I won’t be in Boston for the fireworks show on July 4th. But if you show up at the last minute to see the fireworks, they start at 10.30pm, you can head onto to Harvard Bridge, commonly know as Mass Ave Bridge and get some decent view of the fireworks.

The last time I watched the fireworks from the bridge was in 2007, and I was near the middle at the 200 smoot mark:

The views of the fireworks was quite good, not as good as being on the river banks. Considering you could show up 5 minutes before the start of the display instead of 12 hours before is a good tradeoff in viewing quality. Continue reading ‘4th of July Fireworks!’

The view from my desk at my new job isn’t bad:

Much better than looking at the tweed walls of the cube in the cube farm of my old workplace. And, non-Donegal Tweed at that, sure even the Donegal Tweed is now made in Morocco, and the only native Donegal Tweed is made by artisans.

On Ubuntu it used to be that ctrl-alt-backspace would kill X (the backend of the various graphical user interfaces on Linux). In an aim to be user friendly this is now disabled by default. This can be a real pain if X locks up, you can’t kill it nor change to a console.

On Debian and Ubuntu you can install the dontzap command which will allow you to kill X:

sudo apt-get install dontzap

Then run dontzap:

sudo dontzap -d

Or you can the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (which is what the dontxzap command does):

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "DontZap"       "False"
EndSection

See Alberto Milone’s blog for more info:
http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?p=335

I use Kayak.com whenever I’m planning a trip any where, it’s a good source to determine who flies to what destination and whose got the lowest price. Today, there’s a wee bug on their website where they tell me I should upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.16, this would be sound advise except for the fact that I’m using a newer version of Firefox:

So I think someone needs to look at that Math used here, because 3.0.8 is greater than 2.0.0.16.

Great tool for converting KDE3 settings to KDE4 on Debian. Also, it’s works well to merge KDE4 settings from .kde4 with KDE3 settings in .kde. This is useful as KDE4 1st used .kde4 to save personal KDE configuration data. KDE4 is now using .kde for config data, which mean early KDE4 users will have problems with new KDE4 apps. Fear not, Kaboom will help!

http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kaboom.html

I’d advise saving back-up copies of both .kde and .kde4 .

I have a Red Hat 9 server that I have to support for a wee while longer. I needed to install some packages and I didn’t have the original install CD’s nor access to Red Hat’s repositories.

After lot’s and lot’s of searching I found the ISO images at:
ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i386/

But, there’s too many users on Red Hat’s FTP server and I can’t get access … thankfully rpmfind.net have a mirror:
http://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/9/en/iso/i386/

So now I can download the ISO images, and mount them on the Linux box using the loop-back interface and install the packages I need.

I expect to have new hardware within a month or so, and I’ll probably be using BU Linux or Ubuntu 8.04.

This is quick’n'dirty writeup to help others who might have the same problem. I’ll clean this up later in the week …

Ubuntu Jaunty is the new beta version of Ubuntu. It comes with a new version of X.Org and the ATI drivers have been incompatible with this version of X.Org. ATI recently released drivers that support X.Org 1.6. If you have problems with X not starting follow the instructions here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/FglrxInteferesWithRadeonDriver

For me what happened is that X wouldn’t start properly and cause my Lenovo T400 to freeze and lock up. The laptop would boot but when X would start (when the login screen appears) I’d get a black screen with red lines at the top. To solve this I booted to runlevel 1, also known as failsafe mode. If your using a laptop with wireless, I suggest you connect directly to your router using a network cable, otherwise you may have to configure wireless manually (it’s not that hard).

When your system starts, select failsafe mode, on the next screen to appear choose the option to go to a “root shell with networking”.

Next remove the install ATI drivers and install from scratch the ones you need:

sudo apt-get remove –purge xorg-driver-fglrx xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
sudo apt-get install –reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri
dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

If this doens’t work for you see the Ubuntu page mentioned above.

Went for a walk along the Charles yesterday, what a great day, and it’s was nice and quite down there and a great to relax, chill and get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. And the MIT’er were out sailing too:

And those are seagulls perched on the ice.

I was in the process of figuring out and documenting the process of  compiling and installing an Xen enabled kernel on Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10. This was for a specific project that’s not going to come to fruition. I’m not going to bother as I also don’t feel like having my laptop burn a gaping hole through my lap as I wait for the kernel to compile, and well you know I still have some use for the 2 lads downstairs. And after years of compiling kernels, I really can think of more productive uses of my time.

The quickest way is to grab a Debian Xen enabled kernel, this isn’t recommended by Ubuntu and if your not comfortable hacking your system and having to compile modules (drivers in Windows speak) for hardware or proprietary hardware that Debian doesn’t include support for, then don’t even think of doing this and just use KVM.

Here’s how Chris did it for a system running a AMD64 processor, if you’ve an Intel processor you’ll need to use a different kernel:

http://www.chrisk.de/blog/2008/12/how-to-run-xen-in-ubuntu-intrepid-without-compiling-a-kernel-by-yourself/

If you want a later kernel (2.6.27 or 2.6.28) poke around:

http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/

That’s the approach I’m going to use, as I know that if I’ve problems or issues I’ll be able to figure it out. Anyways, the start of the orignal draft is below, preceded by a minor rant. When I get around to getting Xen on Ubuntu to work with a Debian kernel I’ll add a new post here. Continue reading ‘Xen for Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10′