nixternal

So, as most of you know, today was the release day for the new iPoops. I of course made jokes at everyone in the office who has one, and watched all of the complete idiots stand in line since yesterday hoping their iPoop had some Steve Jobs sweat on it. Anyways, woohoo, I could care less, but what I find funny is that people went and bought the new iPoops during the iTunes failure (Mako, there you go man! Add that to your list of errors, there are some good screenshots out there, or better yet Jono, Mass Fail!) and couldn’t activate their new waste of money. So, some people decided, hell, I will buy 2, put them on Craigslist and Ebay for $800. Holy smokes you Apple freaks, you are slightly iTarded! The AT&T store, about .75 miles from my hood, has all but the 2 they sold today, and the Apple store in Schaumburg still had some when I took a cruise by to see how many iTards were waiting in line. And people wonder why I hate the city of Chicago and enjoy the burb life, ya that means you Kevin ‘I use Ubuntu in my closet’ Harriss! We don’t have the silly hoopla the city has, and don’t have to stand in line, unless it is an $800 laptop on sale for $250 at Best Buy come the day after Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I just happened to stop by Best Buy yesterday and purchase my very own Ubuntu collection. Oddly enough, it was the last one and the guy at the desk started to act like he knew a thing or two, which was cool, though he didn’t know much except that Vista was better and not prone to hackers like Lie-nux is

OK, time to simmah down, watch today’s stage of the Tour de France and go to bed. Have a great iWeekend everyone!

OK, since the lazyweb totally owned in helping me locate a killer portable media device, I can use your help once again.

I have Googled and Googled until my eyes have exploded, and I have yet to find the answer I am looking for.

The question….Can you hot swap, not warm swap, SATA drives in Linux without having them a) setup in RAID, and b) not using a hardware RAID controller card? Someone told me that you can and the kernel works out of the box that way. Well, whoever told me was wrong. I have tried it in Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and SUSE. No go, the kernel panics and blows up and I have to call the Chicago Fire Department

Warm swapping works just fine, where I unmount the drive, pull the drive, put in a new drive, configure drive, and then mount the drive. That works, but when a drive fails that isn’t on a RAID controller, or is on one, and isn’t configured with RAID, I want to a) know about it, and b) pull it out without unmounting and what not first.

So, I know there are some of you wizards out there that can help me, so please, any information you may have or questions, please comment or feel free to email me directly (nixternal kubuntu org). Thanks!

Howdy lazywebbers!  I am currently in the market for purchasing a decent, relatively inexpensive portable music player. These are just some of my preferences for such a device:

• Must work with Linux of course
• Must support ogg vorbis either natively or by using rockbox
• Must be small, something around the size of the iPod Shuffle or a tad bit larger
• I don’t want to pay a lot for it, and I know you typically get what you pay for, but I will be using this while doing some extreme workouts and biking events.

I know if it is out there, you all will know. I went to a couple of stores today and none of them jumped out at me except for the Sansa Clip, which is nice and I heard it support ogg with a new firmware upgrade, plus it has FM radio on it. If any of you have this and it works well, let me know, as that might be the one I am looking for.

What a groovy week, no matter how busy it was! Yesterday I found out that among 3 other people, I am now an official member of the KDE e.V.. Thanks everyone for the support and the votes, as well as a congratulations to Gary Greene, Paul Adams, and Alexis Menard. I am honored to be a part of the wonderful KDE community and look forward to many, many, years of working together to make KDE the best!

On top of this news, I found out this morning that I have been approved as an Ubuntu Core Developer. This means that I now get to upload to the Main repositories, hopefully providing our current Kubuntu core developers a little relieve during the Intrepid cycle and in the future. I took the long and lazy route to core developer by taking my sweet arse time and just enjoying everyone in the community and enjoying the work that I have done. I look forward to the many, many, years of Kubuntu development.

With this news, I have to give a big thank you to Jonathan Riddell, Sarah Hobbs, Scott Kitterman, Lydia Pintscher, Celeste Lyn Paul, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Wendy Van Craen, Tom Albers, Rafael Fernández López, Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas, and the entire KDE and Ubuntu communities, THANK YOU!

OK, here is the scoop. We have one appliance that gets a custom partitioning via kickstart and a bit of Python love. Once the partition is complete, we install the base packages and then our appliance package. During the installation of the appliance package, it reads in the size of the multiple partitions it has available and their sizes. This all works like a charm. Side note, our Kickstart scripts are being run through Anaconda from CentOS.

As it stands, when the partitions are created, there is 5% by default that is utilized with every partition for super user access. This way here, it saves you from running out of space and being unable to access the drive. This is great on directories such as /boot, /var, /, /home, and etc. But when we partition our 750GB drives, we want a large growing space that doesn’t need this 5% reserved blocks percentage. Typically when you use mke2fs to create the partitions, outside of Kickstart and Anaconda, you would pass the -m flag with 0 (zero) as the variable. This would get rid of any reserved space, therefor allowing you to utilize the entire space. With the default 5% on 4×750GB hard drives, we lose a total of 150GB of space. That is a lot of space to lose, especially when our appliances main duty is storage.

I know we could add a %post section to our Kickstart scripts, call tune2fs -m 0 /partition/location, and then reinstall our appliance package so it can read the new drive partitioning, but is there any other way to do this? Someone said to use mke2fs.conf for this, however Kickstart and Anaconda documentation is far from good when it comes to tricky configurations, and it seems nobody else in the world is doing this. Does anyone know how to go about using the /etc/mke2fs.conf with Kickstart so I can have the drives partitioned with the -m 0 flag from the get go?

/me wishes we used Debian/Ubuntu with FAI!

I have been getting IMs lately from people I have no clue who they are because they use nicks that I haven’t ever seen before. I use Bitlbee for instant messaging and for those of you who do not know what that is, it is a gateway for IM protocols for IRC clients. I use Irssi as my IRC client which is nothing more than text, no funky pictures, silly emoticons, and such. So when someone, who is not in my list, IMs me, I can’t respond without adding them to my list, and if I do not know who you are, you will not get added to my list. So, if you could when you IM me, let me know who you are and what you want and I will go ahead and add you to my list just as soon as I can.

Thanks!