Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I realize this may be a twist, but I’ve decided to change the focus of my blog ever so slighty (it’s my blog so that’s ok). I would like to start covering some of my art interests. In my quest to become a better graphic designer, I’ve started to appreciate art increasingly more in the past few months and I think I’m going to feature what inspires and/or moves me. Who knows what this will bring about but who really cares, right? Don’t be mistaken - I will still be covering tech just as much but for now I have a few upcoming posts that are centered on digital art, the industry itself and the digital artists I admire.

Ok guys, it’s been about a month since my last post but I have plenty to talk about. Hopefully I’ll get all the content up before the end of the week.

I had an issue earlier this month with Error 17 (see Super Grub Disk and the Mysterious Error 17). My Ubuntu laptop would not resume properly and I was forced to manually restart it. I did some thorough research on the web yielding a possible fix - fsck. This command - I’m assuming to mean “file system check” - allowed me to “repair” my Ubuntu partition using a Ubuntu LiveCD and terminal. After selecting “yes” to every suggested action that was to be taken by fsck, I rebooted into Super Grub Disk which was able to fix my Grub boot loader. I rebooted again and I discovered that my user name and password didn’t work. From there I did some more reading and realized that I needed to create another user name and password to get access my Ubuntu desktop. I used a LiveCD to get to a terminal and created another user, rebooted back in to my Ubuntu installation and discovered, to my dismay, that my Home folder and many other programs and documents were gone. At that point I knew that some serious rearranging had taken place without my knowledge. Oh, the pangs of being a Linux n00b. I rebooted into my Vista installation and had been using that for a while. I left my Ubuntu partition alone for a week until I could figure how to recover files. I tried running R-Linux from Windows but that yielded no results. I then read an article about the Lost+Found directory and how it works. I checked my L+F directory and there laid a multitude of numbered files and directories that were recovered. That me led to search the directories and I have copied over many of my missing files at this point.

Samba, http://us1.samba.org/samba/,  is widely spoken of throughout the Linux community. It is an efficient way of sharing your network resources like printers and shared drives with Windows computers. I even managed to share my 500 GB USB drive that was attached to my Ubuntu desktop. I installed the latest version of Samba from the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu 8.10. After installation, it installs to the System>Admin menu. Open Samba and take a gander at the window. It has been a few weeks since I installed it but I believe that Samba shares your default Ubuntu printer automatically. Which is great. Anyways, click “Add Share” and select the directory, folder or even USB device (found under the “Media” directory). On the Basic tab, make your share writable and visible and, on the Advanced tab, select your specific user or even allow anyone on your network to see your share.

Not familiar with Error 17? It is apparently a tricky GRUB error (and not a BIOS error in my case) that carries the message, “Unable to mount partition.” I’m running my Toshiba Satellite with a dual-boot setup on a single hard drive: Vista Ultimate on the first partition and Ubuntu 8.04 and swap partition for the other two. This error conceived itself after I attempted to unsuccessfully resume my laptop out of suspend mode. It simply stopped when I opened my laptop lid. A few errors messages but nothing I don’t see periodically usually Ubuntu. So i powered it off and rebooted only to meet this error in surprise. I couldn’t load Vista or Ubuntu. I was simply stuck reading that same error message repeatedly. I tried everything I could think of including running my Ubuntu LiveCD and Puppy Linux in an attempt to use the GRUB command in a terminal to repair or rebuild itself. For some reason I couldn’t even get Puppy Linux to load to RAM which I thought was strange. I checked forums and message boards but all I could find were vague attempts to assist with a very hindering problem. No one was providing sound assistance until I saw a recommendation for Super GRUB Disk. This tool is very convenient. It was straight-forward: Load the iso (400 KB) to a CD and reboot. It has two modes, boot with assistance or just boot. I’ll just summarize because this CD and its included on-screen instructions are for complete beginners.

I stumbled across a great piece of software today called “Ext2 Installable File System for Windows.” This program allows you to mount a Linux partition from your Windows Explorer. How? Simply download the file from www.fs-driver.org/download.html, run the install program and assign a drive letter to the partition. You also have the option to have it reassign the drive letter on each boot. This works great on my laptop since I’m having to dual-boot Vista to get dedicated CS4 support. I’m able to pull all of my source files and assets directly off my Linux partition. It works great and it’s fast. This is a practical way to avoid having to create a FAT32 or NTFS partition that is just for sharing -or- having to use your Windows partition to store both your Linux and Windows files.

Sometimes Windows wireless printing has been a breeze. Other times, like today, it is not. My host computer is a Dell XPS 420 running Vista Home Premium SP1. My wireless computers are a Toshiba Satellite M49 running Windows XP Home Edition SP3 and a Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910) running Windows XP Home Edition Sp3. This is often a mystery to me as I have had mixed results on many systems large and small. On my home and work network, it was as easy as turning on file and print sharing across the networked computers and then browsing and adding a new network printer form the client machine. I’ll update this article as I attempt to find the answer.

I have been struggling with blogs and forums trying to find the working solution for my dilemma since I originally installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I needed USB support for my virtual machines in order to really smooth out my work flow. My guest OS is Windows Server 2003 and my host OS is Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to be able to clone the virtual machine’s hard disk using Clonezilla and my external Western Digital, USB 500 GB hard drive. I realize that it is possible to “clone” a virtual machine through VirtualBox but, as I work on multiple physical machines, I needed the disk image to be able to install a fully configured guest OS without having to worry about the ID conflict that is common with cloning virtual machine’s the wrong way. I have compiled a step-by-step process on how I was able to successfully set up USB support. If at any point, your not seeing the same results I saw, just reboot. It is recommended by everyone who wrote an article about this. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19.generic. Here we go…

Welcome back Hardy Heron. I’ve been using 8.10 on my Toshiba Satellite but after the upgrade, I was having issues with the suspend - or standby - process. Sometimes I would be able to bring my laptop out of the suspended state and other times I would lose my work and the work located on my virtual machines. Not good. I suppose that explains the long-term support (LTS) version of 8.04 that makes it so stable. I had read that your graphics driver can cause issues with the suspend stand. Since I am using an ATI Radeon X1200, I attempted to use both the open and restricted drivers that are available for that model. No luck. I also adjusted power management settings but that had no affect.

Last night I upgraded my Toshiba Satellite from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 with only minor issues. I had an 8.10 CD so I added that as a software source, allowed version upgrades and refreshed my update list. I began the upgrade to 8.10 and waited. I had to download around 1 GB of files for upgrade. I restarted my computer and, because of my previous tinkering with the Alsa sound mixer, was greeted with a banshee-like (mic and speaker feedback) call from my laptop’s speakers during boot-up. I plugged in a pair of headphones and let the boot-up continue.