I got Skype up and running. This is super easy on Windows, but not so on Linux. I was impressed that the newest versions of Fedora, with the latest kernel update, now have webcam drivers built in. It is no longer necessary to compile and install the drivers yourself. And, Fedora automatically recognized the USB webcam when I put it in! That’s amazing, and represents a lot of progress. My headset microphone was also recognized. So, I could just point Skype at the appropriate devices, in Skype’s menus, and I was then good to go. I’m “krellan” on Skype. Now, I just need somebody to actually call me, so I can see if the service works 🙂 |
Did well at PAPA pinball tournament[Aug. 25th, 2008|01:15 am][mood| calm][music|di.fm Future Synthpop]Great news. A week ago, I did really well at the PAPA pinball tournament in Pittsburgh. I put together a great set of games and qualified for the finals in B division, something I’ve never done before in any division. I ended up taking 3rd place in B division. Good enough to win a very decent cash prize. Many people in the BAPA pinball league I’m in, also had great success. Here’s a beautiful photo, taken from a slideshow of photos taken by Tim. The picture is of many of us, all afterwards at the hotel bar. The gorgeous guy on the left is Gabriel, then from there to the right it’s me, Andrei, Tim, and Mike. This weekend was the BAPA playoffs. Even though I also had a good qualifying seed in this tournament, my hot streak came to an end. I quickly crashed and burned right back down to the ground. Ah well, there’s always next season 🙂link1 comment|post comment |
| Resizing partitions on Linux[Jul. 31st, 2008|04:31 pm][mood|geeky] Here’s another obscure Linux tip I felt compelled to write about, lest I forget it when I need it in the future! Sometimes you need to move or resize partitions on your hard drive, in order to free up more space. Since Linux users often have more than one partition (/boot, /home, swap, or whatever), unlike Windows users, this issue comes up more often than you would think. There used to be a commercial program to do this, PartitionMagic. The makers of this program put in some very nasty size limits, though, that would cause the program to fail in strange ways when your hard drive exceeded certain size limits. There should have been no technical reason for this, but interestingly, each successive version of PartitionMagic would feature a slightly increased size limit. These were paid upgrades, of course. Interesting “subscription” model, if that was their goal, to make you keep buying the program every year or so, to keep up with the newest hard drives. The good news is that hardly anybody needs PartitionMagic anymore, because there’s a free clone of it, called gparted. It’s available on most Linux boot disks. I recommend Knoppix. Knoppix includes gparted, among many other things, on a conveniently bootable CD, DVD, or USB key. You always want to run a partitioning program from a boot disk, in order to guarantee your hard disk is not being used by the operating system at all while it’s being repartitioned. This includes swap. On Knoppix, be sure to boot with the “noswap” cheatcode, or you could run into problems with this while running gparted! So here’s the tip. The resizing operation in gparted will go much more smoothly with ext2 filesystems, not ext3 filesystems. If you’ve had problems resizing before, you can often fix them by downgrading your partitions to ext2, performing the resize, then upgrading back to ext3 when you are finished. There is no data loss, as these partition types are perfectly compatible on all modern versions of Linux. In these examples, I’m using /dev/sdz1, a partition on a fictional drive letter that nobody has, in order to avoid unfortunate problems with cutting and pasting the commands. To downgrade a partition from ext3 to ext2: e2fsck -f -y -v -C 0 /dev/sdz1 tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdz1 e2fsck -f -y -v -C 0 /dev/sdz1 The tune2fs command removes the ext3 journal from your filesystem, effectively downgrading it to ext2. It’s surrounded by e2fsck commands, which will take a long time to finish. The e2fsck commands force a check of your filesystem, to make sure there are no errors beforehand, and to clean up all traces of the ext3 journal afterwards. Now, gparted resizing should run smoothly. When finished, do the reverse, to upgrade your partition from ext2 to ext3 again: e2fsck -f -y -v -C 0 /dev/sdz1 tune2fs -j /dev/sdz1 e2fsck -f -y -v -C 0 /dev/sdz1 Also, here is a bonus tip. In order to squeeze the maximum amount of usable free space out of your ext3 partitions, and to turn off the forced check of your partitions when booting: tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 -m 0 -r 0 /dev/sdz1 I recommend doing this on any newly created ext3 partitions. The -c 0 and -i 0 options disable the forced check of the partition after a number of reboots or elapsed days. Many older Linux distributions were notorious for forcing an annoying check every 30 days. The -m 0 and -r 0 options allow full usage of the entire space, without reserving any space. It used to be thought prudent to reserve 5% of a filesystem for use by root, but on today’s large drives, 5% is a huge amount of space to lose. So, hope this helps anybody who needs it. |