My family has 3 routers. An old D-Link, a new Linksys N router, and another router that looks like a mac. After cleaning out my closet, I moved all my old computers, the old PC, an old iMac running Yellow Dog Linux (Soon to be ubuntu) and the iBook into the closet, and networked in with the router that looks like a mac (white and clear plastic and sort of round.) I am now making a rather small network and testing nfs and various other things on the network. I haven’t connected the closet router to the outside internet, but I can use a mac laptop to inject the wireless signal into an ethernet wire to install software. An interesting and continuing experiment. Expect more updates.
Filed under: Computers, Linux, Mac, Networking, Technology, Ubuntu
This long story starts with me noticing that my one and only external drive had a USB connection. I had previously though connected this drive to computers other that macs was impossible, but I now realize that was wrong. So I plug the hard drive into my Acer laptop, and it borks. After fiddling around with various hfs packages for linux, things didn’t work, and I tried plugging it into my mac. This did not work. I was bummed, because I had a massive collection of linux distributions stored on the drive. I tried various methods to recover the data, all failed, or didn’t work correctly, so I finaly reformated the thing as ext2. This worked perfectly. Now the acer and all my other linux boxes can read the drive. My mac cannot. So, I installed MacFuse, along with a ext2 driver. I started a backup, and it was taking forever. Throughput for the drive was horrible. So I tried it on the Acer, and i/o speeds were just fine. So I used scp to copy the files from my mac, over the network, and to the external drive. Everything went well until /bin/echo started failing to execute. Turns out I was copying the entirety of my mac’s hard drive to my acer. This did not work well, and the acer stopped working. I booted a liveCD, backed up my stuff to the external drive, then downloaded and burned a flash drive of the Ubuntu Minimal install. I used it to install a base ubuntu system, a few packages, and the xubuntu-desktop. I tried to install some ubuntu studio packages, but they didn’t work, nor did the packages for audio, video, and image editing. They installed, I booted, and suddenly everything worked, my wifi autodetected, and everything was hunky dory. I moved all my important stuff to a single folder in my home folder called “mine,” to facilitate backup and recovery, because there were some permissions issues the first attempted install. Still, everything works just fine, and the computer is working perfectly, except dropbox isn’t installing, I have to fix that at some point…
Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu
Filed under: Uncategorized
My sister used to have an old, clamshell ibook before she got her new computer. I had had my eye on it for linux instalation. At the last lug, I installed Xubuntu. After getting a few things working, and learning how to change the dns servers from the command line, I installed several windowmanagers: blackbox, fluxbox, and openbox. After trying each of them, I settled on fluxbox as the main window manager. I fixed a small empty menu problem (My menu was empty, so I copied one of the example ones and off I went), and noting the one second start time, I got down to building my menu. After reading up on fluxbox menu syntax, I added a few submenus, and some items. Fun. Everything is working fine!
Filed under: Uncategorized
For some time, I have had a problem. My computer has failed, for some time, to aquire the proper DNS server from the wireless router. However, it only happens on some wireless networks. So, I signed up for OpenDNS, and I use it frequently. However, whenever my computer suspends, I lose my dns settings on these networks. So, I wrote a shell script to add OpenDNS to my DNS settings. The Script:
#!/bin/bash
echo Contents of /etc/resolv.conf:
cat /etc/resolv.conf
echo Replace dns with open dns, press enter. Otherwise, press ^C.
read $LFJLKJLKJSF
echo nameserver 208.67.222.222 > /etc/resolv.conf
echo nameserver 208.67.220.220 >> /etc/resolv.conf
echo Done. New contents of /etc/resolv.conf
cat /etc/resolv.conf
echo Happy?
The first few lines prints out /etc/resolv.conf, and asks whether the file has open dns or not. If you press enter, it is given to a junk variable, and it continues. ^C to cancel. It then replaces /etc/resolv.conf with te first OpenDNS server, then adds the second. It then prints out the file to make sure, then exits. Rather useful.
Filed under: Uncategorized
April 23, 2009 • 10:24 am
http://www.pcworld.com/article/163552/why_i_use_linux.html
A great article about why people use linux. I personally agree with most of his points.
Filed under: Uncategorized
APG is really quite an interesting program. It randomly generates passwords. Big deal, I can write a ruby program that does that in one line. However, APG makes passwords that can be pronounced. This is amazingly usefull. This means that you can chooe a good, strong password, that you can easily remember. In Ubuntu, you can install it with sudo apt-get install apg. It’s quite usefull.
-Indigo
Filed under: Uncategorized
I recently got involved in the creation of irc bots. It is common knowledge that my language of choice is ruby, so I set about making a bot in ruby. None of my friends had used ruby, they had used perl and PHP. I got an IRC library, and improved it, adding support for joining channels after the MOTD, a problem which was afflicting my bot (it wouldn’t always join the channels) an added support of auto-joining mutliple channels. I am currently working on a weapons system and dice bag. I then forked the project, and created Deady, a hellish irc bot. Deady is just like my other IRC bot, only Deady is contained in a single file, which you can download here. Deady utilzes ruby’s random number generator to generate a random name. It then joins the specified channels, and sits, doing nothing. However, if somebody says:
botsnack
Deady will say: botsnack, starting a vicious cycle where each deady will say botsnack, causing the other one to say botsnack, and causing all the other bots in the channel to respond with thier proper botsnack response (typicaly “:D.”) Though it has not been tested in a real world enviroment, I trust it works well. You can visit my nice bot, RBHellfire, on #bots on irc.foonetic.net. He doesn’t do much yet.
-Indigo
Filed under: Computers, Programing, Ruby, Technology
Got a new programing project on github: YstSimRB Please provide positive criticism. No negative, please.
Filed under: Computers, Linux, Programing, Ruby
Orion’s Arm is a massive universe created by volunteers, based on science. It has a detailed history, and has some pretty cool tech. Not many people know about this site, so I wanted to post the link here. Thats all!
Filed under: Uncategorized
