I’ve noticed recently that I had two mediocre computers when I really only needed one.  I took the best parts from both (which again, are mediocre at best, but are all I can afford at the moment) and combined them into one machine.  On this machine I installed Linux:  Ubuntu 8.04 to be exact.  Using the alternative install CD, I used two harddrives to create software RAID-0 and RAID-1 devices on which to place the /root and /home partitions respectively.  My goal is to completely ween myself from windows completely, at least on my home computers, and I’m still working towards this goal.

I am a graduate student after all, and I still need to be able to write papers on my home computer for publication in technical journals.  Standard procedure on my old windows computer was to use MikTex and TeXnicCenter.  MikTex is great because it automatically downloads and installs whatever latex packages it needs on the fly, and TeXnicCenter beats the snot out of notepad.  After switching to Ubuntu and Gnome specifically, I started tracking down replacements for these two pieces.  The most intriguing (and first) solution I came across was using the Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) development environment with the Texlipse plugin.  Eclipse is an extremely extendable platform that has great plugins and tools for developing in all sorts of languages, and I’ve been using a customized version at work to develop software which runs on some Texas Instruments fixed-point DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs.

The first step to getting a workable Eclipse-based LaTex environment working Read more

As I’ve previously mentioned, I run a Smoothwall Express 3.0 firewall on my home network.  I built this firewall using a crappy old computer I had lying around.  Well, the harddrive ate it big time this week and needed to be replaced.  Luckily, I had another old harddrive laying around which will get me by for a few more months (they just don’t make harddrives like they used to… the one that died was almost a decade old).  As you may know, Smoothwall has a built-in backup feature which will copy your settings over to a floppy disk.  It’s limited, but I guess it would work for some people.  I knew my old junk hardware would fail eventually so a few months ago I installed the SmoothBackup for SWE 3.0 v.1.4 mod.  One can configure this mod to make scheduled, complete drive backups.  Since a Smoothwall installation is inherently limited in size (~130 MB for mine), this mod generates a tar file of the entire file system.  It can also optionally SCP the file to another computer.  I had mine configured to put the tar on my server out of harms way.  So today, when I went to replace the crashed drive, I simply reinstalled smoothwall and the SmoothBackup mod, and then restored my previous installation from the tar which I copied back over from my server.  BAM!  10 minutes tops and I was back up and running.  Smoothwall is a quality application, and community-contributed mods like SmoothBackup are icing on the cake.

Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

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