I came across this blog post in one of the feeds I read daily. I thought it was cool and I wanted to share. It’s a way to use the Phosphor screen saver that comes with xscreensaver to display a random bit of the Linux kernel source.

I have to admit, I don’t use a screen saver. They drive me nuts. My screen powers down after 1 minute. And I like it that way. But this is cool enough and novel enough that I might try it, at least for a few days.

The directions are written for a Debian based system, so I’ll have to play around a bit and see if I can get it to work with Fedora. But everything seems bog standard. It uses a small program the author wrote to display the contents of a random file in a directory (this will also help me out in some scripting I’m doing for mplayer).

It of course assumes that you do have the xscreensaver package and said package contains the Phosphor screensaver.  It also assumes that you have the kernel source on your system as well.  It’s also necessary to compile the author’s program (which should only be `make` and `make install`).

If  I get this to work, I’ll definitely report back.  I’ll also report back on Argument Shuffle.

I’m in the process of testing out a rpm for BOINC. Woo hoo!

Some notes to self:

• After creating a tarball of one’s working install. One needs to move it somewhere for safe keeping. One’s data partition is a great place for said safe keeping. When one needs to move something to said partition, it helps if one mounts said partition before trying to move it. Somehow I think I now have a /Data directory hanging out somewhere. I’ll have to remove it once I find it.
• rmdir only works on empty directories. If there are files in there, you have to use rm -r.
• Using rm -r on a directory that has a metric ton of files takes a very long time because it runs in interactive mode. If one is really sure one wants to get rid of the whole thing, use rm -rf.
• Once you remove a directory containing a file, the soft links pointing to said file break. And programs that need said link to file to function correctly will also break.
• It is impossible to echo something > broken_soft_link_name. You must rm broken_soft_link_name first.
• Wiping out a users home directory is a Bad Thing ®. Not having all the hidden config files causes Very Bad Things ® to happen, including not being able to access the account from the shell. Having a backup is a Good Thing ®. Knowing how to restore said backup is an Even Better Thing ®. And finding out that said restored backup works is an Extremely Good Thing ®.

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Watch this space for further updates…

I wasn’t happy with just having my laptop dual booting between Ubuntu and Vista. Nah. I had given up on the XP/Vista/Ubuntu triple boot idea mostly because the XP Pro CD I have doesn’t have the right drivers for my SCSI hard drive.

In working through the terminal stuff with Eric, he sort of turned me onto the idea of trying Fedora Core. So we came up with a partitioning scheme that will allow me to triple boot among Vista, Ubuntu and Fedora Core 7.

The partitioning was the easy part. Once I remembered that I had to reboot after wiping out the last three of the four partitions I already had setup, it went flawlessly.

For the curious, my partition table looks like

/dev/sda1 — Vista

/dev/sda2 — Shared data

/dev/sda3 — Swap

/dev/sda4 — An extended partition containing…

/dev/sda5 — Ubuntu 7.04

/dev/sda6 — Fedora Core 7

/dev/sda7 — /home

/dev/sda8 — /tmp

So now I’m at the point where I’m ready to scream. My first attempt was a failure. I didn’t pay attention to the GRUB (bootloader) screens when I installed Fedora so I ended up not being able to boot into Ubuntu. Thankfully I was still able to get into Windows.

After consulting with Eric, I decided the easiest thing to do was reinstall Fedora and add Ubuntu into GRUB. So I did that.

Failure again. Although I now have the option of booting into Ubuntu, I still can’t because it throws an error at me. But again, at least I can still get into Windows.

So now I’m off to try to mount my Ubuntu partition in Fedora through some CLI magic (and it really is magic to me) and then find the names of vmlinux and initrd (whatever those might be).

Thank goodness it was a rainy weekend. I don’t feel so bad for sitting in front of the computer all day for two days.

I have been planning on triple booting (Vista Home Premium/XP Professional/Ubuntu Feisty Fawn) my laptop for quite a while. I started the process about 6 weeks ago. I managed to get the hard drive partitioned before I left for Korea. That process only took about 2 hours or so. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but it was probably something stupid. By the time I reinstalled Vista, I was so frustrated that I knew Ubuntu was going to have to wait for another day. And XP is going to have to wait just a bit longer as well. I’m waiting on my brother to slipstream me a new install CD as the one I had doesn’t have the drivers for my SATA controller.

So yesterday was the day to install Ubuntu. I pulled out the tutorial I found online and popped in the installer CD I burned. The install was truly one of the quickest and least painful ones I’ve ever done. The only problem I had to solve was a silly one. All I needed to do was right click the ext3 partition to specify it as the mount point (errr… at least I think that’s what it was called).

One reboot at the end of the install and I was up and running. First thing I did was install all of the updates and then started trying to break it. My first project was to get BOINC installed. I was following a forum thread that another cruncher wrote and managed to screw it up at least twice. I did learn that Google and “man” are indeed your friends. But in the end I did get it up and running.

I got Firefox and OpenOffice up and running and set-up just the way I like them. I installed Flash and Java so I can see all the nifty things on the web. I half figured out the problem I was having with RhythmBox. What I did should have solved the entire problem, but hasn’t. So I’ve Googled and also posted on a message board for help from a Linux guru as my Google skills seem to be failing me.

So all in all, I think I did fairly well for a weekend’s worth of work. I have a shiny new OS to play with. I learned some new things. And I got myself out of jams all by myself (even if the terminal still scares me).