Fuzzy Logic

As anyone who has ever listened to Security Now knows, backing up your data is incredibly important.  It’s that one thing that seems completely unneccessary almost all of the time, especially if you never delete anything.  Whenever your hard drive dies, however, you need a good solution to recover your data.  Linux users love using rsync to sync to an external server but there doesn’t seem to have a great way to backup with a GUI to a local drive.  When I found the program Flyback, I thought I had found my solution.  However, I found it had a tendency to lock up at times for me.  It also hadn’t been updated when I wanted to switch.  Evidently someone forked it into a program called “Warpback”, but I haven’t seen any real work on that front.

After a bit of searching, though, I’ve found a nice updated program called Back in Time.  I really like a lot of the features it supports.  It’s written in python and uses rsync and diff to do its magic.  One of the nice features of Back in Time is that it only updates files that have been updated since the last backup.  This doesn’t seem like that huge of a thing, but it does it well.  The only problem I’ve found is that the it won’t accept symlinks that link to outside of its directories–you’ll have to manually include that directory to be included.  Other than that, it’s great!  Check it out.

Just a quick fix for this problem–I’m more posting this for myself than anyone else.  Anyhow, if you have at one point installed the non-official Java package and then installed the sun-java6-jre package set, you may be missing some things.  The error I was getting was

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

The exact error being:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1666)
at java.lang.Runtime.load0(Runtime.java:787)
at java.lang.System.load(System.java:1022)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1767)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1684)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:840)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1047)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:67)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:47)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.awt.Toolkit.loadLibraries(Toolkit.java:1610)
at java.awt.Toolkit.<clinit>(Toolkit.java:1632)
at java.awt.Component.<clinit>(Component.java:568)
at CreditSystem.main(CreditSystem.java:17)

The solution I found was to issue the following command

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

That will update your files and fix it. Fun fun…

Canonical released the Ubuntu 8.10 beta candidate last week.  As an avid Ubuntu user, I decided to give it a try on my T61 laptop.  I’m generally hesitant to upgrade to betas with Ubuntu–I’ve really never managed to have a flawless upgrade process.  I was determined, however, that today would be different!  So I fired up the Update Manager so I could update from 8.04 and prayed.

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So, thanks to Jeff Nadeau, I got hooked on WoW recently.  Unfortunately, I had a problem–How would I play this completely addicting game without the ability to play it on my laptop?  After all, the inability to play CSS/TF2 on my laptop with Wine was one of the big reasons I didn’t fail out of Engineering last year.  Luckily, after hacking at this for a few hours I managed a fix so I can properly lose all of my social life.

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Okay, so I have to plug this even though it’s on Digg and whatnot.  Auto-NDISWrapper has hit the 0.1 stage and it looks like it could be quite awesome.  I don’t have the available hardware to test this (mainly because my wifi card has a native driver) but this could quite honestly change the game for Linux.  One of the main problems with Linux is the fact that some hardware doesn’t support Linux.  More specifically, a lot of wireless cards don’t work natively with Linux.  This leaves people having to use a wrapper of some sort (like ndiswrapper) to run their wifi cards.  A wrapper basically emulates the API of Windows to allow linux to use Windows drivers.  The problem with this is that it was always pretty tough to get working in a way that you could depend on.  I know that when I first attempted to install Linux on a computer and get it working with my wifi I was unable due to the lack of native drivers and I couldn’t manage to get ndiswrapper to work.  If this program hoenstly works and starts getting included in the package managers for the main distros this could change things for the better.