Mitch Mahan

A recently discovered and ‘linux friendly’ addition to Google! Search (under their experimental search features) is the use of Keyboard shortcuts.

You’ll see that these same keyboard shortcuts are very familiar (if you’re a vim’er) and make searching friendly if you’re a non-mouse power-user.

The added little smirk of enjoyment knowing that yet another linux ‘feature’ is crossing into the main-stream is just icing on the cake.

Try it out! (middle of the page)
http://www.google.com/experimental/

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816116030

A good SATA Raid controller for linux.

As you may have seen in more detail and in much more grandeur on Joey Stanford’s blog the Gutsy Release Party was quite a blast.

During my recent move (and other associated projects) I’ve been delayed in posting the party pictures.

Keep checking back though; they’re sure to turn-up soon.

The Colorado Ubuntu Team (CoLoCo) has elected me their fearless leader!

Many thanks to David Overcash (our prior head-honcho) for all his great work and leadership.
I look forward to further motivating the CoLoCo team to get out there and have fun with Ubuntu (you don’t always have to spend your day triaging bugs). Hopefully with myself at the helm we can find a lot of energetic and note-worthy tasks to convert the masses.

Watch out Colorado, here i come.

So it’s about time for me to get serious about my blog (set by the wonderful example of Joey Stanford) I’ll try and make this a common-update place for Ubuntu, the CoLoCo and myself.

( its not quantity here it’s quality )

A quick blog worthy note:

As with any linux distribution (or operating system) we tend to see a trend that its not always the quality of the product that matters.

Take Windows for example (har har) we have all had our share of gruesome (and some overly gruesome) stories of how frustrating and unproductive the Windows architecture can and has been. However; behind every window (punn) is a great geek that has a passion for computers and a good enough heart to take care of those that do unfortunately use Windows. This support net, while being disorganized and spread out throughout most communities, has really kept Windows alive in my opinion.

Honestly, sit back and think about it. It’s not the corporate support that you get put on hold for hours on end that has kept such unsecure and unorganized closed-source code alive in homes. It’s the 16 year old kid down the street. The kid that plays computer games and browses the internet and who knows enough to go down the block to help his neighbor out with her e-mail or spyware problem (or better yet installing Mozilla). These closed-community support groups in my opinion should really be the goal of Ubuntu LoCo’s; but better. We should be the friendly neighbor down the street that knows enough to help our community out — even the ones that don’t know how to use e-mail.
Swerving back on topic; there has recently been chattering in the undertow (IRC) about organizing all of the US teams in some way shape or form to provide a better “root” for the development and growth of other LoCo’s. What an amazing gesture and a brilliant idea! For those of us that may belong to the mailing list of a LoCo team and may use Ubuntu at home I believe this push will not only help unite us to our LoCo’s but more thoroughly help unite the LoCo’s with their communities. It is in my vision that this “in the works” step to organize is exactly what Ubuntu needs — a template to support current LoCo’s to help them understand their goals and how they can achieve them.

So, in closing, keep your heads up and your eyes open because sooner than later you may be the one walking down the street.

I created a simple Ubuntu CD “tag-along” to go with the CD’s we distribute. I have not blogged in a plethora of days; so I figured this was blog worthy enough.

The card ,while so far being only for CoLoCo use, can be changed upon request if you are interested in something similar for your group.
Just let me know.

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBoulder 

While festivites kicked off the day before, Saturday was an action packed fun-house of geekliness.

Many different discussions and topics filled the room each hour while people had the opportunity to mingle and talk about personal interests between “sessions.” Overall the atmosphere was fairly easy going and laid back and there were topics discussed abroad. The one’s of more interest to me were the Adobe Photoshop, Podcast and the typical “Why linux?” questions I got while trying to convince people to try Ubuntu.

 Toward the end of the evening (around 5 or so when I left) Neal McBurnett showed up to talk about Free Software and the general ideas and positive apects of Free Software. His discussion touched on the subject of Open Source Voting Machines (which if interested in the topic one could probably probe him for more information on his ideas) and how to truely make a “Trusted” voting machine the code would have to be available for public review.

When Neal touched on the subject of Ubuntu Linux (3 cheers) a lot of people had good input. The general vocalization of the distribution made many people pick-up a CD off of the Swag table. Out of the 35 or so CD’s I brought with me I came home with about 8; so hopefully we will be having some new members join our community. Thanks to Jason who also showed up and to Neal for letting me take a little bit of his spotlight to discuss my views on Ubuntu when the topic came around.

Mitch, Neal and Jason
(CoLoCo Ubuntu Team)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColoradoTeam

A group Discussion

Presentation Room

Some of the Swag

So the backup solution I discussed earlier (imaging a harddrive using dd) worked miracles. (Well it worked… that’s good enough for now).

 So here’s the process

  +  Boot into Ubuntu 6.10 (from the CD) and plug in an extra harddrive or in my case an External 250Gig USB harddrive.

  +  Open up a terminal and su to root (sudo su)

  + find out where your harddrives are mounted and then issue the command

   “dd conv=noerror if=/dev/(hard drive you want copied) |split -a 3 -b 1000000000 – /media/(backup harddrive)/ServerRecovery.img.”

This will copy all of the content from your harddrive onto the “backup harddrive”(External USB 250Gig) and seperate it into 1Gig chunks. A great backup for those in dire need. Definetly not a permanent solution… but hey; it works. Especially if you cant get Ghost or any other proprietary driver to work this makes up for a neat little card to put under your sleve.

To restore your backup all you have to do is
“cat /media/(backup harddrive)/ServerRecovery.img.* | dd of=/dev/(new harddrive)”.

 Beautiful!

Today me and my fellow co-workers found another great use for the Ubuntu distribution.

There were plenty of headaches trying to backup our IBM Power 1425 server. The main problem came from the SCSI disks and the onboard raid controller. The combination of the RAID controller and the SCSI hd’s prevented the machine from being Ghosted, locked up Knoppix, and many many other software imaging tools.

 Ubuntu to the rescue!

Not only did Ubuntu detect the RAID controller and both harddrives but the 6.10 release did it with style. =) We have came to the conclusion after seeing the wounderful driver support of Ubuntu to use the live cd and “dd” the command-line copying utility to copy the contents of one of the (RAID 1) hd’s to an external drive and thus making ourself a wounderful backup and image to deploy on all of our other IBM 1425 servers.

 Once we actually have time to take down the running server (this weekend) I will post the entire process and links to great “dd” how-to’s.