linux

Right after installing Ubuntu 8.04, I attempted to install Cinelerra CV but failed miserably.

Seems there were serious dependency problems in their repository. That's now been fixed.

If you want to try your hand at some awesome video editing in Linux using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), just add the following repository and install Cinelerra. They have versions optimized for AMD 64 bit processors, and even more generic 32 bit systems.

deb http://akirad.cinelerra.org akirad-hardy main

I'll try and post a tutorial in a few days.

I use Ubuntu servers in various places. I've built a terabyte backup server that reaches out and grabs various files from other servers for a longer term storage using rsync over ssh.

Works like a charm!

Unfortunately I neglected to check it's SSH key's after I installed the security upgrades for Ubuntu after the SSH vulnerability was announced, and the key it was using was invalidated so all the rsync connections were failing.

I really should implement some sort of real network backup system one day so I'd be notified if something failed. In the meantime I've replaced the key pair and everything's working fine again.

Setting up KVM for virtual machines in Ubuntu 8.04 is easy!

A few simple steps will get you up and running. First, install the packages with your favorite package manager, or at a console type:

sudo apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin virt-manager virt-viewer

I also found I needed to add myself to the kvm group:

sudo adduser `id -un` kvm
sudo adduser `id -un` libvirtd

You must add yourself to libvirtd for networking to function :-)

Here's one of the few situations where rebooting linux is probably easier for most people than trying to manually start everything, so give her a boot and log back in.

Under your Applications menu in "System Tools" you'll find "Virtual Machine Manager". Connect to the qemu "localhost" setup that is already there by right clicking on it. After it says you are connected, click New at the bottom of the window to create a new virtual machine instance. Follow the wizard to configure your install.

I found that after installing XP, when it rebooted to complete the install that kvm didn't remount the cd-rom image I was installing from, so I had to manually edit the virtual machine setup and add a storage device pointed at the Windows XP cd-rom. Then installation finished normally.

The first thing I noticed was that install took about 45 minutes total, which seemed a bit long to me. It could be the setup I chose. I'm running a dual-core AMD 64 on a 64 bit Ubuntu install, and chose to run a 2 processor 32 bit virtual machine for the install.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 on my machine that refused to install Ubuntu 8.04, I then updated it to 8.04.

Things seem to be working... we'll see.

Well, I gave up on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". It refused to format the drive whatever I did. I did format the drive once with a 7.04 disc I had lying around and then tried to install 8.04 on it, and it still failed.

So, obviously it didn't like my motherboard chipset. Basically if you have a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard (AMD 690G Northbridge) then don't try Ubuntu 8.04.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the system and it went on perfectly first try!

For the record, here's what I have:

Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard
AMD AM2 X2 64 bit 5600 Brisbane CPU (fastest 65 watt CPU they have)
8 GB of RAM
160 GB SATA Barracuda
160 GB SATA Raptor
Asus GeForce 8600GTS with Dual 20" widescreen monitors

I'm still not sure what the problem is. I'm attempting to install Ubuntu 8.04 on a new machine and it keeps freezing up during the install. So far I've tried disabling virtualization in the BIOS, a different hard drive and now I'm trying the built-in video instead of the GeForce card I'm going to use.

Update:
Things I've tried:

boot params: noapic, nolapic acpi=off
Multiple hard drives
Removed PCIx video card and used onboard video
Setting BIOS SATA controller to "Legacy IDE"
Native SATA Mode
Standard IDE hard drive
Another DVD reader in case it was a bad source drive
Memtest, just to make sure it wasn't bad memory
Booted into 8.04 live CD and tried to partition the drive - still froze
Tried different SATA cable and port (even though the IDE drive failed too)
I finally booted a 7.10 32 bit Live CD and was able to partition and format the drive
Still no luck installing 8.04 on top of that formatted drive, however...
Tried setting SATA mode to RAID

I recently rebooted my desktop, only to find it painfully slow on restart. It took about 20 minutes of investigating to figure out what was going on, but finally I stumbled on the answer.

The first thing I noticed with top was that there were 10 instances of "identify" running, all using around 10% of the CPU.

If I killed all the instances of identify, they would immediately come back. It was driving me up the wall. With nothing else running on the desktop, these things would constantly pop up.

Finally I noticed that trackerd was the last process started. After killing it, the problem went away.

Tracker is a Linux search and indexing utility. One that I never use. Apparently it was trying to index the thousands of images I have stored on mounted NFS shares to a server.

Since my search utility of choice is "slocate", I uninstalled Tracker and the problem was solved.

Verizon Wireless announces they will be releasing Linux based cellphones next year.

We'll see how it plays out, but overall it's good news for embedded Linux.

I've just finished building what is soon to become my new primary MySQL server. It's a dual CPU, dual-core AMD64 running at 2 GHz each. I've put 8 GB of RAM in it right now, but the board will support up to 64 GB. It's running three Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives in a Linux RAID 0 (striping) for performance. No, there's not a mirror or checksum because not only will it have daily off-machine backups but will also be replicating to a backup database server when it's up and running.

I've configured network bonding, so it effectively has a 2 Gbps connection to the network. Right now I'm doing some serious load testing on the Raptor's since I've had issues in the past with them on another chipset motherboard. So far so good!

I was a guest on the "No Carrier" podcast over at Galaxycow. It's about an hour long show, so download it and listen on your commute!