kennywest

I don't think I have to tell you that creating backups is necessary. You never know how and when disaster will strike. To prevent loss of data I have been using the following strategy for a while: create a backup on a weekly basis to 2 disks on-site switch one of the on-site disks with an off-site disk (stored in a safe in a bank) Having an off-site disk is important. It helps you recovering from a real disaster like fire or theft. You could rent some online cloud storage to facilitate your off-site backups, but I think my solution (given the amount of data) is cheaper and faster. To create my weekly backup, I use the following script: #!/bin/sh # Author: Brice Burgess - bhb@iceburg.net # multi_backup.sh -- backup to a local drive using rsync. # Uses hard-link rotation to keep multiple backups. # Directories to backup. Seperate with a space. Exclude trailing slash! SOURCES= "/home/kenneth" # Directory to backup to. This is where your backup(s) will be st...

I've been using Ubuntu for quite some time now. Ever since the issues I've encountered while upgrading from Hoary, to Breezy, to Dapper, I decided to stick with LTS (or Long Term Support) releases. I don't care about using bleeding edge technology, I just want a PC that works. Being a first hour kubuntu with KDE4 user, I was a little bit displeased with the latest LTS release, so the past years I've been looking at different other distributions to see which one supports KDE best. Distributions with rolling releases earned extra points :) In 1998 SuSE 6.0 was released and I remember buying a big box containing 6 CDs in a local bookstore. I liked SuSE a lot. It was easy to install and maintain. The only downside was the RPM dependency hell you can end up with once you tried to install packages that were not available on the CDs. YAST already existed back then and was already doing a great job configuring the system (ncurses based, of course). Since openSuSE is very KDE...

As already mentioned in earlier posts, I uses mondo to create system backups of all my systems. By system backups I mean; create a backup of the live system, without any personal data. In short, this is a backup of everything except home folders. The home folders are backed up using rsync and external disks, but this is another story. Restoring from a mondo backup is easy; simply burn the images, put it in a cd drive and nuke the system (yes, this is a restore option in mondo :) ). If you just want to restore some files from the backup, without overwriting the whole system, there's an easy way to do this. Suppose you created an ISO a while ago and these are stored on some disk. First, you will need to mount the ISO as a loopback device like so: mount -o loop MyIso.iso /mnt The ISO is now mounted in /mnt . Now locate the file you want to restore (I was going to restore smb.conf ): $ grep smb.conf /mnt/archives/filelist.* /mnt/archives/filelist.11:/var/lib/ucf/cache/:etc:samba:...

I've been using f-spot for quite some time now to manage and categorise all my pictures. In older Ubuntu versions (8.04 and earlier), the default location for f-spot to store its photo's was: /home/username/Photos . For some reason, Ubuntu 10.04 (probably earlier versions as well) changed this folder to: /home/username/Pictures/Photos . I didn't notice this until today, while I was importing photo's and checking the contents of /home/username/Photos only to see nothing was copied to this location. That's when I discovered they changed the default location :) Since f-spot is backed by an sqlite database, this wasn't very hard to solve: create a backup of the sqlite database photos.db (should be underneath /home/username/.config/f-spot ) now update the location with sqlite3: kenneth@pavane:/data/home/kenneth/.config/f-spot$ sqlite3 photos.db SQLite version 3.6.22 Enter ".help" for instructions Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";" sqlite...

Now that I had my system up and running, it was time to add some of the applications I love to use. The previous LTS version shipped with Thunderbird 2, whereas the current LTS comes with Thunderbird 3. The new version recognized my existing profile (underneath HOME/.thunderbird , which is where all accounts are kept) without any problems. No mails got lost in the transition. The new version comes with smart folders, which gives an aggregated view on all folders when using different accounts (e.g. webmail, gmail, your ISP's pop mail, ...). My favorite photo management software, f-spot , is also updated and I was very pleased to see it converted my database from the older version without any issues. In short, all software I used on 8.04 managed to convert my personal settings and data without any problems, which was a relief. For the rare occasions I still need Windows (only to sync my GPS software with my old PDA, actually), I've set up a virtual machine inside vmware server. U...

I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary, which was released 5 years ago. It has always been, and still is, my preferred OS for desktop computing. April 29th the latest LTS version, 10.04, was released. This week, I decided to take it for a spin. Being able to upgrade / dist-upgrade on a Debian based Linux system, has always been one of the main reasons why I like Ubuntu so much. In Ubuntu's early days, however, breakage was very likely after dist-upgrading your system. dist-upgrading from Hoary (5.04) towards Dapper (6.06) every six months has been a true nightmare. After that experience, I decided to stick with every LTS version (i.e., 6.06, 8.04, 10.04, ...) and reinstall from scratch. Having my home directory on a separate partition, eases this process a lot. Just reinstall Ubuntu (after backing everything up of course), mount the home partition and your done. Since I became a big fan of KDE, over the years I've been using Linux, I decided to replace my Kubuntu 8.04 (which wa...

NVIDIA has had the best drivers for Linux users for several years. Since early releases of KDE 4, however, some nasty artifacts appeared when running some Gnome based applications (like Open Office and Thunderbird) on systems with NVIDIA cards. These bugs have been reported to NVIDIA but haven't been addressed until now. According to this very long thread, the latest beta drivers from NVIDIA (180.x) the nasty artifacts should have disappeared. I compiled and installed this latest driver and indeed, the panel corruption when, for example, composing a new mail in Thunderbird does no longer appear. Finally, people running KDE 4 with NVIDIA cards are no longer nvidia-victims :)

In an earlier post I was talking about how I've been using mondo as preferred backup solution for quite some time. However, I have never used it to restore stuff, since I've never broken any install before and hardware hasn't failed on me yet. Since I wanted to replace the smaller 10GB hard drive, I've installed in the Wyse, with a bigger 500GB one, this would be an ideal case to try and restore everything with mondo . So I created a backup of the 10GB drive with mondo to an NFS share on another PC (using the script posted earlier). Next, burned the resulting ISO to a CD and finally booted from the CD and interactively restored my data. mondo has 2 main restore modes; interactive and nuke. Since my new drive was bigger than the original drive, mondo suggested to drop to interactive mode, which allowed me to create a whole new partition scheme (which is nice). The only thing that failed was grub installing itself on the master boot record. I'm not sure why, maybe...

Ubuntu has been a fantastic operating system for my desktop and has been my preferred Desktop OS for more than 3 years now. The cool thing about Ubuntu is it's Debian based. So you install once and dist-upgrade to every new release without ever having to reinstall the whole thing. The downside is a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu sometimes fails leaving you with a very b0rken system. That's why I stick with LTS releases for now, because I have little spare time to reinstall my desktop every few months or so. Nevertheless there are brave people out there always keeping track of the latest, more or less stable, version and don't mind the dist-upgrade problems. Anyway if your install is broken after a dist-upgrade (or any upgrade) it's always nice to have a backup at hand. In search of the ideal, most flexible, backup tool out there I found mondo . So, people, stop asking for a backup tool for Linux on forums, this one will suite your needs. Unlike some other tools, mondo creates ...

Just to let you know, that yours truly and some other Ubuntu enthusiasts will be hosting a booth at the Dipro fair on November 23rd in Ghent on behalf of the Ubuntu Community. I will bring candy :) Please visit the dipro website if you're not sure how to get there.