Three Wise Men

Network boot and install of Ubuntu Linux

Image via Wikipedia

You tried everything, booting from CD, DVD, USB, and in your desperate attempts you already started to look if there is a floppy drive laying around the house, just to get the damned thing to boot. The very same thing happened to me today. Computer, simply, would not boot. The only thing left to do is booting your computer from the network. Sounds scary, I know, but in reality this can be a trivial thing to acomplish. I have a Linksys WRT54 router that is running DD-WRT and it serves me as a DHCP server. DD-WRT is using dnsmasq which can provides DNS, DHCP and TFTP services! Great news, since this is all that you need for network boot. Unfortunately TFTP server is disabled and not really usable if you don’t have any extra storage where you could put the tftp files. You will have to use an alternative tftp server, in my case Ubuntu Workstation. Continue reading for the whole recipe …

READ MORE

µTorrent freezing Windows 7

A word of caution. After I managed to install Windows 7 64bit my machine started to freeze. Completely freezing, not the blue screen of death, not the black screen of death, not the ‘this program has stopped responding’ kind of freeze. It was the ‘if I had a CRT monitor the picture would be burned in by now’ kind of freeze. Why? Because of the µTorrent. After running it for 15 minutes or so machine was freezing constantly. This only happens on 64bit version of Windows 7, 32bit version is ok.

I am not sure if this is related to the fact that µTorrent is downloading on TrueCrypted drive, but I am not going to test this theory. The impostor was already removed from my disks and I was just copying a load of stuff to and from the encrypted drive for two hours now and no freezing.

Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala preview

Image via Wikipedia

Time sure flies when you’re having fun and now we are about ten days from final release of Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala. What kind of stew did Ubuntu guys cook for us this time? Four days after the FinalFreeze stage in the Ubuntu development cycle means that what didn’t make it in the distribution will be left out and that we will get the Release Candidate in three days. I decided to install Kubuntu 9.10 which differs from Ubuntu regular in primary desktop environment and installation program. Instead of Gnome based desktop you will get KDE based desktop. Is KDE 4.3 up to the task? Let’s dig in and see how Koala tackles the legendary horned rabbit! ;)

READ MORE

Linux Tips Aggregated – 2

Image by kevygee via Flickr

It took some time, but the next batch of Linux Tips is ready. If you are following me on Twitter then you have already received all the tips. Now they are here again with some explanation just like previous time. All the feedback is appreciated and corrections are gladly accepted. ;) Obligatory ‘your computer might blow up’ disclaimer follows: All these commands were tested on my computer with my K/Ubuntu Linux installation¹. Before you actually use any of the commands that are published here, make sure you test them on your computer with your test files, not your actual data. I don’t want to be responsible for any tears and hair being pulled out.
READ MORE

1. I am using a mix of Ubuntu and Kubuntu. [↩]

Boot VirtualBox machine from a USB flash drive

While preparing my new workstation I stumbled upon a problem on how to boot VirtualBox machine from a USB fash drive. Pretty soon I discovered that VirtualBox has no support for booting from USB devices. Something with their BIOS not supporting it and that implementing this wouldn’t bring a lot to the whole package¹.

Read on if you want to know more.
READ MORE

1. I gathered this from few forum posts on their website, things today might be different. [↩]