Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy from Dapper

Friday evening and a nice time to spend on upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy.
replaced all dapper to edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list and ran
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I had to run apt-get update couple of times and apg-get dist-upgrade to capture those missing packages which were updated due to connection error.

At first, the apt-get update failed because of multiverse repositories. I commented out the following lines to proceed with the upgrade.
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe multiverse
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe multiverse

Once the upgrade is complete, after the reboot, I ran update, upgrade again. I uncommented the above lines and ran update and upgrade again to complete the distribution upgrade to Edgy.

I love Firefox 2

Too good is a simple word. I dont have statistics, but the overall experience is good. The pages load much faster (I can feel it), the tabs looks neat and glossy. Will update more in the days to come.

mynslu2 on mypc

mynsul2 is my little NAS, which I want to be accessible on my PC. This nslu2 runs V2.3R63-uNSLUng-6.8-beta and till now not able to access it as root. Hope it gets fixed with stable version or planning to move to openslug in some time.

So, for now, the nslu2 is accessible only via samba and I had to mount my shares via samba rather than nfs. Installed smbfs
sudo aptitude install smbfs
smbclient -L returned all shares. Now,
mount -t smbfs -o username=<user>,password=<passwd> //<nslu2>/<share> /mnt/<shared_folder>
It got mounted and I could browse the NAS. Now to make it permanent, I found an excellent resource (http://www.mattvanstone.com/2006/06/automatically_mounting_smb_sha.html thanks to Matt). Not that I didnt know this before, but I was lazy on a saturday morning and wanted to avoid reading man pages :-)

sudo vi /etc/fstab
//<nslu2>/<share> /mnt/<shared_folder> smbfs credentials=/home/<user>/.smbcredentials,uid=<user>,gid=<group> 0 0

sudo chmod 600 /home/<user>/.smbcredentials

sudo mount -a worked.

Other settings

Once vnc is up, I had my gnome desktop so that I can play around with GUI. I was playing some games and wasting time. I configured the Desktop background to no image (to speed up loading), configured network to have a static ip rather than dhcp.

Fired synaptic package manager to update all packages (/etc/apt/sources.list was modified to include all universe, multiverse options).

Configuring vnc on my PC

I had connected my PC to network, but I dont have a monitor. I had installed openssh-server, so I could ssh to this host. Now my task was to enable vnc on ubuntu on command line.
Edited /etc/vnc.conf
added $XFConfigPath = "/etc/X11/xorg.conf";
set $geometry ="1680x1050";

And installed tightvncserver
sudo aptitude install tightvncserver

Fired up realvnc viewer from my windows laptop (realvnc is better in windows that tightvnc) and it came up good.

Got a PC

I got a PC (Dell optilplex Gx270) from ebay. Powered by pentinum 4 with 512 MB RAM with 40 GB harddrive. Installed Ubuntu dapper drake desktop version on top of it and set on to configure in my network.

Too many things

Too many things done. Planning to explain them in individual topics.

Switching to Ubuntu

I had Open Suse 10.0 installed in my laptop. I was planning to switch to ubuntu for long and when DapperDrake got released, trying to get some freetime was proving to be difficult.
The installation was not straight forward for me. I had LVM configured in the previous Suse installation which I had to completely remove for the ubuntu installation to go ahead.
After installation I was nearly shocked to learn that root account by default is disabled. I enabled the root account using sudo passwd root. I am still trying to fix my ndiswrapper for Broadcom 4306 802.11g/b WLAN.

Failed to get uNSLUng on my cute NSLU2

Its been pending for a long time and this week I decided to upgrade my Linksys NSLU2 to unslung firmware. I already run V2.3R63 and planning to go for unslung V2.3R63-uNSLUng-6.8-beta. I started off early in the morning (around 07:00) and still having troubles in restoring it.

I followed religiously what was told in the readme.txt of the firmware. I got it flashed and when trying to unsling to my disk, I got lost. I loaded up the firmware, boot with the disks and it was very much fine showing me all the disks and shared music over samba. I reboot it without disks, enable telnet and telnet into the box with root. Now I connect the disk1 and try to unsling, it says mounted disk not found.

I reboot without the disks and connect disk1 again. I login as root and check the mounted partitions. It is shown briefly

# mount
/dev/mtdblock4 on / type jffs2 (rw)
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/mtdblock4 on /dev.state type jffs2 (rw)
ramfs on /dev type ramfs (rw)
/dev/mtdblock4 on /var.state type jffs2 (rw)
ramfs on /var type ramfs (rw)
none on /tmp type ramfs (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /share/hdd/data type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb2 on /share/hdd/conf type ext3 (rw,sync)

# ls /share/hdd/data
caps lost+found public quota.user
quota.user~
# ls /share/hdd/conf
backup_sh.conf config config.bin group
group.ttt lost+found passwd
passwd.ttt server.log share share.info
share.info.ttt smb.conf smb.conf.ttt
smbpasswd smbpasswd.ttt tmp upgrade
usrgrp.info usrgrp.info.ttt

But the mount is lost after some time. Curious, I go out and check /var/log/messages.

<47>May 6 16:31:44 klogd: WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
<47>May 6 16:31:44 klogd: USB Mass Storage device found at 2
<46>May 6 16:31:47 klogd: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
<44>May 6 16:31:47 klogd: EXT3-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended
<46>May 6 16:31:47 klogd: EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on sd(8,17), internal journal
<46>May 6 16:31:47 klogd: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
<46>May 6 16:31:48 klogd: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
<46>May 6 16:31:48 klogd: EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on sd(8,18), internal journal
<46>May 6 16:31:48 klogd: EXT3-fs: recovery complete.
<46>May 6 16:31:48 klogd: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
<46>May 6 16:31:52 klogd: Adding Swap: 120480k swap-space (priority -1)
<44>May 6 16:33:07 klogd: EXT3-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended

So doing a fsck now to get the disk1 in order before proceeding. It is not going to finish by today.

New blog for technical posts

Most of the times I write only technical stuff interleaved with personal life. I decided to split this and hence have opened this blog exclusively for technical posts including the new I try out from time to time. My other blog will become a pure personal blog.