Finally booting pre-installed Linux on an OEM PC

The Dell XPS 410n that I ordered on May 24th arrived this Saturday. After 10 years of using Linux, I was finally able to order a prebuilt computer from a major OEM without paying anyone for an operating system that I would delete shortly after unboxing. Instead of devoting half of Saturday afternoon to installing Linux, I had a working Linux system 19 minutes after opening the box. I think I probably spent more time picking a desktop background from Flickr than configuring the machine.

I didn't spend any time installing the DVD drive into the case or washing thermal grease off my hands. I opened the case briefly to take a picture, but I don't even know how many PCI slots I have. I can feel the freedom of blissful ignorance returning.

I half-expected Dell to screw up Ubuntu somehow-- add idiotic icons to the desktop (offers to connect me to the internets, shortcuts to crippled versions of photo editing software, or similar). I'm happy to report that they seem to have gotten it right. The Ubuntu they delivered is difficult for me to distinguish from the Ubuntu I've been installing for the past few years. Synaptic is set up to use the ubuntu.com repositories. Compiz is disabled by default. The boot process seems faster, but that may be the new hardware. The 2.6.20-15 kernel was installed; Synaptic installed 2.6.20-16 during the first update.

Ubuntu wasn't perfect-- it did fail to identify my HP f2105 monitor's maximum resolution of 1680 x 1050, and there was no way that a normal human would have been able to fix it. (I executed sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg and selected the correct resolution to fix it.) Also, the option to enable the restricted Nvidia driver doesn't work, but I haven't gone beyond the normal-human level of effort yet.

(Update: after running a Synaptic update, I could enable the restricted Nvidia driver and turn on Compiz-- no geek-level intervention necessary.)

Overall, I'm delighted with what Dell and the wealthy gentleman from Canonical have done. For me, 2007 is the year of the Linux on the desktop. I offer my sincere congratulations and thanks to the Ubuntu folks at Canonical and Dell.

Fixing X11 no more

Last week, after building my own computers to run Linux for about 10 years, I ordered a computer from Dell with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Don't get me wrong-- I have enjoyed at least 80% of the hacking, crashing X11 repeatedly, trying to disable X11, giving up and using the terminal window at 640 x 480, crashing X11 repeatedly, and so on. In the last 2 or 3 years, Linux has become solid enough that I rarely need to perform tasks akin to surgery. With tested hardware from Dell, instead of hardware randomly selected from different (non-Belkin) vendors, I'm betting that I may not need to edit xorg.conf at all!

As I prepare to enter the realm of normal people, the realm of adults who buy computers to get work done, who don't know about lolcats or frist psot, HTTP redirection or ARP cache poisoning, SSH or even RSS, it's time for me to pass on what I sincerely hope will become useless tips.

When your GUI goes crazy, the screen starts cycling on and off, or just searching for inputs eternally:

1. Use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to stop the X server and drop to a command prompt. Then you can try looking at /etc/X11/xorg.conf to see what's wrong and restart X using the command startx.

2. Enable sshd as soon as you can, so that something goes horribly wrong, you can still ssh into the machine and execute commands.

3. Use Ctrl-Alt-F2 (or higher F-keys) to cycle to additional terminal windows if, as was generally the case, X is screwed up.

Those three tricks have kept me going for tens, or maybe even hundreds, of hours of debugging.

So, maybe I'll need these skills again when the hard times come and production of new computers grinds to a halt, but until then, I'm turning my attention to higher level tasks, like implementing a sun-tracking algorithm in Python.

Exavault rsync script

The company I work for recently started using a service called Exavault to back up our data. We have a server running Linux that logs into our NAS using ssh every night and rsyncs the data with a local directory. It also dumps our mediawiki database (well, used to-- we're using Socialtext now) and subversion repository.

All of this data gets synchronized with Exavault's machines in Dublin, California.

This has been running with no known problems for about six months. Below are the bash scripts I wrote to do the synchronization.

(lang=bash) LOGFILE=/var/log/GME_backup/GME_backups.log echo "Syncing chemp to Exavault, starting $(date +%FT%T)" >> $LOGFILE echo "Dumping wiki database" >> $LOGFILE mv /home/brandon/wiki_backup/wiki_dump /home/brandon/wiki_backup/wiki_dump.old mysqldump --user=root --password=****** greenmountain > /home/brandon/wiki_backup/wiki_dump rm /home/brandon/wiki_backup/wiki_dump.old echo "Dumped wiki database" >> $LOGFILE echo "Dumping Subversion repository" >> $LOGFILE mv /home/brandon/svn_backup/svn_dump /home/brandon/svn_backup/svn_dump.old svnadmin dump /home/brandon/svn/NCL2 > /home/brandon/svn_backup/svn_dump rm -r /home/brandon/svn_backup/svn_dump.old echo "Dumped Subversion repository" >> $LOGFILE echo "Backing up files from Q, SVN, and wiki" >> $LOGFILE rsync -av --exclude-from=no_backup.txt --progress /home/brandon/Q_backup/ greenmountain@greenmountain.exavault.com:backup-test/ >> $LOGFILE rsync -av --exclude-from=no_backup.txt --progress /home/brandon/svn_backup/ greenmountain@greenmountain.exavault.com:backup-svn/ >> $LOGFILE rsync -av --exclude-from=no_backup.txt --progress /home/brandon/wiki_backup/ greenmountain@greenmountain.exavault.com:backup-wikidb/ >> $LOGFILE rsync -av --exclude-from=no_backup.txt --progress /var/www/wiki/ greenmountain@greenmountain.exavault.com:backup-wiki/ >> $LOGFILE echo "Finished at $(date +%FT%T)" >> $LOGFILE echo "----------------***-------------------" >> $LOGFILE</pre>

The other script:

```(lang=bash)

!/bin/bash

LOGFILE=/var/log/GME_backup/GME_backups.log echo "Syncing Q to Chemp, starting $(date +%FT%T)" >> $LOGFILE rsync -a --exclude-from=no_backup.txt --progress root@192.168.2.4:/raid/WeatherPhenom/ /home/brandon/Q_backup/ >> $LOGFILE echo "Finished at $(date +%FT%T)" >> $LOGFILE echo "---------------------------------" >> $LOGFILE

```

Barcamp Boston 2

My favorite quote from the weekend: "I'm just a recreational paranoid."

Thanks to everyone who represented on behalf of geek power (if that's even possible).