Busy… Sleep.. and busy again.

I’ve been busy with work and life. I’m working on getting my life started and its going well. Staying at home day after day is just depressing with a failing computer that’s still tickin’ and wasting 2 to 4 minutes every 5 or 10 minutes watching commercials that are as boring as hell. I’ve been busy workin’ on my truck. I will be getting an engine this week or weekend for it. I imagine if things go the way they are, it could be rolling in a month or two. I gotta take some pics for my gallery.

I have plans to replace all of our computers with dual cores and a quad for me, I’m looking at $2,500 to $2,800 for 4 new computers. Everything will be new, from scratch or maby buy a couple factory PCs, perhaps two or three Dells.

My computer will be built from scratch with totally new hardware and will house a least a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3GB of RAM and two 512MB NVIDIA Video card attached to two 20″ or 22″ widescreen flat panels. Powering the beast will be a 800 watt PSU, maby go with a eco-friendly PSU that will consume only the necessary wattage to power it. Then go with two hardware RAID setups, one for the OSes and storage. I imagine 4 500GB HDDs to mirror and strip the data stream. The storage will consist of 2 750GB or bigger HDDs to mirror each other, all connected to SATA controllers. I’m dumping IDE for this setup. Of course, I’m going with a DVD+/-RW DL Burner, perhaps even two of them. I’d like to also connect them with SATA, as well. She may not be the latest and greatest but it will be a HUGE jump in performance when comparing all 4 desktops combined. Hmm, what else…. oh, how about wireless mouse and keyboard and a fancy blueish case with front usb, firewire, esata, and audio ports. 120 mm fans to cool her. I ain’t gonna fool with liquid cooling. For the OSes, Windows XP and Ubuntu’s latest and greatest. She should keep me happy for 3 or 4 years until my next big upgrade.

I’ll be adding some new cabinets for the server and gadgets, one for the entertainment system, and another for just general storage. Thinking of painting my room a light blueish color. All in all, I’m looking at maby 5 grand to 75 hundred bucks. I’m hoping I could get the Dells for about 500 to 600 bucks a pop. My beast with be at least a grand. Oh, and I almost forgot, I gotta protect that investment with a 1200 watt UPS by APT or ATP or somthin’ like that. Did I mention I gonna get a whole house surge protector to protect our gadgets? Now I did.

If I happen to just need to browse the web, I might be better off with a second lower powered, dual core?, to do casual browsing. It’s case will need to be compact. Maby a low priced Apple will do and connect it to one of the monitors, so one of them will need to support dual inputs. Hehe.

If you read all of that up to this point, thanks.

‘Till next time, Cheers!

Computer Update

Ubuntu and Xubuntu are working great and are sharing the same home partition and swap along with the same username. Windows still won’t boot. I’ll try moving things around on its hard drive by putting the Windows Data partition first and Windows last.

I fixed the problem with ubuntu by, well I don’t know its initial problem but I had to adjust some settings in the profile folder (/home/jms1989) and fix the permissions and owner and groups. Once the bug was squashed, Ubuntu and Xubuntu loaded just fine. Still can’t get to the 6 console screens, I just have a blinking underscore. If you have any ideas why, please post them in the comments. Cheers!

Xubuntu

So, now its Xubuntu’s turn. After having some experience with Ubuntu on my computer and xubuntu on my compaq computer, I figured I’d try it. After booting from the CD, it worked good. I was even able to write to my ntfs partitions straight out of the box. Most distros haven’t matured enough to write to ntfs. It found all my file systems and works ok. I’m currently trying to install it so I’ll see how it goes from there.

If you’d like to try it youself, you’ll find it here.

The Fedora Experience Continued

Well, I managed to get a cabled connection with a crossover cable to a windows computer. That allowed me to update fedora’s repos and install ndiswrapper and a couple of programs. Once I installed the video drivers, I was able to get the graphical user interface (GUI) running. Then I was able to create my user account but had problems loading my home directory. I tried correcting the file permissions and user and group owners., still no go. Eventually, I got annoyed of the file manager’s behavior. When I navigate to a folder or even the parent directory of the current directory, it would open a new window of the file manager.

Since fedora was driving me crazy from the start, I decided to try something else. I know I probably didn’t give fedora a chance but since I wanted to use the same user directory for both linux distros, it had to work together with ubuntu.

Fedora 7

Today, I’ve been trying to get fedora up and running so I can get my other operating systems back up and running. As you can tell from my previous post, I didn’t have success in reorganizing my system. Since I have a DVD already downloaded, I just popped it in and installed it to some empty space I left from the reorganizing task. The first try was ok but I had no internet access and I had no idea how to enable my wired ethernet to connect to a nearby computer. I’m giving it a second try and hopefully, it’ll have internet access so I can download the ndiswrapper and install my windows drivers for my wireless card. Then, I can work on getting my video drivers working so I can have my pretty graphics.

If you would like to try Fedora, you can download it here. Cheers!

Organizing the Hard Drives

Good morning, today I’m going to repartition my internal hard drives. My plan is to first move my /home partition to my data partition on my larger disk and then backup my operating systems, both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux and my Windows Data partition I use for iTunes and large computer game data. Once backed up, I will repartition the entire master drive to hold my Windows partition and the Windows Data partition. The second disk will hold Ubuntu and all of its data files. I will leave room for a second linux OS that will also use my /home partition for its settings. What distribution I will use as the second Linux os, I have yet to decide.

I will keep a written log of time events of when a action starts to when it ends and then the next and then the next, well you get the idea. Moving my /home partition could take about 30 min. to an hour. Backing up my OSes and the Windows Data partition could take 2 to 3 hours. Repartitioning, 10 to 20 min. Restoring the files to their new homes, 1 hour to an hour and 30 minutes. Then with a few adjustments to my linux config files and a jumper swap to make the larger drive with linux to be the master. Restore grub (linux bootloader) and edit its menu.lst file. So, I’m looking at about 5 hours of reorganizing my disks.

I hope this is worth the effort because I’m desperate for better performance. When the task is complete, I post a new post indicating its finished and my comments on it. Hopefully, good ones. :)

What’s odd is Windows behaves annoyingly well when compared to Ubuntu in performance but Windows better behave after the adjustments and Ubuntu better get better in its performance. Cheers!

Update: Progress Log:

[07:32] Perform a hard startup to windows to disable access to the ext3 partitions.

[07:35] Reboot to Ubuntu to migrate /home partition files to the Linux Data partition.

[08:46] Finished migration, rebooting to backup OSes and Windows Data partition.

[08:50] Starting Backup, part 1 – OS.

[09:41] Backup, part 2 – Windows Data.

[10:21] Backup complete.

[13:15] Start Restore, Part 1 -OS

[19:08 Backup and Restore complete. Starting gparted live cd to reconfigure linux.

[19:16] Move linux root to the right to allow for a 1.49GB swap space and shrink it from 25GB to 24.2GB.

[19:55] Shut down to swap jumpers. Reboot to Ubuntu Live CD to reconfigure some linux files.

[20:20] Reconfigure /etc/fstab to allow for the new layout and reinstall grub to the master boot loader.

[20:43] Shut down, operation has failed. Windows does not boot, Ubuntu will not show any text diologes to dionose the problem. fsck in the live cd fixed a small problem but ubuntu still won’t boot. Will do some research to figure out this problem.

Ubuntu

About Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.

The Ubuntu promise

• Ubuntu will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.
• Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from Canonical and hundreds of companies around the world.
• Ubuntu includes the very best translations and accessibility infrastructure that the free software community has to offer.
• Ubuntu CDs contain only free software applications; we encourage you to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Download it today.

Test clip of gtk-recordMyDesktop

This is a test video of my desktop using gtk-recordMyDesktop.
You can install it by running the following command: sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop. Make sure you have the universe repositories enabled in your ubuntu sources.
The video was originally recorded in OGG format but was converted to MP4 to upload to youtube.