact that most will never take the time to understand what inflation actually is. If the Fed controls the printing of money, yet in no public sector do wages track 1:1, where does the difference in actual value go? Not to the people, this is obvious. Not to the businesses, as for them to get it, it must also come from consumers (who didnt already get it). Therefor the difference in actual value must remain with those in charge of printing the money, the difference stays with the government.

At the rate of 2% (Bernankes stated wish for stable inflation) we can compound that out to see a doubling of consumer prices over around 35 years. (Reality would show that it is actually much faster), so where does that difference go? Thats right, right back into the government coffers.

So in that mess, with the fed on control of every basic aspect and control of trade, from artificially controlling interest rates by fiat, to the rate of inflation, we have had free markets? We have had government setting up a business environment that is conducive to the return of the robber barons, but not free markets. Note that this has been constant regardless of who is in the white house or what party has control of congress.

Watching TV and Linux

2010-01-13T15:52:00.009-09:00

This all started a couple of weeks ago when I finally got around to putting the tv capture card I had picked up a year or two ago into my computer. Happily like most things in Linux, it just worked, that was a great plus. Sadly the software packages in existence that I ran across were either too much or too little, nothing was just right.

What I wanted was to be able to open up a window, tack it to the desktop in always on top mode, and leave it in the corner taking up some but not all of my screen real estate. I also wanted the ability to pause it, so that I could get up, grab a cup of coffee, hit the head, or what ever. Guess what, this falls into the "good luck with that" category of having had someone scratch that particular coding itch.

For the watching TV in a window, I found several applications, such as tvtime and xawtv. Both are good and configurable. Excellent for what they were designed for which was simply just watching TV, either in a window or fullscreen. Sadly of all of the light weight applications I played with they all lacked the second critical function, the ability to pause. So while I decided to keep tvtime on my system because it is rather a nice piece of software the search must continue.

I decided then to explore mythtv. I had read about it several times over the years and finally had a reason to do more than think about it. I knew that it had the ability to record TV, watch movies, and basically handle being a home theater system. Holy unfriendly overkill batman. By the time I had it compiled (I was doing this on a Funtoo system) I was mildly annoyed at the collection of dependencies that had to be pulled in. That annoyance was nothing compared to trying to configuring it.

Between the documentation, complete and utter lack of editable configuration files, a configuration UI that is among the unfriendliest and unintuitive I have ever seen, and an IRC help channel slightly less friendly than the Spanish Inquisition. I think maybe I would prefer to spend a month at a nudist colony with a porcupine infestation than get near that project again.

OK, enough of a sideline about mythtv, needless to say I did get it up and running. I then decided that while it was not completely unsuited to that task at hand, it was exactly what I did not want. Not to mention it still didn't do exactly what I wanted. Which was simply a window in the corner that I could play/pause.
** It was brought to my attention that mythtv will indeed start in a windowed mode
** thanks for correcting my misstatement Dinotrac. Still it's a level of overkill I do not need.

So I decided to set about doing for myself what I could not find an existing application for. While I had been playing with the capture card and software for it, I found that I could watch TV using mplayer, or record TV using mencoder (part of mplayer). Armed with this dangerous knowledge I figured I could wrap everything up in a script to do what I wanted. I was right too. With one script I can watch TV, play/pause, and as an added bonus, when I close the window I was using to watch TV, it asks me if I want to save the streams I had been watching.

There are only two packages that you need for this script, mplayer and xdialog. Actually xdialog is only if you want it to ask you if you want to save the streams and easy file clean up. Alternately you could just change that portion of the script to : rm $location/$filename.avi to have it clean out all the files when you shut mplayer off.

So here you go:
Click here for the script

UPDATE:
Added file rename when save file is selected. Cleaned up spurious text for those using dialog rather than xdialog. Broke up the mencoder command for easier reading and added deinterlacing to it.

Version 2 of the script

Blogspot mangles code snippets, so its in a pastebin. Personally I dropped the script into /usr/bin/ did chmod 755 on it, and use it as I would any other program. So you could make a desktop shortcut, add it to a menu or do what I did. I mapped it to a spare unused key on my keyboard, so now I have TV at the push of one button.

But its not google

2009-08-07T16:51:00.003-08:00

Curious to see what would come up, I entered that search term in both google and bing, the results are curious. Have to wonder why no one trusts MS, because they cant do anything without spinning it in a positive light for themselves.

Yes I know I posted this from a windows machine. I'm on lunch at work, I account for 3/4 of my wages for being forced to use windows.

Automated LVM mounting script

2009-06-13T12:13:00.008-08:00

After having had enough of walking people through how to mount a LVM from a LiveCD I finally got eternally tired of if. This script was done entirely in self defense, however as it is meant to be run to rescue an installation that was done on LVM, it might be handy for a few others as well as it boils down to just 4 commands ... OK one of them is a chained command, but whose counting.

Please note, this script needs to be run with root priveledges and was written to run using LVM2.

I hope it helps someone else.

p.s. sorry for the text size, but it was the only way to keep the formatting correct.

#! /bin/bash
## This script is released under the GPL version 2
## copyright (2009) James Cook
## Thanks goes to Klaus Knopper who reminded me of something
## very simple that I had forgotten at the time, thanks bud.
## the author may be contacted at:
## azerthoth (at) gmail.com

## Check for user is root
## Thanks to micia for the suggestion
if [ $UID -ne 0 ]; then
echo "You need to be root to run this script!"
exit 1
fi
## get them all into /dev/mapper
modprobe dm-mod 2> /dev/null || :
vgscan --ignorelockingfailure --mknodes || :
vgchange -aly --ignorelockingfailure || return 2
clear
mkdir /LVM
cd /dev/mapper
## Create directories and mount
for FILE in *; do
test -b "$FILE" && mkdir /LVM/$FILE && mount /dev/mapper/$FILE /LVM/$FILE 2>/dev/null
done
## List good partitions
echo "Cleaning up LVMs that were swap partitions or with unsupported"
echo "File Systems from the list. This will not effect those partitions"
echo "There is just no need to list or parse them"
rmdir /LVM/Vol* 2>/dev/null"
echo " "
echo "The following LVM(s) were mounted for you and are ready to use"
echo " "
ls /LVM
echo " "
echo "You can find them in /LVM"

Beta Testers

2009-03-27T08:10:00.002-08:00

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

2009-03-22T18:18:00.002-08:00

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

2009-03-01T15:25:00.008-09:00

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

Mr. Stallmans Internet

2009-02-24T07:58:00.003-09:00

*initially published @ lxer.com*

Once more unto the breach my friends, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) has laid another profound thought process out there for us to digest. This man is definitely worth everyones respect. Whether you agree with him or not, he has given the whole planet gifts that it does not even realize for the most part. While not the creator of the concept that the code for software should be free, he is without a doubt the one who codified the concept. He laid out exactly what it means for software to be free, in such a fashion that even most laymen could understand it. This alone should earn him the respect of the planet, however, it does not stop at that point.

He is tireless in his campaign to right the wrongs he perceives of the modern technological world, from copyright reform to software patents, from speaking out about Darfur to the oppression of civil rights in any form in any country that he becomes aware of. The man is a machine when it comes to doing his level best to improve the situation of all of humanity, everywhere. There is some debate among the Open Source community as to who is more influential RMS or Linus Torvalds. I think Linus puts it well in that he is just an engineer while RMS is the conductor. However, when all the rest of RMS's goals and accomplishments are laid out, it is no stretch of the imagination to place him on the field of history along with Nicola Tesla, the man who invented the 20th and now 21st century, or Nelson Mandella whose tireless campaign for basic human rights landed him in jail. While RMS, to my knowledge hasn’t been jailed for his beliefs, as he tells it, a run in with the Transportation Safety Authority almost landed him there due to some imprecise language on the part of one of their gestapo agents.

With all that said, you would think that I was among those who idolize and indemnify him. I do not. Like the coyote in his never ending chase for the road runner, he through every fault of his own, keeps snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. To keep with the coyote and road runner analogy for a moment longer, the coyote did once catch the speeding bird, and then let it go because the thrill of the chase was better than the catching. RMS too has had a win, and then let it go so as to continue the chase into the sunset. However the debates over that rocket and roller skate chase are legion, and take up enough screen real estate already.

Let’s take a look at what has me annoyed with Mr. Stallman this time. In a recent interview with Thomas Nowak, as published on polishlinux.org, RMS dropped this seemingly profound piece of wisdom.

Tarabaz: How can we stop censoring the internet, and help personally in this fight?

RMS: I have four suggestions:

* Keep your wireless networks open, so that you will not become an enforcer for an unjust Internet regime.

* Tell politicians you demand they legalize sharing of all published works, and that you will accept no excuse for failing to do this.

* Reject all products with Digital Restrictions Management that you don’t have the means to crack, and never make an exception.

* Join the DefectiveByDesign.org campaign.

Full article at http://polishlinux.org/gnu/richard-stallman-on-isp-filtering-and-censorship/

Lets take these in reverse order, and save the major sticking point for last.

Points 3 and 4, are actually the same thing, and on the face of it make perfect sense to anyone who believes in freedom. The problem I have with it is pretty simple. There are places where I do not want anyone to be able to change the code and leave it a functional piece of equipment such as cruise missiles. Imagine someone getting in and making a change or two that pass undetected. Trust me, I don't want that thing to ever take flight. If someone tampers with the machine that controls an I.V. drip in the hospital, I want that thing to start screaming it's little alarm and turn into a very useless brick.

Point 2, I actually wrote about some time ago. Not going into detail now, as that article is pretty easy to find. He is in essence trying to destroy the GPL from the inside by removing the only protection and all the teeth that it has.

The previous points are mentioned only in passing and have little to do with the actual topic at hand.

Point 1 is the major problem this time around. It seems benign enough on the surface, even positive and proactive, but let’s break it down for what it really means.

* Keep your wireless networks open, so that you will not become an enforcer for an unjust Internet regime.

First objection is the keep your wireless networks open part. Nice thought, however, the first failing point is this leaves your IP address open to any malicious hacker, script kiddie, and pervert who want to not have what ever they are doing point back to them. Yes, most routers keep logs of the MAC addresses that connect to them, but I challenge anyone to track that back to a mobile computer or device a month or so after the fact. Let’s also not discount that it is functionally impossible to secure your computers and internal network from outside access. Why make it easier by granting access to the center of your network in the first place? The mentality of the individual involved is sure to make them try and see just how far they can penetrate.

There is also the little fact that many in the world live with a bandwidth cap or access charge per whatever time increment is the custom in that area, be it minute, hour, day or so on. This means that the bandwidth and access granted is at that moment my personal possession. I can think of nowhere in the world, where personal freedom and liberty, something that RMS espouses, are paid even basic lip service that would require or even ask me to share my possessions with anyone without my consent. To put it another way, I don't leave my garage door open so that anyone can come in and wander off with my tools without my knowledge. The tools weren't free, nor is the access, and neither is even remotely duplicable by the common person.

It's fairly easy now to read that as neither your personal privacy, security nor ownership is of any consequence when it comes to a perceived 'greater good'. This is the first failing point of the comment and just as a start, it is a doozy. The second part, however, fails on an even more epic scale.

Second objection is the unjust internet regime portion. This one can be debunked with a few simple facts. Neither you nor I own the copper, satellite, servers, or fiber optic rings that actually carry that data. That belongs to the companies that purchased, launched, or installed them. Next is the misconception that you purchase internet access, when in fact you do not. You lease your internet access. Purchase denotes ownership in perpetuity or until some point that you dispose of it in some manner, at which time you no longer can be said to own it. Leasing it on the other hand, as is what you are actually doing, grants you only access and use. When you lease a space for business, the landlord still actually owns the physical property and lets you use the space, within reason.

The same thing applies to the internet. While leasing, you are granted access to what is there, within the restrictions of the folks who actually own the equipment you are using. You own your computer, and are free to do with it what you like. However, your computer and the internet is kind of like your car and the road. You can do lots of things with your car too, but once you put it on a road, you are restricted by laws and regulations that ensure that you do not intentionally or unintentionally damage or destroy anything that does not belong to you. This is called civility. The same can be said about the folks who actually do own the hardware that your computer is driving down. They are well within their rights to say what protocols and ports are open for you to lease and use. Like driving your car at 120 miles per hour, you may want to but there are reasons you cannot. There are protocols and services that do the same thing on the internet, and while you may want to do or use these, it does not give anyone the right to do so. The companies are within their rights, to limit or flat deny such things so as to allow fair and equitable use for all who lease access to the services their hardware provides.

In a perfect world, would free, unlimited and unfettered access be a good thing? Yes, of course. However, that is not the case. The reality of it is that there are physical and financial limitations involved that will be there for the foreseeable future. The technology of wireless mesh networking is just now coming to pass, and while that is a step in that direction, it works only within the limitations of a local network. A mesh network is not the internet itself. To get to the internet, one or more of the mesh nodes would still need to lease those services, which of course then fall under the rightful restrictions of those who own that particular chunk of hardware.

So I think that the comment has been fully dissected.

* Keep your wireless networks open, so that you will not become an enforcer for an unjust Internet regime.

The first, you have no rights to, and the second does not exist except in the minds of a few who don't understand why driving 200 miles an hour through a school zone is a bad idea. In the end, the restrictions are not in place to preclude individual freedom and liberty, but precisely because of individual freedom and liberty. Mr. Stallman’s view of how the internet should work is in direct conflict with this concept. Taking liberty from one and giving to another is just a form of theft. Whether for the greater good or not, theft and repression is never justified. Ultimately, there are individuals attached to all the wonderful hardware we use to transfer data, play games, and talk to each other, who actually own it.

Nuff said, rant over.

The Intercloud

2008-12-08T12:54:00.003-09:00

Cloud computing, the Internet rave of the hour. Well Virginia I have some problems with it. For a little while now I have been doing some of my work in Google Docs. I'll admit it is handy for what it does, and it's absolutely perfect for what is does not. Mind you I am not a typical person in my computing habits. I move from computer to computer, even inside my own house. I move from OS to OS between work and home and I am liable to be without connectivity for days at a time.

I have a single piece of technology that I carry with me everywhere, my PDA. Not a cell phone PDA, just a normal run of the mill embedded windows PDA. I have been know to write articles and short stories using nothing but that. However even giving that a miss, what is truly missing from Google Docs (or atleast I cant find it) is a way to sync between the online version of something to an offline device and then back again. Oh and did I mention that versioning while not a requirement would be really really nice. Until such time as something like that exists, where I can seamlessly move from connected to disconnected and back again without ever actually knowing that I have done so, cloud computing is ever so aptly named, a lot of vapor with no substance.

Yes I know, I can just use a thumbdrive and carry my stuff with me as I move from computer to computer and connected states. Thats not the point, you want to sell me on cloud computing, I need to be able to work in the fashion that my life takes me. I like Google Docs, I do, just that for me it's fairly limited in application. I use it now as a place to do Blog articles mostly as I can export directly to my blathering spot. On rare occasion will I use it as a collaborative tool instead of just emailing versions of documents around. Thats it, and for me, thats not enough to be a full fledged functioning killer app, and of the cloud computing hooha, it's the ONLY thing that even remotely interests me.

nuff said
Have fun
Azerthoth.

*edit*
For Blogging purposes. It's fantastic as I can handle revision control, editing, draft, and research and one touch publish all from a single interface. I thought I would say something nice about it, and that is really nice.
*/edit*

Funtoo

2008-11-26T21:36:00.003-09:00

I sit here watching the first emerge --sync go slowly scrolling by in preparation for my second go around with Funtoo. The Funtoo creator Daniel Robbins, the same man who gave us Gentoo, has started a new project for us geeks to play with. My first pass with it was fine, and I still have it going, however while it has a functional X server and environment, it never made it past being a chroot playtoy. This time I'm putting the code to the metal as it were.

Setting up a Funtoo system should be old hat to anyone who has ever played with Gentoo, your doing a stage3, either x86_64 or i686 are the prime focus of Funtoo. So if you want/need, grab the handbook and maybe one of Daniels stage3's (normal Gentoo stage3 works just fine too) and get busy. Alternately if you already running Gentoo, switching to Funtoo is so easy it should be illegal. The first thing you'll be happy to know is, emerge --sync is gone, Funtoo and pulling Gentoo repos is done via Git, a much smoother and simpler operation IMHO. Overlays however remain the same as always, being handled via layman. Which is fine, because like it or not, there are some things in the Sabayon overlay that I really like, as well as in a few other overlays. So without a doubt the system will very quickly become uniquely mine.

I think thats one of the things that I really like about the group of people that are around Funtoo at the moment. The cross section of people who are working on it for the right reason, fun. There are well known names from the Gentoo community, some from Sabayon, one from Arch Linux and a smattering of interested others. We all seem to get along, in a gun toting, meat eating, beer swilling, redneck kind of way. No one is giving up their other projects really, just adding Funtoo to the list of things to tinker with when time and inclination allows. No pressures, dead lines, or people clamoring for some odd function to be added. Like I said, it's all for the fun of doing it.

Funtoo however is very much a solve it on your own project. If you aren't capable of getting into the guts of your system without someone holding your hand and spoon feeding you the commands you will be in over your head with a quickness. If you cant get the same response to any given question out of Google two times out of three, or aren't inclined to spend an hour pouring over Gentoo documentation you may end up being hopelessly lost. Funtoo is exactly that, fun, for geeks. It's perfectly capable of being your daily driver, as it is in a large part still Gentoo. However I remember when I used to refer to Gentoo as the Linux for those with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

If your not scared yet, and want to give something new and challenging a try head over to http://www.funtoo.org/

Have fun
~Az

Making a Bootable USB from DVD image

2008-10-16T13:24:00.010-08:00

One of the big problems of making a bootable USB is file size. Almost all of the how-to's out there that allow to pass kernel commands during the boot process require the use of syslinux, which uses FAT16/FAT32 formated partitions. This comes with the drawback of limiting your maximum file size to 2 Gigabyte if using FAT32. A DVD release has it's main file, livecd.squashfs that can run up to nearly 4 Gigabyte, twice the maximum allowable size. In other words, Epic Fail. Here is a way around that.

This How-To will be covering use of a variation of a syslinux bootable USB drive, extlinux. As you might figure from it's name it allows you to use ext2/ext3 to format your partitions, thereby removing the 2 Gigabyte limit and allowing you to fit that monster livecd.squashfs onto your thumbdrive. For this example I will be using a 4 Gigabyte thumbdrive and Sabayon Linux 3.5 32 bit.

The first step to this is making sure you have syslinux installed. So depending on your distribution, apt-get install, emerge, urpmi -i, equo install ... etc etc etc, syslinux. This, if your distribution is any where near current, will also include extlinux.

You might as well go root and stay there. Yes, lots of this can be accomplished via GUI apps, and there are a plethora out there that you can use to accomplish a good chunk of these tasks. Command line though brings us to a common point that all your GUI apps are bolted on to anyway. That and because it's my preferance. From here on out I am going to assume that you are root (Ubuntu users this means 'sudo su -').

The next step to this is formatting the USB drive.
First identify your thumbdrive.

fdisk -l

If you read the output of this the first line of each device will tell you the size of the device, which makes it pretty easy to see which is a hard drive and which is not.

In my case /dev/sdb as shown below:

Disk /dev/sdb: 4016 MB, 4016045568 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 488 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0004adbb

Make sure to substitute your device, /dev/sd(?)
fdisk /dev/sdb

Command (m for help): d
Selected partition 1

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-16065, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-1015, default 1015):
Using default value <hit enter here for defualt>

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 83

Command (m for help): a
Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

mkfs.ext2 -j /dev/sdb1

Next is to install the syslinux boot sector, I know we said we were going to be using extlinux, but bear with it for a few. Thumbdrives don't come with a boot sector, so we have to make one and that's what we are doing here.

dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

Please note that this is the location of the syslinux mbr.bin for Gentoo and Sabayon, your distribution may hide it somewhere else. The command 'find / -name mbr.bin' will pin it down for you, this command will scan your entire hard drive so it is kind of slow. Just substitute the absolute path to mbr.bin in the command above.

Now we need to make a few mount points and mount the ISO and the thumbdrive, remember to substitute your thumbdrive location for the one in the example.

mkdir /mnt/iso
mkdir /mnt/usb
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
mount -o loop -t iso9660 /path/to/iso /mnt/iso
(as an example mount -o loop -t iso9660 /home/jim/Sabayon-Linux-x86-3.5.iso /mnt/iso)

Now we copy things over that we will need.

cp -rvp /mnt/iso/boot isolinux livecd livecd.squashfs README.txt /mnt/usb

This could take awhile with a DVD iso image. The livecd.squashfs is a monster. Go get a cup of coffee and check back in a few minutes. After it is finished copying we can continue on by running the following commands which set up the files for use by extlinux and make the needed changes to the boot sector.

cd /mnt/usb
mv isolinux extlinux
mv extlinux/isolinux.cfg extlinux/extlinux.conf
rm extlinux/isolinux.bin
cd /mnt
extlinux -i /mnt/usb/extlinux

Your done, wasn't that easy. The final piece to this is unmounting everything we mounted earlier.

umount /mnt/usb
umount /mnt/iso

Now you can reboot into the USB drive by selecting to boot from USB, the ways the various BIOS's handle this though are too numerous to list. Typically there will be an interupt option during the POST to select boot device. If not you'll probably have to go into the BIOS itself and find out where to select it.

Have Fun
~Az

Where is GNU ?

2008-07-17T16:06:00.005-08:00

Well, the odds were good, but I know I never actually thought about it. Most people would recognize LAX as the three letter airport identifier for Los Angeles International or ORD for Chicago O'Hare. So what is one of our (computer geek) favorite TLA (three letter anacronym), why GNU of course. In this case, as an airport identifier GNU is Goodnews Bay, Alaska.

Here is a box tag from a local airline that services GNU:
I used GIMP to smudge out the airline name and phone number, other than that it's exactly what it looked like when I pulled it out of my pocket and scanned it.

From Google maps here is a link to show you where this place actually is.

CLICK HERE

Okay, enough for now, I found it and thought it was fun. Sharing time is over.

~Az

p.s. I have landed there and gotten out of the plane, but didn't go looking around. It was a stop on the way to another village I was visiting.

Sabayon 3.5

2008-07-11T14:05:00.004-08:00

It's official, Sabayon 3.5 has been released as stable. It's time to say that it has truly come into it's own now. No longer simply a spin off of Gentoo it has improved upon it's parent by leaps and bounds. Foremost in this is the Entropy package manager, which simply put allows binary distribution of packages, similar to apt-get, pacman, urpmi, etc while still maintaining full compatablity with Gentoo's source based package distribution (Portage).

While using a binary packager instead of source you loose one key function of Portage, you no longer have the option of tweaking USE flags, so the packages are more generic than system specific. However it does not rule out the possability of using Portage if you need the fine grained control over specific packages or your whole system.

The Entropy method does offer one huge advantage over Portage though, and that is in full system upgrades. No more do you spend days rebuilding modules, python, and packages that need specific options set. If you have ever done a Gentoo world upgrade you know the pain and frustration that it can become. Entropy allows the whole process to be completed using only a single command that happens at the speed of your internet connection. Then if you want or need to, you can recompile the specific packages you want uber control of.

While the Sabayon crew will tell you, and rightly so, that mixing and matching between Entropy and Portage is dangerous and possibly system destabalizing, I have not yet run into any real issues with it. Mind you I only take fine grained control of specific packages that I use every day, such as wine and firefox.

The speed and stability of Gentoo are still present as well as it's incredible selection of packages and other associated overlays. Now this may sound like this is simply a more user friendly version of Gentoo, but it is so much more. It is one of the most out of the box functional distributions that I have ever experianced. From having Compiz-Fusion active even from the LiveDVD without the need for additional drivers, to the wonderful suprise of finding that my network attached printer had been detected and configured without any interaction from me at all and finding ALL my media immeadiatly playable.

There is also a great dirth of information available for it that is more controlled and professional than other distributions. The level of incorrect or out of date fanboi help and how-to's is minimal. While nearly all of the Gentoo documentation is applicable to Sabayon (and a nod to THE BEST documenation of any Linux goes to the Gentoo folks) there is also Sabayon spefic docs that keep to the high standards that the Gentoo community maintains.

If your interested in having the speed and stability of a Gentoo based system with the improved ease of use and management of modern desktop, perhaps better than most. Also having the Out of the box functionality that so many users crave with little to no mucking about with things after installation, give Sabayon a try.

For those without a DVD drive needed to install Sabayon, there is a CD sized installer that contains a very minimal set of packages, or alternatly you can use the how-to I wrote for installing the DVD without actually having a DVD drive by booting from the .iso.

~Az

Happy 4th of July

2008-07-04T09:37:00.004-08:00

Happy 4th of July everyone. This has nothing to do with Linux today, rather the condition of the United States. While traditionally this is the day we celebrate our declaration of freedom for the oppressive rule of a foreign monarch, I thought I would post a video as to how well the most basic tenet of how we accomplished this task is holding up.

If a picture says 1000 words, then this is nearly the library of congress. Lesson learned? If authorities ever come up to you without a warrant and ask if you have weapons ... well I wont say to say no, but use your best discretion. If you want to be able to continue your constitutionally guaranteed right of self defense I'm sure you can pick a proper response.

~Az

Awesomebar or Breach of Trust?

2008-06-22T11:53:00.002-08:00

I just made the transition from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and my initial reaction was, well, underwhelmed. On further use though I realized that there is a horrid privacy issue that has existed for some time. It was the Awesomebar that brought this to light, which should be renamed by the way to the annoying bar. Anything that absorbs that much of my screen real estate and is that intrusive should have an easy way to turn it off.

That is not the privacy concern though. What really caught my attention was the fact that I have had Firefox set to not remember a thing. No history, flush the cache, cookies ... everything when I close the browser. If I want to revisit a site at a later date I bookmark it. Now with the advent of the Awesomebar I discovered that when I started typing in a URL that even though my history tab is empty that the Awesomebar was still pulling up the sites I had visited even though I had explicitly told it not to. What was more shocking was that I was seeing websites show up in there that I had visited prior to installing Firefox 3.

What in the world? There is a reason I dont want my browser to cache this stuff. I do not want anyone who walks up to my computer to be able to take a look at where I have been or what I have been researching. For one thing when I am at work I'm not really supposed to be going to sites like LXer or Groklaw, well, actually I can go there, I'm just not supposed to spend as much time as I do there. Or say I run across an interesting bit of news that sends me off on a knowledge hunt about the how or what of something. I realize that any of the IT folks who monitor network traffic could figure it out really quick, that's not my point though. My browser should NOT be caching this information against my express wishes.

Anyone, and I mean anyone with a little knowledge can walk up to your system and pull your history regardless of what you have told the browser to flush or not retain. This is not just breach of privacy, it's a breach of trust. I find it ethically questionable and morally reprehensible. So thanks to the Awesomebar for bringing this to my attention however my reaction after I sat down and thought about it for a few minutes was to start inventing a few new vulgar words to direct at the Firefox team.

Make no mistakes, this is not another undocumented "feature". This is a breach of public trust. Your browser is tracking EXACTLY what you have told it not to track or retain. I love using Firefox, but this revelation has set me to taking a serious look at other broswers for personal use, as should anyone who is concerned with personal privacy.

This is my call to Firefox. Fix it, and fix it now.

~Az

Fun and games.

2008-06-07T12:36:00.004-08:00

While it's been awhile since I posted anything, the time has hardly been wasted. As with all things learning is a never ending cycle. That is pretty much what has been going on over the last few weeks, finding problems and then beating my head against them until I win.

The start of the process was when I decided that the OLPC XO I had picked up needed to do something useful, because to be honest, as it comes to you, it is a really interesting looking lime green brick. Just my opinion of it. Until I had started the process of doing something with it, the most useful thing I had done with it is get onto IRC via irssi. Curiously enough I did that via SSH'ing into the XO and then hitting IRC, that keyboard is too tiny for nearly any adult who doesnt have dwarfism.

After running through several iterations of Debian and Ubuntu I finally settled on one that works acceptably. So my XO is now attached to the back of my printer/scanner. It works as a cups/samba print server, a scanner controller via a vnc connection to the rest of the computers on the network using kooka, and a webserver for the network. The scanner drops it's images straight into the webserver to make retrieval easy for everyone on the network. If your curious the version that finally landed on my XO is a customized Ubuntu.
http://sprocket.io/blog/2008/05/ubuntu-hardy-heron-on-the-olpc-xo-1/

Of course part of this whole project required me to completely redesign my network. Which was fine. My old linksys router wouldn't handle static IP's. So I picked up another D-Link configured it to handle static IP's via it handing them out via DHCP. Since everything was static now it meant I could go in and set up the hosts file on all the computers, which was as easy as always, right up until I sat down to do my wifes Vista laptop. After a little research, it wasn't all that difficult, the real trick was finding it and editing it using proper permissions.

I also decided to try out a distro I hadn't ever used before, Arch Linux. I found it to be very not newbie friendly, but for anyone with some experience under their belt it was very straight forward to set up. Being touted as light weight, I have to say I have done smaller Debian installs. It weighed in without any X or other niceties at around 650-700 meg, still all things considered not bad. Since I was trying things different I decided to revisit e17 (enlightenment) for my GUI on that install. Setting it up was easy and I have to say I like it enough to keep playing with it.

Overall Arch doesn't offer the natural fine grained control over my system that I get using Gentoo/Sabayon. Speed wise it feels very snappy and responsive though and very complete. There will definitely be more playing with it to find the rest of it's weak points and strong points. From the start though, if your not a total noob and you want more control over your system and what is on it than most other distro's offer, Arch seems a really nice solution.

Good Computing
~Az

CD/DVD install with no CD/DVD

2008-04-27T08:32:00.015-08:00

Want to install a DVD release of Linux but dont have a DVD drive or recorder? Your CD/DVD drive has died but you still want to install a new or updated version of Linux? You can, and you can do it all from your hard drive without burning a single CD or DVD.

To start we need to make a partition for the image to reside on. Two bits of advice, put the partition at the very end of the drive so you can recover the HD space later on if you wish. It's easy to add more room to the end of a partition but nearly impossible to add more room at the beginning of a partition. The second bit is, if you have no working CD/DVD drive at all you will need another way to resize your drives, for this I recommend going to http://www.pendrivelinux.com. They have a great list of thumb drive installs and how-to's, as well as their own version aptly called pendrivelinux which is great. You'll have to install gparted on it but still, very handy and a must have for your toolkit.

Okay, one way or another we now have a way to resize the drive, my personal preference is gparted. For the next step the size of the .iso we will be working with is needed. The one I will be using in this example is 3.9 Gig so I need 3.9 Gig plus a little bit for a fudge factor. A few hundred meg should be sufficient, however in my case I want to also back up some critical data so I bumped it to 5 Gig. You dont have to, but this is a great way to back up things you want to have readily available after you install. The minimum though is .iso size plus a bit, say 10% of .iso size.

You can use gparted to make this partition ext2 or you can issue the following command to do it. As root:

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda4

Where /dev/sda4 is the partition you just created, /dev/sda4 was mine. Make sure to change it to the one you actually made.

Next we need to get ready to start putting things together. All of the commands we will be using for this need to be issued as root so you might as well go there and stay there for awhile.

mkdir /mnt/iso
mkdir /mnt/target
mount -t ext2 /dev/sda4 /mnt/target

(note here, /dev/sda4 needs to changed to the one you made)

mount -o loop -t iso9660 /path/to/image /mnt/iso

(note here, for me this would be /home/jim/dls/Sabayon-Linux-x86-3.5-Loop2-r2.iso . Yours will differ, adjust accordingly)

cp -rvp /mnt/iso/* /mnt/target

Great almost done, but now your going to have to do a little thinking. We have to get what we just did to boot. Since the example I'm using probably wont be the one you will be using I will point out the changes you need to make. Regardless it's fairly straightforward.

We need to figure out the configuration we need to feed to GRUB to actually fire this up. Luckily 99% of this has already been done for us by whoever released the liveCD/DVD.

cd /mnt/target
ls -l

look around here for either isolinux.cfg or syslinux.cfg, if it is not in this directory

cd isolinux
ls -l

and look for it in this directory.

Once you have found it:

cat isolinux.cfg (syslinux.cfg if thats what you have)

You are going to get a lot of stuff here, we are actually only concerned with a little bit. The line LABEL is what we are looking for, the first one usually but read the LABEL to make sure its the one your looking for. In my case:

LABEL sabayon
menu label ^Start SabayonLinux 3.5 Loop2
kernel /boot/sabayon
append root=/dev/ram0 initrd=/boot/sabayon.igz aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 quiet music --

Is the one I want. When you see the next line that says LABEL, that is a seperate boot entry and you wont need it. Now we need to make a few changes to it, to make it bootable from GRUB.

title sabayon
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/sabayon root=/dev/ram0 aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot=/dev/sda4 looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 music quiet --
initrd /boot/sabayon.igz

First you'll see I changed it from LABEL to title and removed the menu label line.

Second you'll see I added root(hd0,3). You'll need to adjust this to match where you extracted the .iso image. GRUB counts from 0 so drive 1 = 0 and partition 4 = 3. sda3 would be (hd0,2) sdb3 would be (hd1,2) and so on.

Third you will see that I left the kernel line alone.

Fourth you will see that I removed the word append and then moved the whole thing up so it follows the original kernel line. Then moved initrd=/boot/sabayon.igz to it's own line at the very bottom. Following that a bit further you will also find that where it says cdroot I added the actual partition where we extracted the .iso.

Note that while it looks complex, and the one you will be looking at will probably look significantly different your only actually making a small handful of changes. Just make the small edits as described leaving the rest alone and you'll be golden.

Okay, lets say you now have your entry figured out. Now you simply have to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add it to the very end of that file. This file has to be edited as root, and make sure you dont over write anything that is in there already.

Save the file, reboot, and you should see the entry for the LiveCD/DVD as an option in your boot menu.

Once your done you can safely remove the partition you made and reclaim the space using gparted again, or leave it in place and have an emergency boot, although you will have to add the lines back into GRUB if you overwrote your last one if/when you installed.

I wish I could take full credit for this, however I cant. I was working on making a USB variant of this, and was almost there but was having a few problems with it when jvj posted an almost line for line how to in the sabayon wiki. I want to thank him for pointing out that cdroot needed to be pointed to the partition, which is where I was stuck at. Since we both use Sabayon and Loop2 is the most current beta at the time of the writing that is why so much of his wiki entry and my how to look so similar.

Anyway, thanks jvj, and to the rest of you, happy computing.

~Az

*UPDATE* 07July08

I'm happy to say that Sabayon 3.5 has officially been released and that the above how-to has been tested against it and it worked perfectly. Here is the grub.conf entry I used to get it working on my laptop.

title Sabayon 3.5 Install/LiveDVD
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/sabayon root=/dev/ram0 aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot=/dev/sda4 looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 quiet --
initrd /boot/sabayon.igz

Remember you will have to adjust root (hd0,3) and cdroot=/dev/sda4 to reflect your actual system as explained in the above article. Due to formatting issues of the blog I should point out that everything from kernel /boot/sabayon to quiet -- is actually one long line.

**UPDATE** 17Oct08
I finally did a write up for how to make a bootable USB from a DVD image. If you have a 4 Gig or larger thumbdrive handy give it a try.
Again, Happy Computing
~Az

Linux and Ipod Video Conversion

2008-04-09T20:59:00.005-08:00

Okay, lets face it, I'm lazy ... really really lazy. When I picked up my new iPod (yes I finally joined the iLemming crowd) it took me only a few minutes to figure out that gtkpod was probably going to be my best bet for my 5G 30 Gig music toy. I promptly spent the following week using all my spare time feeding my computer CD after CD and still coming up with a heck of alot of unused space.

I knew that the wonder toy could do video as well, and that gtkpod could manage the video files as well, just not on the fly conversion to what ever format it wanted to be fed. Thus started my research project and my headache. It can do video, but it is supremely picky about just what it will take as far as bitrate, aspect ratio, and file type.

I started the project thinking to use transcode and command line. After this decision and alot of language that is not ever to be used in the presence of women, children, or fish, I was amazed that I had any hair left. The next step was a little more research and deciding to try it with ffmpeg. 2 days later and some blood, sweat, and more colorful invective, success. I made a (singular) video that my ipod would accept and play, rapidly followed by 2 more that wouldn't.
This was frustrating to say the least. So I attacked google once again and much to my delight I ran across 'convert2videomp4' at kdeapps.org. A simple little utility that adds an encoding option to the KDE menu. Right click on the file you want to convert ... any video file your computer can play and select the final file output you want. The rest happens automagically.

So now with this handy little collection of scripts in an easy to use menu, I can go back to being as lazy as I want to be. Right click, convert, load to iPod. On a side note I highly recommend that you edit the meta tags on these files either before or after you get them onto the iPod. If nothing else set the Genre of it to Movie. The first one I put on I could not take back off because I could not find it using gtkpod for a half an hour or so. Very frustrating, but lesson learned, always always always edit the meta tags the minute you transfer the file. Also if using gtkpod, add the video's one at a time and save the changes between each one, it doesn't seem to like batch transferring movie files.

This little gem can be found at www.kde-apps.org, the instructions for installing are very straight forward and simple, just a little script to be run as a normal user, as long as you have the prerequisite codecs already installed. They are listed on the main page where I linked to.

p.s. Sorry Steve, this isn't the article I was discussing with you, but it is still in the back of my mind.

Destroying the GPL from the inside

2008-01-05T16:44:00.001-09:00

Honestly I don't think it will be done, but there is a way. Simply put, the GPL is a copyright license which is it's strength and it's achillies heel. For years publishing companies and our friends at the RIAA and MPAA among others have pushed for longer and longer copyright lives so that they can reap the rewards from other people's work for a longer period of time. So why not turn things on their heads a bit? What I am talking about has actually already been proposed, and definitely not my idea.

Step 1: Categorize copyrights. Say into Functional (someone else's term) for things like code. A good name since what the code does is function as a human readable version of what software will do. The second category Non-Functional, for things like books, works of art, movies, etc. In other words things that are nice but in and of themselves do or produce nothing.

Step 2: Remove copyright protection from functional copyrights or set the term on them to some ridiculously short period of time, say two or three years. The media moguls wont object to this as it touches none of their core business. They have the money and the lobbying power to fend off any such attempts to remove their privileges.

Who would benefit from this? At first glance from the proposal I read, it would be open source itself because the code that went into a multitude of projects would land fully in the lap of public domain. Nice thought, but nothing could be further from the truth.

So lets ask again, who would benefit from this? The same people who already have the money and lobbying power to accomplish the deed, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and any number of other closed source companies. GPL'd code would also land in public domain free and clear of any license encumberments. Everyone's code would be public domain, free to use, modify, and redistribute which has been the goal of the free software movement all along, so it must be a good thing right?

Wrong.

There is nothing that says that even though the copyright on proprietary code could come to term that any company HAS to release it. As a matter of fact, it would most likely get shoved under the rug as a “Trade Secret” like the recipe for a certain soft drink that comes in a red can with a white swoosh. There is no lifetime on Trade Secrets and even if it got leaked somehow and you got your hands on it, its still illegal to use.

So what do we have now? GPL'd code that is free and clear for any proprietary software company in the world to use. Nothing need be returned or documented, nor would there be any legal recourse to stop the use of or recover the rights to any of that source code.

Wow, that's going to hurt.

A quick recap:

We have a company with associates who actually have the money to pay for a serious run at making it happen. The other major players in the copyright field would not be affected one bit and therefor are not very likely to fight it. Heck, some of those other major players may even toss their hats into the ring for it considering the many connections proprietary software companies have. We would have then lost all our rights and any control to all code covered by any open source license, with nothing to show for it in return. We would still be able to use a lot of code and it would certainly end the debate about the GPL/BSD/MIT/etc licensing rights because they would all be capable of being mixed and matched, but that doesn't do anyone any real good in the end.

Does this seem like a nice little conspiracy theory to you yet? Think I need to be fitted with a tin foil beanie and/or a straight jacket? Well I'm just talking about it, the idea is most certainly not mine. You can find the source for my maunderings here, taken from links I found on the FSF website where you can ask the author yourself why he thinks gutting the GPL is such a good idea.

The Planet is Fine

2007-10-23T19:54:00.001-08:00

Here is a link that I ran across that has alot of "Inconvenient" Truths, sorry Al.

Truths

To paraphrase, here is George Carlin laying it out for you.

Insecure by Default

2007-10-11T02:58:00.001-08:00

Guess what, I can walk up to your Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Debian, etc desktop installation and take complete control over it without needing a single password. Thats right, root access simply by sitting down at your computer. Why is it nearly every single distro by default leaves this gaping security hole open? Seriously, it is possible to fix the problem during installation, my personal favorite, Sabayon, asks if you want to password GRUB as part of the installation.

What am I talking about? One simple word 'single', thats it. You walk up to nearly every default desktop installation, reboot it then break the boot cycle when GRUB fires up. If GRUB is not passworded, and the default for almost all installations is that it isn't, you now have the option to grant yourself root access.

On single or multi boot systems, select the installation you want and instead of hitting enter to boot, enter 'e' to edit. Select the boot line with all the kernel options, typically the second, and hit 'e' again. Scroll all the way to the end of the line and add the word 'single'. Hit enter and press 'b' for boot.

The system will now start booting up in what appears to be normal fashion. With one exception, instead of dropping you into the GUI it will drop you into CLI with root access automagically granted. From that point on the system is mine. I can change passwords, add users, add background processes such as ftp access or ssh access for myself. Maybe add a hidden user account not so hidden if you know what you are looking for in /etc/passwd, but you have to know to look at it. In other words, anything.

So I ask again, why with security being such an assumed when running Linux is this hole left open? It is possible to close this after the fact, and it is not difficult at all. Directions on how to accomplish this simple security measure can be found:

http://www.cs.wcupa.edu/~rkline/Linux/grub.html
or
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/security/security-handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
(that one includes securing LILO as well)
or
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-secure-grub-boot-loader.html

Also if you happen to screw it up and need to recover from locking your GRUB you'll need a LiveCD and the directions here, or a little common sense.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-recovering-grub-boot-loader-password.html

So now, what is your excuse for not securing your bootloader from me? How often do you actually have to go in and mess with it or even look at it? Isn't five minutes of your time worth knowing that no one is going to access your system when your back is turned?

Oh did I mention that Sabayon gives you the option to do this as part of the install routine? I did, but this is a good place for a shameless plug for my distro of choice.

~Az

9/29 what a week

2007-09-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

Been a really interesting week for me. So a quick recap:

1: I wont be doing any more opinion pieces on this blog. I have been offered and after a little discussion and thought, accepted a place to put my opinions. My next opinion piece which I am working on right now will be appearing at thenixedreport.com. I would like to thank the editor of that site for offering this position, especially considering the rocky start we got off to when I publicly called him on the carpet for one of the pieces he wrote.

It takes a great person to be able to take a person who has called you out and then turn around with no rancor at all and offer to give them a place to vent their views points. I am really looking forward to working with him and am grateful for the opportunity he has offered me. I may not be a journalist, but boy howdy do I have some opinions.

2: My old reliable laptop has finally started to give up the ghost. A Compaq Presario R3000, a AMD 3000+ (1600 Mhz) with 512 on board, 40 gig HD and a 32 meg video card. It has been my traveling companion for these last few years and has logged around 40,000 miles with me. The cooling fan died and I didn't notice. It is rather silent to start with and it was sitting next to my desktop which is anything but quiet.

Since I run Sabayon I tend to have to compile software that I use. This jams the CPU to 100% load and leaves it there, sometimes for a long stretch. It did in this case at a time when I started the job and walked away. Too late I checked on it's progress and noticed that the case was insanely hot. While I did manage to get it turned off in time, there was some noticeable damage done. If I lock the CPU down to around 800 Mhz it will function fine as long as I dont stress it too much, but it's days as a work horse are over.

Which brings me to my happy news. I had to get a new laptop. A sparkly HP dv6000t, which has for the first time since my P166 so many years ago, an Intel processor, dual core even. Hi Def wide screen, 2 Ghz, 2 Gig onboard, DVD R/W, and a 256 meg nVidia video card. All for less than $850.00 including shipping via 2nd day air. Too bad I am in bush Alaska and 2nd day air actually means sometime next week, with luck. So it is a race now, to see if the new laptop gets to me before I leave the state for 5 weeks. If not my wife has agreed to ship it to me in Kansas City, but being offline for more than a few days is pure hell for me. Just have to play it by ear I guess.

Did I mention that the thing is being shipped with Vista on it? So for the first time ever I get to try my hand at getting the Windows Tax Refund. That should be interesting and different, however I have my Sabayon install disc all set and ready for it the day I get it. More on that experiance later. Until then ...

Have Fun
~Az

Have been AFK

2007-09-20T13:27:00.001-08:00

I have been AFK for awhile. Not because of the responses received from my previous article, just that real life managed to catch up with me. Lots of work and travel to remote villages in Alaska, and when I was home I was spending as much time as I could with my family.

I have in mind several pieces to write. Many of them would probably be considered inflammatory by some, this as evidenced previously doesn't phase me a whole lot. So perhaps over the next few weeks I'll get around to writing them, at this point though even all the notes I have for them are locked away in the mostly unused space between my ears.

Whats else has been going on? Removed PCLOS from both of my laptops, one got Ubuntu just for ease and simplicity in maintenance. The other got Sabayon, and is anxiously awaiting the Sabayon 3.4 mini which as of this writting is still being worked on.

I will be in Kansas City Missouri for 5 weeks starting Oct 10th for a radar equipment school, then home for a week before taking off to Oklahoma City for two weeks for training on a different system, home for christmas, then back to OKC for yet another systems class. I'm really going to rack up the air miles over the next few months going back and forth from Alaska.

On a side note, I had to put up a copyright notice for the site. After I wrote my last article I found it in all kinds of places, and in a few of them mangled fairly well. It was an opinion piece and you will notice the "I" in the title. It was and is my opinion, it does not necessarily mean that I think you should share it. Discuss it to death for all I care, agree, disagree, flame me all you want, but pulling it apart and using pieces out of context is disingenious at best and outright lying at its worst. So thanks to a few who have few if any morals, I feel forced to put certain restrictions upon any opinion pieces that I right.

Have fun
~Az

Why I refuse to call it GNU/Linux

2007-08-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

When listening to others talk about GNU/Linux it always strikes me as odd the argument that is used. That the Linux kernel was made usable by the marriage of the GNU tool set to it so therefor it should be called GNU/Linux as it is a blending of the two and Linux is only the kernel. On the face of it this argument makes sense ... if one doesn't think about it too deeply.

There are however a few things I would like to point out. The GNU tools are released under the GPL, which does not carry a branding clause. This means in effect I can take those tools, do nothing at all to them, and rename them. Henceforth I can call them the 'Azerthoth Tool set and Compiling modules' and there is not a thing that can be done about it legally. Making that change stick in the eyes of the public, odds probably arent that good. As long as I don't change the license though, all I really have to worry about are the purists and Stallmanites flaming me into oblivion.

The next reason, and in my mind the compelling reason I refuse the GNU/Linux name, my car. Did that stop you for a second making you ask yourself where THAT connection came from? Let me explain then. Lets take my Mercury Cougar for example. Thats easy, Mercury makes a car that I bought, and the model name for that car is Cougar. I have never, and neither have you called it a John/Cougar, even though John might be the name of the guy who designed it. How about a Delco/Cougar because I have a Delco alternator in it that supplies power for the electrical system. A Chevron/Cougar because of the gas I use to give it motive force? Do you see what I am getting at? All of these things are part of a complex and integrated system, however they are NEVER named specifically. The same holds true with nearly every item you have ever acquired.

But, but, but, the GPL is what makes Linux ... well ... Linux, shouldn't we acknowledge that? Um, NO, we should not have to, nor should we be forced to tolerate those who would make us think so. If contribution to the underlying abilities of Linux made that sort of branding logical then should we not also be correct in calling it Morton/Linux or Tridgell/Linux perhaps Ingo/Linux or Stallman/Linux. It is all about a whole bunch of complex pieces coming together in one place at one time to make something that just works. All the pieces are needed to make it happen, and picking out just one single piece to give additional credit to in the complex amalgam that is otherwise known as Linux is just plain silly. Kind of like Frankenstein's monster, a bit from here and a bit from there and a bit from somewhere else. Stuff it into a case, apply electricity, and viola.

I have said my piece on the matter, coherently I hope. All that remains now is to bid you all ado for the moment and await the flaming that I am sure is coming. I did knowingly and willingly step on Saint Stallman, and in the community that surrounds Linux, that is one of the “Shall Not's”. Let's hope that my new asbestos undies are up to the challenge.

have fun till next time.
~Az

Sabayon x86_64

2007-08-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

Did I say that I had started a new love affair with Sabayon? Let me tell you what I went on an install binge this weekend, Bluewhite64, Slackware 12, and Sabayon x86_64. I was terminally unimpressed with either of the first two, although I'm going to give Bluewhite64 which is a Slack derivative a little more time and play before I pass final judgment on it. Sabayon 64 bit ... All I can say is WOW!!!.

Finally a 64 bit OS that works like I want it to. No tinkering with this that or the other to get some 32 bit app working correctly (Flash). I want to run Warcraft, which has a permanent home on its own partition ... well that did take a tinker just as it did with the 32 bit version. For some reason it didn't ship with opengl compiled in, so you have to re-emerge it with opengl support. Other than that though whammo Warcrack was up and running inside a few minutes.

Here is what I do to any new Linux install within minutes of having it running for the first time.
Visit youtube and see if everything works out of the box (it does for Sabayon 32 and 64 bit)
Drop in a movie and see if I can watch it. (yes again for both versions)
Warcraft (no for both, but it was a really fast fix, and got me the latest wine release to boot)
3D desktop (yes for both 32 and 64 bit) Not that I use it Compiz and Beryl have issues about locking up pretty much any system I have tried them on with I ctrl|alt|F1 to terminal and then try to go back to the desktop. But I like having it available, and I know how to shut them down.

Almost every distro I have ever tried has failed in these tests, which I consider my daily uses. I haven't tried Linux Mint lately, which is from what I hear should pass these simple tests however I have an aversion to most things Ubuntu. I know that Ian Murdock has said Ubuntu is Debian done right, but if I wanted a 6 month old snapshot of Debian Sid I can do that and without the bugs that the Ubuntu folks induce. Dont flame me for the truth here folks, Ubuntu has done wonderful things for Linux, its just that it is a far cry from the end all be all it could be if they would just pay a little more attention to what they were doing, and what their users should EXPECT to see out of the box.

All in all I just made another switch, from 32 bit Sabayon to 64 bit Sabayon. I just get happier and happier the more I use this Distribution. It says alot for them and for the Gentoo community and developers that desktop Linux can be this easy.

Sabayon 3.4a x86

2007-08-05T17:30:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update. I had initially installed Sabayon on my desktop using the 3.3 mini LiveCD. While I was away in Oklahoma for training I downloaded the 3.4a DVD in both x86 and x86_64 as well as a few others that looked interesting such as Bluewhite64. So far the only one I have had time to play with is the 32 bit version of Sabayon.

First up I tried the upgrade (not 6th sense) and that took way too long. I did let it finish and do everything it wanted to, however it did not fix some of the problems I had induced into my system, such as not being able to start the 3D desktop environment any longer. I waited something like 6 hours to find that the update pretty much spent 6 hours giving me a new kernel and left me with a partially broken system. Not that I couldnt fix it if I had wanted to, I knew where the error was I just dont need the compiz fusion beryl stuff active except for showing people that Linux outshines any other OS for eye candy.

Next I went ahead and did a fresh install using the same DVD. Folks if you are smart enough to back up the stuff you want to keep onto a seperate partition, this is the way to go. In less than an hour I had a sparkly new install vs 6+ hours for a partially broken upgrade. This is by far the fastest and easiest way to use the DVD to update your system. Of course you can still use emerge to upgrade as you go along if you choose and now that I have learned more how Sabayon/Gentoo works, thats probably the path I will continue to use. Not that I have figured out all the gotcha's yet, but I'm learning *grin*.

Anyway, Sabayon 3.4 is a very polished and functional system. If you have moved beyond the newbie distro's (and honestly Sabayon is almost capable of being a newbie distro ... almost) and are looking for something to start ecking out the most horsepower out of your system, Sabayon is a great place to start. Especially since so many things are already included and configured for you, more than in the various *buntu's or PCLinuxOS. Not to knock PCLOS, I still use that on my laptop and keep a few CD's handy to pass out to folks who are just starting out, its just that Sabayon is so much more, if not exactly as newbie friendly as PCLOS.

Good job on the latest release, I look forward to a long and fruitful affair with this great project.

Debian Etch: Custom Install

2007-07-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

The following is a how-to that was on my original blog and also posted at www.debian-administration.org. It is the first I ever did, and as such has a few rough edges.

As a not completely new Linux user I have been frustrated over and over again at all the extra bloat and apps that I will never use that gets loaded onto my system when I do an install. Debian was the second distro that I tried and have used many others since, but I keep coming back.
With Etch I finally decided to get my system MY WAY(tm). No excess junk and no excess apps. After I had played for a little while I came up with the way to do it, and since I had found very little in the way of easily human understandable documentation I thought I would share the process.

Now understand that what we are going to do is start from where I changed the installation.

1: netinst CD and an internet connection.

2: start the normal install process and proceed all the way to where it asks if you want to use a network mirror.

3: select NO for network mirror (we will change this in a minute)

4: reboot and log in root

5: edit the sources.list

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add these lines

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

Then make sure to comment out the line with the CD in it with a # otherwise it will drive you nuts asking for that blasted CD that has nothing of anymore use on it.

Close and save the file (double check your spelling and make sure you didnt fat finger any keys like I constantly do)

6: type in the command

apt-get update

7: type in

apt-get install xserver-xorg-core xorg

There will be a few questions at the end, for now just go with the defaults.

8: while apt is doing its thing we need to make a decision.
Which login manager do you want to use? Unless you want to run as root all the time ( #1 bad idea by the way) we need a login manager. Here are the 3 I have used and comments on them.

xdm:

smallest and works well to get you going on your way. Highly configurable.

gdm:

easily configurable and adds libraries you need if you want to use the synaptic package manager. (also contains alot of the extra functions of xdm)

kdm:

largest and bloated, I list it only because I know a few people who like it. (my opinion)

It honestly makes no differance to us which you pick. For ease of configuration I'd suggest gdm, if your just setting up a single user machine and will never change your desktop interface xdm might be the way to go. Your choice (thats what Linux is about right?)It doesnt matter which desktop environment you are going to use, any of them will fire up what ever you happen to have

So we

apt-get install xdm/gdm/kdm

9: Next decision, what desktop package to put in?

GNOME:

If you want Gnome you have just wasted time reading this, thats what you would have gotten if you had continued on with the installation normally.

KDE:

very much like the operating system that comes from redmond, and nearly as bloated with worthless junk. I have this installed only because my wife likes it.

Fluxbox:

This is the one I use. Very small, fast, and configurable. Its a low frills let our programs use system resources instead of having the desktop environment hog it approach. Nor will this one load your system up with oddbits like Gnome or KDE, however both are integrated with it. So if you install your favorite Gnome app or KDE app it automagicly appears in your menu in fluxbox.

There are others you can use as well, if you have one you like instead, use it.

So we

apt-get install fluxbox/gnome/kde

9A: If you went with fluxbox because like me you wanted to control what apps are on your system instead of letting someone else decide what is right for you. Remember this, fluxbox doesnt ship with proggies AT ALL. so at the very least you will want to add a web browser.

apt-get install firefox

(my choice, again use what you like)

10: reboot and poof you should be up and running.

For those who are wondering this worked equally well on my desktop as it did my laptop. I hope this helps someone else who like me is still learning all the wonderful things that can be done with Linux, but needs a few pointers because face it, we arent all programmers and everyone has to start the process of understanding somewhere.

Since originally writing this how-to I have changed my minimal install technique, however since at this point I have stopped using Debian or Debian derived distros completely I doubt that a new how-to will be forthcoming any time soon.

Off Topic: New Gun

2007-07-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

OK, so this isn't about Linux, but this is too cool for words. I finally bought the gun I have wanted since I first heard of it. After first reading about this gun I went and found one to see how it felt and was surprised in that for a small cannon it felt like it was made for my hand. It fit perfectly. I'm talking about nothing other than the Smith and Wesson 500, a .50 caliber magnum handgun which has roughly three times the stopping power of a .44 magnum. Here are 2 pictures of this monster with a quarter in the picture for scale.

Breaking Sabayon

2007-07-08T16:36:00.001-08:00

OK, the learning curve is not as steep as I thought it would be, or its my ignorance talking. However I did a "world" update of the install I did from the 3.3 mini LiveCD and then immediately ran into a problem. This update basically brought everything in the system up to "testing" which I guess is a lot more testing than stable then I'm used to coming from Debian.

I wanted to back a few files off to DVD for later use. Namely all the files and updates to install World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade. This was so I could save myself some time later on if I had to reinstall, which I did and am doing as I write this. To do this backup though I fired up k3b, which I nearly always use and the system immediately hard locked and boy do I mean hard.

This is when I discovered that the system had been upgraded to the testing level. OK, can I downgrade my packages? Sure can, you can mix and match so easily its no even funny. you find out the package you want:

emerge -s *package name*

That will spit out available packages plus the one you have installed. The stable one is listed, usually the one thats available with a lower version number. To install that one instead all you have to do is:

emerge =*package name-version number*

Whammo your all fixed up.

OK I may be getting excited over nothing, but fixing and downgrading is something new and different for me. Who said Sabayon/Gentoo were for uber geeks? oh, wait I have, repeatedly. Its so much easier to reconfigure and/or fix screw ups its not even funny.

Anyway, More on the adventures of moving to Sabayon later.

till the have fun
~Az

Making the switch to Sabayon

2007-07-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

For those readers who had read my old blog, or from elsewhere on the net you know that I am a huge fan of Debian. However I have become more and more disenchanted with it as time goes on. It started when I was doing a laptop installation and finished with a recent battle with my desktop.

Laptop issue:
Cpu frequency scaling (also an issue with my desktop). Its not enabled by default even if I selected laptop during the install. Come on guys every other distro out there enables scaling by default, and even when its not fully supported it defaults to the highest cpu speed not the lowest. Hell, even the Ubuntoids got that part right.

Desktop issues:
1: AM2 64x2 4600+ with either a abit AN9 32X or a Gigabyte M61P-S3 motherboard. CPU scaling AGAIN!!! With either board. Trying to get scaling to work on multiple installs fell on its face. Why you ask? It needs sysfs loaded, guess what didnt get loaded because my processor was misdetected on every install with either mobo and the wrong damn kernel got installed ... even using expert install.

2: CPU detection and kernel installation. Even though supposedly Debian now releases all the kernels with SMP support every time I install I get no SMP, I have to go and pick the kernel I want out of synaptic. Up to and including the testing (Lenny) net install as of 2 days ago.

These are things that arent just an annoyance for a desktop user, its a show stopper for anyone even thinking of deploying a server. If you cant get what every other distro in the world can get then your useless, wait let me say that again, useless, worthless, self absorbed, prissy prima donas. Debian used to have the reputation of being the best, you dont keep a reputation like that guys, you work at keeping it, and right now your loosing it.

PCLinuxOS, I love you guys even if you have a jerk or two doing forum moderation. Dig through my posts at LXer for that story. This is the distro that I have on my laptop, I installed on my 58 year old mothers laptop, and that I keep a couple of LiveCD's kicking around to hand out to people. Good job and well done. However there are things that I want to do that I cant with it. The documentation is SOOO wonderful that it took me 2 days to manage to get wine to compile from source correctly.

Back to the desktop, I ruled out Debian as the distro to go into it. So I went with Ubuntu 7.04, 6.10 worked well for me when I used it so what the heck I'll spin up the new one. That lasted less than 2 days, I cant even begin to describe just how clunky it felt. The speed wasnt there, the configuration options are worse not better. It just felt and acted wrong and after several lockups where I couldnt even 'ctrl alt f1' to get to a terminal to find and kill the offending culprit I decided it was as stable as a fart in high winds.

Enter Sabayon, a Gentoo derivative. Gentoo is NOT newbie friendly, I have tried it a couple of times and wandered off muttering "I'm not that big a geek". However when I first heard of Sabayon I went out and snagged the LiveCD and was suitably impressed. I liked its look and feel, as well as the overall approach to things. First off it loaded the nVidia drivers from the CD and also brought my wireless networking up (bcm4306) so all I had to do was enter the hex code I use for my router. Thats 2 really big pluses for it right there.

That test was a few months ago, so I decided to give their 3.3 livecd a look. On top of both the other pluses it came right up with KDE and Beryl working flawlessly (except I usually use fluxbox, so neither KDE or Beryl mean much to me. Except I hadnt seen Beryl work right out of the box before). I poked and prodded a bit (checked for cpu scaling) the decided to take the plunge. I knew just enough about source based distro's to know that I just entered into another steep learning curve. However 2 days later and the curve isnt as steep as I thought it would be. No real gotcha's so far ... well one, the user accounts I created during the live CD install never created the home folders so I had a little fixing to do once I figured out what happened.

All I can say is that 2 days in and Sabayon is fast, has taken my every little tweak without so much a cough, and blows the doors off of any other distro I have used before. I hope that it continues to do so, I'll get back later on that though. For the time being PCLOS is still staying on my laptop and will continue to be my newbie recomendation of choice.

~Az

QEMU/KVM,and a trick

2007-07-01T19:49:00.001-08:00

Ever wanted to play with a new distro without having to burn and then reboot into a liveCD or do an install into a spare partition that you may or may not have? QEMU has been an option for awhile, but lets face it, its slow. There are several options available to run up a virtual machine, i.e. a second operating system running inside and seperate from your already running operating system. Here we will be focusing on kqemu and kvm.

If your kernel is already 2.6.20 or higher you can run kvm, if its under then you will be using kqemu.

kvm is in sid/unstable so you will have to add that to your apt sources.
go root

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable

then

apt-get update
aptitude install kvm

After kvm and associated packages are installed it would be best to edit your sources.list again and comment out the line where you added in unstable with a # at the beginning of the line.

kqemu, which is technically a qemu accelerator instead of kernel level virtualization like kvm is available in Debian stable and there for as easy to install as:

aptitude install kqemu

You should have noticed if it wasn't already installed that qemu was installed regardless of whether you went with kvm or kqemu. Thats because both packages use qemu. So no worries, we need the qemu tools anyway.

OK so now we need to set a few things up.

If you installed kqemu then we need to load that module when we boot. I use nano, you can use what ever other editor you want.

Go root, then

nano /etc/modules

and add at the bottom of whatever list might be there

kqemu

For kvm you need to know something beforehand, whether you have an Intel or an AMD processor. It makes a difference in the module we are going to load on boot.

Go root, then

nano /etc/modules

If you have an Intel processor you will add at the end of the list

kvm-intel

If you have an AMD processor you will add at the end of the list

kvm-amd

Now that we have the modules ready to load, we need to make them accessible to you as a user.

adduser $USER kvm
adduser $USER kqemu

depending on which you installed.

Congratulations, right now you should have everything just about ready to go. The problem is, even if you modprobe the modules active right now they still wont be usable to you, they need to be loaded against the kernel when you boot, so bookmark this page and reboot your computer, I'll wait here while you do.

OK so now we need to create a virtual drive to install our test distro to. I'll explain the parts of it after. From here on out everything is applicable to QEMU, Kqemu, and KVM. It is done as a normal user, so no more need to be root.

qemu-img create debian.img -f qcow 5G

The first bit is self explanatory, create an image (virtual drive) named debian.img. The next bit -f qcow tells it to format it in an inflatable structure. The 5G means a maximum physical size of 5 gig real hard drive space. The nice thing about this format is, if your VM installed only takes up 2.5 gig, then the virtual drive only takes up 2.5 gig of space on your real hard drive.

I guess the next thing that you'll be wanting to do is actually spin this up and try it out. I should note that I have had problems on occasion with KVM locking up during the install process, if this should happen to you drop back and use qemu with the same command line arguments. If you are using kqemu instead of kvm use qemu in the command line instead of kvm, kqemu is a module called by qemu when it starts. I'll be using kvm for the command line, you use what works for you.

I'm not ready yet to tell you how to start. A few things first if you don't mind. I usually make a seperate directory for my VM's because there are usually one or two files other than just the .img file. Such as an overlay file or two, which I will cover shortly and a script that simplifies launching the VM after its made. There are tons of command line arguments that can be added to the basic ones I am using here to get you started, the script is a huge time saver.

There are two basic ways to start this off, either with an .iso image or a CD/DVD. Lets start with an .iso image, the debian net-inst image in this case. We will assume for the sake of argument that the .iso is in the same folder as the virtual drive that you created is, and that it is also our working directory.

kvm -cdrom net-inst.iso -hda debian.img -m 512 -boot d

First this calls kvm and tells it that the .iso image is actually a cd drive, then the -hda debian.img is its hard drive. The -m 512 tells it that its a computer with 512 meg of memory. Careful here because this is the amount of physical memory that its going to block out for itself. Rule of thumb is no more than ½ of your actual physical memory. The final bit is -boot d, it tells it to boot from the cdrom drive.

kvm -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda debian.img -m 512 -boot d

The only difference here is that your pointing it to your real cd drive here. If /dev/cdrom doesn't work for you then you can cat /etc/fstab and look there to see what you cdrom drive really is.

Now I mentioned that you might have problems doing an install using kvm, if this happens you have to explicitly tell qemu to not use the kvm module in the command line like this:

qemu -no-kvm -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda debian.img -m 512 -boot d

Lets move on with the thought that you have installed your new virtual operating system. Your going to want to get in and play with it. The command for this is simply:

kvm -hda debian.img -m 512

With that you will be up and running in your new OS running inside your existing. However there is another trick that is really handy that will let you do whatever you want without permanently breaking this new creation, overlay files. Which basically takes a snapshot of your virtual drive and then run it from the overlay instead of the virtual drive. Really handy if you want to have several versions accessible but only have to do the install process once. Say like having a version of stable a version of testing and a version of unstable all available from the same install. To do this its as simple as:

qemu-img create -b debian.img -f qcow stable.ovl

To boot into this you just change the command line a little bit and tell it to use the overlay file you just made.

kvm -hda stable.ovl -m 512

As you can see the easy way to run multiple versions off the same install would be to do a base install of stable and then make your overlay file for it. Next you would make an overlay file named something like testing.ovl and another for unstable.ovl all from the debian.img that we made to start.

Then simply fire each up in turn via the overlay files, edit your /etc/sources.list to what ever you want and update yourself into debian nirvana.

My thanks to Scott Ruecker over at lxer.com for asking the question that started the process for this how-to. As I said though there are tons of switches that will add functionality to your virtual machine. More than I can adequately explain as I haven't managed to figure them all out yet either. This how to was written with the whole intent to get someone armed and dangerous before kicking them out the door and isn't intended to be all inclusive.

For more information on this topic you can start at qemu's authors site at:
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html

Have fun.
~Az

Starting Out

2007-07-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

OK, I just deleted my last blog, all posts and comments are mostly gone. There does exist a bit here and there that found itself posted on other sites on the net. I will move those back here as soon as feasible. For the most part though all this blog will be about will be my adventures in the lands of Linux.