Three Wise Men

Cloning Ubuntu Linux – The easy way

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Your Ubuntu Linux installation is getting bigger and bigger and you are running out of space on your hard disk. You got your new hard drive and now you need to clone your old drive to the new one. The dreaded cloning is actually quite easy and relatively simple to do. The only thing you will need is a little patience and some typing skills. No special software just your already installed Ubuntu Linux.

The regular obligatory disclaimer: This procedure worked for me several times, I use it almost on a daily basis and I had no problems with it. Your mileage my vary. Make sure you double check all the commands that you type and that you do not format your data drive. You will end up with two empty disks. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
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Installing KDE 4.4 in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

In a little bit more than a month before the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx I decided that I want to try how KDE 4.4 behaves and if I am ready to switch from Gnome to KDE again. My heart was always with KDE and Qt but after KDE 3.5 everything went downhill and I switched to Gnome. I really want to try the new KDE, but going to Beta software on my primary workstation is not an option and I will stick with Karmic Koala for a while after the release of Lucid Lynx which will be shipping with KDE 4.4. The only option for me and others like me is to install KDE desktop on top of existing Ubuntu taking it from the backports repository. Here are simple step by step instructions on how to do this.
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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx – What’s New?

Image by digitalART2 via Flickr

Lucid Lynx is the new release of Ubuntu Linux operating system. We decided that it should be us testing it for you and telling you what’s new and what’s hot. This release of Ubuntu will be marked 10.04 LTS. Ubuntu is released every six months so you are always up to date with your software. LTS versions are released every two years and Canonical will be providing support for three years for every LTS release (five for servers). Let’s see what was simmering for the past six months and is due to release at the end of the April.

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TorrentFlux – The Best Torrent Client in the Galaxy

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File sharing has a long history and I will start with the time when I first got into it. At that time I was using ZX Spectrum 48k and games were distributed mostly on magnetic tapes packed in plastic boxes more commonly known as compact cassettes¹.

Twenty years ago, give or take a few, violation of copyrights² wasn’t really a big issue in a country behind the iron curtain. Getting a new game involved borrowing the tape from a friend, going back home and copying that tape with a double cassette recorder that supported high-speed dubbing.

The other a more sophisticated way of getting a game was to tune your FM radio to a certain local radio station. Then you had to put a blank tape in a cassette recorder and press Record when they started airing the games³. Yes, the local radio station was in fact airing all sorts of ZX Spectrum games and you were able to record them on tape. This was the first method of file sharing that I encountered and by today this is the only one that is limited only by the range and not by the bandwidth. A billion clients can connect at the same time and perform a download.

Read on if you want to know more on how to set up the best BitTorrent client in the Galaxy. ;)

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1. Back then piracy was not for soft-hearted types, it was for real men — it was almost a hardware business. [↩]
2. Piracy. [↩]
3. Storing data as a bunch of chirps and beeps on the audio tape was something very common. [↩]

Network boot and install of Ubuntu Linux

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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 …

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