To get right to the point, I converted my Centos Linux computer to a Ubuntu installation instead. My interests have changed and I am less interested in learning about Linux and more interested in a functional desktop computer for me and the fam. Seems that Ubuntu is the most popular installation for this purpose so I grabbed a copy and did a fresh install over my old Centos machine.

I’ve had it installed for a few weeks and it seems easier to maintain. For example, I just now updated Adobe Flash via point and click within FireFox rather than dealing with rpm’s and tar.gz archives.

Is Ubuntu for everyone?  Dr. AnnMaria De Mars makes a good case that it it just might be, using her non-techie daughters as an example. At the same time, I think it helps that she has a rocket scientist (literally) husband in the house as well. For example, during my Ubuntu intstall, I had to overcome an error that appeared upon every start-up and also had to force Ubuntu to recognize my OEM graphics card. Solving both of them took some research (ok, actually just Googling) and then using Linux command line syntax to resolve. I’m no rocket scientist, but I was able to get it working. Yet I don’t see my wife or kids willing to mess with this.

I can’t see the iPhone loving masses being bothered with something that doesn’t work right out of the box. Anyone at Dell/HP/Lenovo see an opportunity here?

Just seeing how a google form works when embedded into a blog. Continue Reading »

I doubt that I would want to write a long blog post from here, but I have WordPress To Go installed on my Droid so I thought I would test it out.
www.google.com
My birthday cake is attached as a picture.

Having figured out Samba shares, I thought I would tackle remote file systems between Linux machines using NFS (Network File Service). The documentation looked clear enough, but it wasn’t quit as easy as I expected, largely due to the differences between version 3 and 4 of NFS with respect to:

• firewall behavior
• exporting file system syntax and use of pseudo file systems
• difference in mount command syntax

I am running systems that use SELinux and firewalls*. I have one Centos 5.3 NFS server and three client machines running as virtual machines** on the server. My goal was to establish remote file systems for the virtual machine clients. I’ll skip some of the introductory steps to set up the nfs server process that are listed in the doc.

I’ll list the commands that I used to export the file system from the server and the mount command I first used on the client. The file system that I was attempting to export was /junk/client1. On the server (server.stevens.net), I added the following to /etc/exports:

and I used the following mount command on client1.stevens.net (and received the error shown):

A bit surprised that it didn’t work, I poked around the Internet and I found some good info that ultimately helped me get on the right track at Miles Brennan’s Linux Home Server HOWTO page. He does an excellent job explaining the pseudo file system configuration required for version 4 of NFS.

I built out the following psuedo file system on the server:

Continue Reading »

Well, I’ve started messing around with virtualization. Saying I’ve only scratched the surface is an understatement, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? I Installed VMware Server 2 on my Centos 5.3 machine, and then installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as a virtual machine. This was all easier than my initial installation of Centos on my home built PC. It’s really just installing software and allocating resources of the host machine to the guest machines.

I downloaded VMware Server (The 64 bit Linux RPM package) from http://www.vmware.com/freedownload/login.php?product=server20 as well as the User Guide from http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/server_pubs.html. You will have to register with an email address on the VMWare site to access the downloads.

Chapter 2 of the User Guide walks you through the install. For me it looked like this:
After downloading the rpm package, I moved it to /tmp and checked the checksum vs. the value on the VMware download page. (It matched, trust me)

Then installed it with the instructions in the User Guide, and ran the vmware-config.pl script

Continue Reading »

I added a new 500GB HDD to the Linux home PC. This drive will be dedicated to Samba shares for our home PC that has exhausted its 80GB hard drive. This gave me an opportunity to set up file systems on the Linux machine, a great learning opportunity. I decided to set up a 250GB physical volume called ‘/storage’ that would hold our multimedia files’ and a 250GB logical volume group, 100GB of which would be a ‘/backup’ volume to act as a backup drive for the home PC files (currently being backed up to CD-RW) and a 100GB drive called ‘/junk’ which has no other purpose than giving me a second logical volume in the volume group. Going forward, I’ll create all file systems as logical volumes, because these are easier to resize in the future. But using a physical volume for /storage game me a chance to experience the set up both. Continue Reading »

I need to have some sections of code in my blog, as any good geek blog would. Here is what I added to my blog’s style sheet to support my code entries. In fact, the presentation of the css code uses the code definitions in the style sheet. Can you say recursion? Continue Reading »

I wanted to get a simple web page up on my hosted site, created by hand using a simple text editor; just a little project to learn the basics of xhtml and cascading style sheets. I’m a big advocate of the “learning-by-doing” mantra.
I had done some work in html many years ago, so I understood the concepts of markup languages and tagging. It took a couple of weeks working in the evening (sometimes the late evening), but I was able to get a simple page established at markstevens20.net. Continue Reading »

I want to play with computers and networking.  My family doesn’t.  They are content with a basic Windows XP PC with email, web browsing and support for MP3 players and digital cameras.  Our XP PC is 5 years old and has exhausted its 80 GB hard drive.  Rather than buying a new Vista machine, I decided to buy the parts to make a PC, then loaded CentOS Linux on it. In addition to the new Liunx machine’s function as a ‘lab’ for me to play with, it also had to provide additional storage and backup facilities for the family’s XP machine.   I know the simpler thing to do would be to simply buy a USB HDD for the XP machine, but this isn’t about simple, it’s about creating ‘learning opportunities.’ Continue Reading »

After completing the build of the new PC, I set out to load a version of Linux.  While it seamed that most folks who had bought my ASUS motherboard had successfully installed Ubuntu, I wanted to go with CentOS, because it is based on the Red Hat Enterprise distribution and I had used it some at work to build an Asterisk PBX, something I may do with this machine too. Continue Reading »