Archive for category Linux

Ubuntu 11.04 fsck/MOTD bug/issue

Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks on October 7th, 2011

Recently this message popped up on the MOTD of the Ubuntu servers on EC2:

*** /dev/xvda1 will be checked for errors at next reboot ***

After proceeding to do a fsck and restarting, the message still kept appearing. After some debugging with wk, it apparently was due to a stale fsck-at-reboot file left around causing the message to keep popping up.

Here are the steps I used to make sure they stopped popping up again:

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo shutdown -r now
sudo rm /var/lib/update-notifier/fsck-at-reboot
cd /usr/lib/update-notifier/
sudo ./update-motd-fsck-at-reboot
sudo rm /forcefsck

Thanks wk!

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Installing MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Linux, Open Source on August 30th, 2011

Steps I used to get MySQL 5.5 working on Ubuntu 11.04 AMD64 (behind Aptitude’s back sadly since it’s still not packaged up due to copyright statuses..):

  • Download the following from here.

mysql-common_5.5.13-2_all.deb
libmysqlclient18_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqlclient-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-client-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqld-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqld-pic_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-server-core-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-server-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb

  • Run the following to remove older versions of MySQL client/server:
sudo aptitude remove mysql-client mysql-client-5.1 mysql-client-core-5.1 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1
  • From the directory you downloaded the files above to:
sudo aptitude install libmysqld-dev
sudo dpkg -i mysql-common_5.5.13-2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqlclient18_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev
sudo dpkg -i libmysqlclient-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude install libdbi-perl libdbd-mysql-perl
sudo dpkg -i mysql-client-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqld-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqld-pic_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mysql-server-core-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mysql-server-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb

Took me awhile of messing around to get the sequence right, hope this helps!

Reference/links from blog post/comments here.

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YamiPod write up

Posted by Benny Chew in Gadgets, General Tech, Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Windows on July 9th, 2007

Just posted a write up on YamiPod (Yet another iPod manager) which is an alternative iPod management software to iTunes here.

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More geek humour

Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Humour, Linux on June 24th, 2007

Came across quite a few recently..

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Upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to 6.10 (Edgy Eft) using apt-get

Posted by Benny Chew in Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks on October 29th, 2006

This upgrade was released a day or 2 ago, and I thought I’ll give it a shot at upgrading using apt-get‘s distupgrade. The steps I used:

  1. sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  4. sudo apt-get -f install
  5. sudo dpkg –configure -a
  6. Reboot.

Steps taken from Debian Admin.

The first step replaces all occurrences of ‘dapper’ with ‘edgy’ in the sources.list which has the list of repositories apt-get will use (e.g. I have mine pointed to my ISP’s FTP mirror instead), the next step updates the sources.list which is then followed by the upgrade. 5th and 6th step is to check that the process completes properly and the last step is pretty self explanatory.

Only issue I had with the upgrade was VMware Server stopped working, which I’ll probably have to reconfigure/reinstall it as I think some configuration stuff probably got overwritten.

Ubuntu’s documentation wiki has probably more comprehensive explanations on the upgrade steps as well as alternative upgrade choices.

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GParted

Posted by Benny Chew in Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Windows on September 19th, 2006

GnomeIf you have ever partitioned your hard disk, Partition Magic would probably be the application you used for it. It’s probably the de facto software to use for doing anything with partitions with a very low chance of any loss of data (I personally have never got any issues on data loss/corruption). Unfortunately, Partition Magic isn’t free.

I recently tried out GParted (stands for Gnome Partition Editor) to repartition the hard disk on my Ubuntu server box. As opposed the Partition Magic which runs only on Windows, GParted can be used regardless of the operating system installed. It boots up via a CD or USB (which you can choose from the site) and is able to support the file systems currently in use by Windows and also Linux.

Its interface is very similar to Partition Magic, so it shouldn’t be too difficult if you have prior experience with the former. I managed to delete a redundant FAT32 partition I had and resized my /home ext3 partition without much drama. After restarting, everything was in a perfect order, so I don’t really have much to complain about.

Try it out if you’re looking for a free, open source alternative to Partition Magic.

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