Linux

Today, I gave a KWLUG Talk on how I replaced the disk of my laptop under Linux, while preserving all the information on it and making hibernate work.

The PDF of the presentation is attached below.

In mid June, my laptop hard disk died. Suddenly, there was a flurry of disk I/O wait, then applications started to report errors trying to write anything.

With a 500GB 2.5" laptop disk lying around that was used for backup, I replaced the dead disk with this one.

I had an Ubuntu Server 14.04 CD lying around, and therefore did not bother to download Kubuntu 14.04.

My laptop's home directory is backed up daily via ssh to the server. So my data was safe.

Recently my laptop hard disk died suddenly, and I had an unused 2.5" laptop disk lying around, so I just put that in, and installed Ubuntu Linux LTS 14.04, then added the packages I needed.

However, using smartmontools, I found out that the not so new disk has unhealthy statistics, and did not want to risk down time on my main computer.

Attached are the slides from my presentation tonight at the KWLUG on how to flash a custom Android ROM (in this case OmniROM) on the Acer Iconia A500 tablet. The podcast is here.

The whole process was done without any Windows software. All was done from Linux.

• Getting a CPU ID using APX mode, then getting an SBK (Secure Boot Key) from that.
• Installing Timmy Dean's V4 Rollback.

Since I moved from cable TV to free HDTV over-the-air (OTA) ATSC TV, I have been using the Homeworx HW-150PVR as a PVR (personal video recorder) for HD TV.

More and more large companies are implementing more restrictive email policies to fight increasing SPAM. These are mainly DMARC. Such companies include Yahoo, Cox, Verizon, and others.

As this happens, some of your legitimate email may be rejected because email servers are more restrictive.

In order to minimize the probability of your email being rejected, the following describes how to implement Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DKIM on your already running Postfix mail server.

Now that OpenWRT has released a new stable version: Barrier Breaker 14.07, it was time to upgrade my D-Link DIR-835 router running snapshots to it.

Do do this, I first did the following:

1. Save a list of the packages, using the command:

opkg list-installed

Then using some scripting on the output to ignore the version numbers.

2. Updating the /etc/sysupgrade.conf file to look like this:

/etc/rc.local
/etc/syslog-ng.conf
/etc/crontabs/

If you are, like me, an Ubuntu user who is annoyed when doing aptitude full-upgrade because it stops and displays the changelog until you press "q", then here is why this happens, and how to change the behavior.

The reason this happens is that the package apt-listchanges is installed on your system. This package lists the changes before applying them.

However, by default, it stops the upgrade process until the user has provided input. The silly part is that there are no choices at this point, the user must dismiss the output and nothing else can be done.

If you upgraded your Kubuntu KDE Desktop from 12.04 (precise pangolin) to 14.04 (trusty tahr), and tried to connect your laptop to a projector, you will be, like me, frustrated with the default "Monitor and Display" settings that pops up. You can't unify outputs easily.

To overcome this, install the kde-workspace-randr package. It will provide you with an icon in the system tray where you can unify the outputs and change each's resolution more easily.

Do it using the following command, or use your favorite software installation program:

Looking at the regular weekly backups, I saw a jump in size that was not accounted for by regular normal growth.

ls -ltrh /backupdirectory
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31G May 25 03:23 backup-2014-05-25.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31G Jun 1 03:22 backup-2014-06-01.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32G Jul 6 03:21 backup-2014-07-06.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41G Aug 3 03:25 backup-2014-08-03.dump
...