Category: Geekery

I fixed yesterday’s problems with the machine locking up every time I tried to burn a DVD by opening up the case and reseating all the cards and cables. Yeah!

Last night I worked on setting up a new computer for the flying club’s ops center. The old one started freezing up and dying about a month ago, and so I took it home to work on, and then never had time to work on it because of the move. Even after reseating everything and cleaning, it still freezes up after a few minutes of operation – it continues to work and the screen refreshes, but it no longer responds to the keyboard and mouse. A club member donated a machine which was even slower than the original (400MHz versus 550MHz) and has less ram (384Mb versus 512Mb). But it’s adequate. I installed Morphix Linux on it, which probably isn’t the best choice but it uses XFCE4 as its user interface unlike most small Linuxes that use IceWM or Blackbox or Fluxbox, which look like somebody with really bad colour sense and latent depression tried to copy the worst features of Windows 95. XFCE4 uses a Mac OS X-like application dock, and uses bright pastel shades so that it looks like something out of this century. The ~/Desktop/Autostart directory contains a script to start up Firefox with a special home page with some links that I find useful.

I stripped the stuff that users shouldn’t be doing off the menu bar, and set it up in /etc/init.d/xstart so that when a user logs out, the user’s home directory is blown away and re-copied from a read-only file system “safe”, and the display starts again. That way nobody has to worry about any of their web cookies, passwords or other cruft being left behind. And because it’s Linux, I don’t have to worry about them installing stuff or getting viruses or spyware.

After the hard drive problems I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my new hard drive arrived, and today I actually had time to install it.

I partitioned the new drive like the old drive, but with bigger partitions (because this was a 160Gb drive instead of an 80Gb drive). Being old-fashioned, I used fdisk instead of whatever the young kids use (parted?). Then I booted with a rescue CD and did the following to mount and copy all the partitions:

for i in 1 2 3 5 6 8 9; do
mke2fs -j /dev/hdb$i
mkdir /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda$i /mnt/hda$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb$i /mnt/hdb$i
rsync rsync -aSuvrx –delete /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
done

Then with everything copied over and swapped around the drives and attempted to boot with the new one.

Ok, how many people spotted my deliberate mistakes?

First off, I forgot to install grub on the hard disk. So I had to boot back with the original drive as hda and the new drive as hdb. I couldn’t get grub-install to even recognize /dev/hdb or hd1. So I went into the raw and wolly grub shell to do it.

Second mistake was that I forgot my /etc/fstab uses labels. So I had to quickly google how to put labels on the partitions using e2label. But I couldn’t figure out how to label a swap partition, so I changed the swap entry in /etc/fstab to not use labels. Not sure why I didn’t just convert them all to not use labels, but I’m trying to be a little more modern.

Third mistake was that somehow /tmp ended up not globally writable. I think all the other files and directories had the right permissions, so I’m not sure why that one was different. Probably because it’s the only partition whose top level is globally writable.

Everything seems to be working now, so my fingers are crossed.