Fuzzy Logic

I got home today and booted up my Ubuntu Linux (8.04) server that had been down most of the semester and got some fun errors.  Now, the reason it was down in the first place was because the CMOS battery was out which caused hell with the system’s security features and I hadn’t bothered to get a new CMOS battery.  So I boot it up and walk upstairs to set up my desktop.  I come back downstairs and get this ever friendly message:

* An automatic file system check (fsck) of the root filesystem failed.  A manual fsck must be performed, then the system restarted. The fsck should be performed in maintenance mode with the root filesystem mounted in read-only mode.

So, basically, my main filesystem was broken somehow.  Adding insult to injury, of course, was the fact that the thing that was shown as causing the problem was S01E02 of Firefly, which I was considering watching soon.  Great. On a strange note, the other place that was giving me trouble was on /etc/acpi/suspend.d/10-thinkpad-standby-led.sh. As for the problem itself,  I know why it happened, of course–this server only goes down when the power goes out and I would imagine that the file reference didn’t get correctly written to the journal before the server crashed. So, after multiple “Multiply-claimed block(s) in inode: x: xxxx xxx” errors, it finally told me to reboot.  After doing so, it fscked the disk again and then had me reboot AGAIN.  Awesome.  That finally let it work though, so I can’t complain.  Now to get a new CMOS battery…

Adobe announced on December 17th that AIR 1.5 is now available for Linux!  This is a pretty big deal for Linux users because the previous version we were using was a buggy version that didn’t have all of the newest features (and was unreliable at that).  With this new release comes the new version for both x86 and x64 processors!  Read on for the whole explanation!

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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.

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.

So, in a move that shocks absolutely no one, Richard Stallman (RMS) has once again denounced Microsoft and their tactics.  This time, however, he has got me rather aggravated with his arguments.  I am a very big fan of GNU/Linux, even running it exclusively on two of my three machines.  But RMS, considered by many to be the father of the modern Free/Open-Source Software movement, has really jumped a boundary when he wrote a BBC article blaming Bill Gates for ruining computers for the majority of users.  While I dislike many of Microsoft’s tactics and products, I really feel that RMS is out of line with this latest rant.

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