Some doubts about Linux, use http://modfree.2.forumer.com/

I’ll be out for two weeks, but If you have some questions or doubts about Linux, take a look at the modfree forum at http://modfree.2.forumer.com/ and you’ll get answers. There are some people there with lot of experience using Linux and most probably you’ll get good tips. Other options, of course are the ubuntuforums if you are using Ubuntu. But modfree is more general oriented. People there have used several distros (me one of them) and know a lot of using Linux in general. You can PM me if you want, I’m a moderator there, but be aware I’m out for two weeks!!
Have fun!!

Time to be on holidays

Next two weeks I’ll be on holidays. This year I’m going to London for two weeks. It’s really high time I got holidays. This has been a tough year with a lot of work and I need some rest although I’m afraid I’ll do lots of things in London, a lot of walking and a lot of visiting. I most probably won’t touch a computer for two weeks, and I’ll certainly miss Linux during these days. After my arriving, I’ll will post my experiences, some photos, and of course I’ll be prepared for writing new stuff for this blog. More howtos that will try to help you out in the everyday life of using our most beloved OS of all times, Linux.
See you soon

HOWTO: Cloning your hard disk

I’m gonna explain another method to backup your whole hard disk. We are going to make an exact clone of our hard disk. In this howto, we will use a very useful command: dd. If your hard disk is /dev/hda and you have a spare hard drive being external in /media/sda1 or internal, just type:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/sda1

Be careful, sda1 must be of the same or greater size than hda. If you want to make an image of the whole hard disk into an image file, just type

dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/sda1/image.img

Then, this .img file can be mounted as a loopback filesystem to see its contents.

To restore it, then proceed the other way round:

dd if=/media/sda1/image.img of=/dev/hda

When restoring, the best way is to boot from a live cd and restore the hard disk. There are lots of live cds out there, but I recommend using Knoppix.

Backup strategies for a Desktop Linux Box

There are several possibilites and tools. In fact, there are great tools to perform backups for your Linux Desktop. I’m gonna name the greatest:

Mondo

rdiff-backup

rsync

partimage

It doesn’t matter which is the best, or what do you prefer. Currently I use partimage to perform exact copies of my three partitions (/, /home and /boot) once in a month and rdiff-backup to perform daily incremental backups of my /home partition.

Partimage

When using Partimage, the partitions must be unmounted, so I use knoppix to perform backups with partimage. Partimage saves the image partition to an external ext3 usb hard drive. Then, when booting my primary OS I burn the images to DVDs and remove them from the external hard drive, because they take a lot of space that I need for my daily incremental backups. This operation done once per month

Rdiff-backup

I use rdiff-backup to perform daily incremental backups of my /home directory. Just writing

rdiff-backup -v6 /home/jordilin /media/backup/myhome

does the trick. It only saves the differences, so the backups are made generally in less than a minute. Once per month I erase the whole destination backup directory to leave space for performing the partimage operations. When done with partimage I begin the process again.

This post shows my current backup plan. Perform yours, it’s highly recommended, mostly for someone like me who is always playing with the OS system files and performing updates once in a while. And one more thing, I’m using Debian testing, so one must be safe, just in case

A linux geek in Catalonia

As I’m always trying new linux distros and changing quite a lot in search of the maximum power and flexibility, I’ve had to change the blog’s title. Now it does not show any OS name like before (an ubuntu user in catalonia), so now it’s more general. So, you will not know what distro I’m using at the moment…

Installing the Java Virtual Machine in FreeBSD

It’s just very easy as FreeBSD has a license with Sun Microsystems. Just download the package for your architecture in http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml and proceed as follows:
pkg_add -r javavmwrapper
pkg_add diablo-jre-freebsd6.i386.1.5.0.07.00.tbz (in my case the i386 architecture)

This will install the firefox plugin as well.

That’s all.