Nathan’s Blog

I took the plunge today and reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch. I thought it might be interesting to see what additional software I had to install:

• NVidia driver + this xorg.conf fix
• Packages vim and vim-gnome
• Dropbox (from www.getdropbox.com )
• Package nfs-common to access storage on my home NAS
• Package smbfs to mount Windows shares at the command line (I find this preferable to the smb://server IO-helpers that Gnome and KDE have)
• Package xchat-gnome for access to Mammoth’s IRC server
• Package msttcorefonts for the freely available Windows fonts include Arial for compatibility with websites that assume everyone has Arial.
• Thunderbird 3.0 from the Mozilla Daily PPA
• Package screenlets – specifically, the Sidebar (with ‘Dock other screenlets’ disabled), three RingSensors, ClearCalendar, ClearWeather, Clock, and Slideshow screenlets all configured to ‘Stick to Desktop’.
• The 64-bit Flash beta in Package flashplugin64-installer from this PPA
• Package qmmp is a very basic MP3 player, similar to the old Winamp releases
• Firefox plugins: Greasemonkey, Net Usage Item
• Package virtualbox-ose for VirtualBox.
• Package apache2 for development/testing.
• Package meld is a great visual diff tool.

I will keep this updated over the next few weeks.

The Ubuntu Live CD does not come with LVM or the MD administration tools, so if your existing system uses LVM and/or MD (the linux software RAID functionality), the partitions are not visible by default within the LiveCD. To get access to your data, pull up a terminal (Applications menu →  Accessories → Terminal) and switch to root:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo -i
root@ubuntu:~#

Start by installing the software needed (since its a live CD, this just installs to the temporary in-memory “RAM disk”):

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install lvm2 mdadm

With that completed, you can assemble your existing array(s):

root@ubuntu:~# mdadm --assemble --scan
mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 2 drives.

Then scan for the LVM physical volumes:

root@ubuntu:~# pvscan
 PV /dev/md1   VG nathan   lvm2 [465.52 GB / 0    free]
 Total: 1 [465.52 GB] / in use: 1 [465.52 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]

Activate the logical volumes contained within:

root@ubuntu:~# vgchange -a y
 3 logical volume(s) in volume group "nathan" now active

And finally, mount whichever partition you were interested in:

root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/nathan/data /mnt

My latest in a very occasional series of articles was posted on AusGamers a few weeks back, detailing how to build a cheap HTPC with Ubuntu and XBMC. In the comments there was of course, the usual resistance to using Linux -  despite the simplicity of the guide.

Last week I had to build an unattend.xml script that among other things, set the system up with a static IP. This seems easy enough but I just couldnt get it to work until I found this blog post.

Yes, the position of <identifier> in respect to its sibling elements matters. I never would have thought of that in a million years, so much praise to Renaud Depagne !