Ubuntu 9.10 Almost Out

The new Ubuntu is almost here! 9.10 Karmic Koala hits the download mirrors (as opposed to the store shelves, like that other OS) next Thursday. I am really, really excited for absolutely no reason. If I actually thought about my computer rationally, I wouldn’t even upgrade. After all, 9.04 works perfectly for me, so why change? But there’s something about having the new shiny software that is irresistible. Especially when it’s free.

Windows Vista: It Works With Only 512 MB RAM!!!

So we are installing Vista on my Mom’s laptop (which has only 512 MB of RAM), due to a chronic shortage of Windows XP install disks at our house. I didn’t think it would work, but the installation and initial setup actually progressed smoothly. Firefox and Thunderbird also installed with no obvious performance issues. When I left the scene Microsoft Office was being installed, and this at last seemed to be a little too much; RAM usage was pretty much maxed out, and the install had slowed to a crawl. Still, as long as no more that 1 or 2 major applications (web browser, emailclient, etc.) are open at once Vista should run decently. This was a big surprise, since after a clean install on my laptop with 3 GB of RAM, about 6-800 MB were being used immediately. I guess it’s smart enough to scale itself down if necessary. I think throwing at least another 512 MB of memory into the laptop would be a good idea, though.

For all you XP worshipers: Stop knocking Vista. It works, dudes. How long can you hold onto an OS that was obsolete in 2006? P.S: Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with a minor makeover. Don’t try and preach how Windows 7 is so much better than Vista and finally a worthy OS to upgrade to, because Vista and 7 are the same thing.

How to set up an external hard drive in Ubuntu

By default, Ubuntu recognizes an external USB drive you plug in, and automatically mounts it for you at /media/disk. The problem is that only root can read and write to it; normal users can only read, which is pretty limiting. Here is how to make it a little more useful. I’m writing this because, surprisingly, most of the results you get when Googling this stuff involve NTFS or FAT32 drives. I’m assuming you are going Total Penguin and formatting your drives with a Linux filesystem. In this example I’ll use ext4.

Things you’ll need:
One (1) external USB hard drive
sudo powers
A marginal amount of command line skillz

The plan:

0) By default Ubuntu mounts USB drives to /media/disk. This works, but you may want the mount point to be a little more descriptive (so that, for example, you can tell at a glance which of your hard drives is currently mounted!). To do this, we give the filesystem a label with the tune2fs command.
sudo tune2fs -L BuffaloHD /dev/sdc1
Here I labeled my hard drive BuffaloHD; now when plugged in it will get mounted at /media/BuffaloHD. The /dev/sdc1 part is the device name of your drive. Make sure you get the right one; if in doubt, plug the drive in and remove it to see which /dev/sd* entry appears and disappears.

1) Now plug the USB drive in. It should automatically mount to your mount location. In order to be able to write to it without sudo, change the ownership of the mount directory and its contents to your user with
sudo chown -v -R <username>:<usergroup> /media/ExternalHardDrive

2) That is all! You should now be able to read and write stuff to the drive without being root, saving some typing!.

Giant Invasive Snakes Pose Threat

Article here.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, now Burmese pythons and Boa Constrictors are breeding in the wild. And, it turns out, actually planning on invading. This from the USGS.

That’s TWO new snake species, folks. And, according to the article, five is enough to bring our ecosystem to its knees. That means we’re 40% of the way to doomsday and hardly anyone is paying attention. Except for Samuel L. Jackson, who apparently had more insight into the situation than anyone dared believe when he released his chilling documentary Snakes on a Plane two years ago.

Conky

I rediscovered the joys of Conky today, and consequently wasted most of the afternoon tinkering with configuration files. For those of you who don’t know but care, and even you who don’t know and don’t care, but not you who know and care, or know and don’t care (there, I think that exhausts all the possibilities), Conky is a system monitoring application for Linux and BSD. What makes it special is that it has literally (I counted them) a zillion built-in variables that you can monitor, and you can use the highly cryptic but also highly awesome .conkyrc file to customize how you want to display all the stuff. I think that after 5 hours of tinkering I got a semi-cool looking result.

I was going to put the actual configuration here in case somebody wanted to copy something, but it ended up looking like a total mess.

If you want more information on conky, here’s their website

Temporary

This is only a temporary post, to avoid a “Not Found” message that might confuse some visitors. As soon as I think of something rad to post, it will be shown instead. This is confidently expected to happen any year now.