NONparametrics » ubuntu http://nonparametrics.com geekdom without assumption Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:09:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Lightscribe on Linux! http://nonparametrics.com/2009/10/15/lightscribe-on-linux/ http://nonparametrics.com/2009/10/15/lightscribe-on-linux/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:41:59 +0000 Bryan http://nonparametrics.com/?p=45 Being the idealist that I am, naturally linux is my operating system of choice. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I booted something else on one of my machines. Maybe minix, a couple years ago. At any rate, there is a price to pay for jumping off of the M$ bandwagon, and most of the time that comes in hardware support. Our monopolistic software giant likes to encourage hardware vendors to support only a certain, popular OS (for the dis-believing, check out this article on GrokLaw, or at least check out the paper it mentions.). The result is many devices that end up having to be reverse engineered, usb snooped, or other in order to force them into penguine submission.

Laptops are the worst for this, since there are more vendors turning out more new crap…. For example, my HP Pavailion dv6-1230us; the HDMI port is tempermental, and the sound card fails to run at all in Ubuntu 9.04. I’m currently upgrading to the Beta 9.10 with high hopes, but I’ll be sure to let you know. Another feature this machine happened to have is LightScribe–a feature I just assumed would not be usable. On a whim, I googled “ubuntu lightscribe” and was thrilled to discover a page detailing the 5 easy steps to get it running on Ubuntu. It’s a pretty stripped, simple interface, but hey–it works!

You can find the debs or rpms pretty easily on the lightscribe site if you need them for another distro.

]]> http://nonparametrics.com/2009/10/15/lightscribe-on-linux/feed/ 0 man with a mirror http://nonparametrics.com/2007/11/07/man-with-a-mirror/ http://nonparametrics.com/2007/11/07/man-with-a-mirror/#comments Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:46:54 +0000 Bryan http://nonparametrics.com/?p=21 I’m sure that you’ve all heard me sing the glories of Linux at some point, and probably most of you know that I run Ubuntu (among other OSes). I’m constantly impressed by the relative ease of use and how quickly it is continually improving. I’ve got 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) running on 5 machines at the moment, and I’ve been wanting to upgrade to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) since it came out a few weeks ago; I just haven’t had the time to add a new hard drive to my apt-mirror machine. BTW, any of you really geeky fellows who run Ubuntu on more than two machines, apt-mirror is well worth the effort and bandwidth (if you have it).

It takes all of about 10 minutes to set up, and about 12-72 hours to download the packages. Once it’s done, your updates and installs will happen in seconds, since the downloads are only limited by your local LAN. With my sources enabled (all of the official and community repos on the ubuntu mirror plus the wineHQ one) it was a 37 gig download. Assuming you have a running web server, all it takes is:

sudo apt-get install apt-mirror

After the install, open up your mirror.list and replace the lines that start with deb with the similar ones in your sources.list. here is mine:

sudo vim /etc/apt/mirror.list

############# config ##################
#
# set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror
#
# if you change the base path you must create the directories below with write privlages
#
# set mirror_path $base_path/mirror
# set skel_path $base_path/skel
# set var_path $base_path/var
# set cleanscript $var_path/clean.sh
# set defaultarch
set nthreads 20
set tilde 0
#
############# end config ##############

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security multiverse

clean http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

After that you just need to run the mirror updating command…
sudo su - apt-mirror -c apt-mirror
…and wait for several hours. Or days.

Once it has completed the first run, you can go into /etc/cron.d/apt-mirror and uncomment the line in there to make it run on it’s own every day.

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