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Ubuntu 9.04 released

Jaunty Jackalope is IMHO. so far the best choice for any Netbook users out there.
I have been running the beta on my 1000HE for about 2 weeks now and its running great with very few minor issues. Finally, every bit of hardware was detected and installed with no further interaction necessary.

If you are running on an EEE PC, i can recommend getting the Eeeasy scripts for improved APCI and fan control.

Bootchart clocks the bootup time with a nice 29 seconds and i will also be installing and testing it on the AspireOne A110L and the good old EEE701.

The official release comes in 3 Tracks:

  • Desktop: ok we dont need to discuss this one 😉
  • Server: Built for Servers, no graphical foo (now features encrypted /home directories)
  • Netbook-Remix: Designed for small screens with good “Out of the Box” hardware support for netbooks

Update: The Aspire One 110L with a SSD drive clocks at 17 Seconds bootup time

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Netbooks & Serial Network device configuration

I recently bought some Cisco equiptment (a Catalyst 2924-XL-EN and a 2611 router ) to play around with in my spare time. In order to get the equiptment running for a test lab using telnet configuration, I had to connect via the serial console which can be a hassle due to the lack of serial rs232 ports on modern computer devices.

I bought a Serial USB adapter eager to find out if this will actually work (had some compatibility issues with other devices in the past)

So i got a cheap USB adapter from my local computer store (link on Amazon – this one definitely works with Cisco Catalyst Switches, I will test it on a 2600 router as soon as it gets delivered to me ) and plugged it into my Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu 8.10. After dmesg confirmed the device (in my case ttyUSB0) I needed to get a serial based terminal emulator for console configuration.

Minicom is the good old Linux serial terminal emulator, so a simple

sudo apt-get install minicom

will provide you with the required app on Ubuntu/Debian. If you are running Vista, I recommend tutty since HyperTerminal is no longer included.

The next step will be to set up the device parameters for minicom by running

minicom -s

Set your serial device to the equivalent (should be ttyUSBx) and set the following connection values:

  • Baud Rate: 9600
  • Data Bits: 8
  • Stop Bits: 1
  • Flow Control: none

Now save your config file (the default config is dfl) and launch the program. The values for any Windows software are the same.

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The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im

If you are using pidgin with ICQ on any current Linux distribution like Interpid, you may discover that 2.5.5 is not yet available in the official repositories.

For now you will have to stick with pre-built packages or simply get rid of ICQ 😉

http://www.getdeb.net/release.php?id=3960

Here is a source for now, 2.5.5 should be released soon on the interpid and hardy repositories:

  • first of all you should remove pidgin and perform apt-get autoremove to uninstall any pidgin dependencies such as pidgin-data and libpurple
  • install pidgin-data from the link above
  • install libpurple0
  • now you can install the pidgin package and you should be free to go 🙂
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GNU ddrescue – Recovery Enhanced dd

Creating images of a drive prior to the recovery processing is always a good idea. If you will be expecting a lot of I/O errors, ddrescue might be interesting for you.

http://freshmeat.net/redir/addrescue/55349/url_homepage/ddrescue.html

GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

Combine this with a cheap USB2IDE or USB2SATA adaptor and keep it in your geek bag!