Lots of things going on, not enough time to tell about them. I am still running the Beast Rom v2.2.1 on my Notion Ink Adam, and not having any issues to complain about, I have used UnrEvoked on my HTC Evo to root it, removed the Sprint apps I didn’t want and started backing up with Clockwork Mod and Titanium Backup. Still running Ubuntu 10.10 x64 exclusively on my desktop, I’ve been working on learning Java and think I’m picking it up pretty quick, although there are nuances I still do not have down. Maybe after 4-6 months I’ll take an intermediate level course on Java and see if they can tell me the small things I am missing from not having an instructor. Some time around January I’ll start learning Android specifics, by then I should be getting up to speed on java graphics and UI interfaces, right now I am just doing console coding.
I lost a large quantity of data from my drives last week, there appears to be an issue with my external drive caddy, when I bootup sometimes one of the drives is not recognized, normally a reboot operation clears it right up. Last week I shut my systems down for a bad storm, in case we lost power for an extended time as the storm was about 2am. Well during startup it had no issue finding the drive that normally didn’t startup, but it did do a disk consistency check, which happens every now and then and no big deal I thought. A few hours after that I went to startup my virtual machine so I could work on my java code and VMware told me some VM drives were missing, I didn’t think much of it, as I had been rearranging and deleting some old VMs recently and started up my Android-SDK VM, launched Eclipse (I move to using Eclipse instead of Appcellerator’s Titanium Mobile Developer, because It has a code editor and Appcellerator decided not to include one…) Well it couldn’t find my files, so I started looking and my data store drive was there, had files in it, but all of my directories were missing!
First things first, I rebooted, thinking there was an issue mounting during startup, well it was the same when it came back up. I checked the trash, in case I accidentally deleted them, nothing was there. I moved to a terminal session and checked the drive space on my mounts and saw there was 173GB of data on my 1TB drive, but no files to show for it (previously there was over 750GB of data on the drive). Well I found a large portion of them in a .trash-1000 folder, not sure about most of you, but I copy every CD I’ve ever gotten since 1997 on to my hard drive as a backup, well that was the end of my backups for a large bit of it. Two days later I found another 140GB on my old Windows 7 boot drive that I apparently copied off of, but never removed the original. So I’m out about 55-65% of my backup data, most of which the CD’s are either missing or damaged beyond use. Probably 60-80% of my backups are either things I have never actually used, or only installed to see what it did, then uninstalled it. So I am not really out too much, just makes me feel empty inside… Most of what I lost that I actually use were my Microsoft disks, having been a Microsoft partner for about 4 years and working a lot with Virtual Machines I had everything stored in .iso format, and about 2 years ago Microsoft moved to .iso format and I was keeping up with all available software via the download site. So I basically lost everything that was released by MS in the last 2 years and since I am no longer a MS partner I no longer have access to those downloads. (this includes Win7 and Office 2010) I guess it is a good idea that I don’t run windows as my OS anymore!
just want to get this started as I hope it will motivate me to finish it, since I have done a LOT of things on my computer since my last post, and obviously I have posted none of it.
So, I got a little impatient about not having my PC functioning, so I I installed Fedora 12 x64 on the rest of my FreeBSD boot drive and I have about 80% of the things on my list done and working. I’ll reference them by numbers here, and you can go read what they were by clicking on “my list” above. I am still hoping to get FreeBSD as my host OS; however everything is working right now with Fedora (except that stupid wireless NIC), although I am still having my “system reached critical temp” error from ACPI, yet the system resource monitor I have running shows a nice pleasant 30C CONSTANT temp. maybe this summer I’ll pickup a liquid CPU cooler… I already have 5 exhaust fans and 2 intake fans, 2 x 240mm exhaust and a 160mm or 180mm intake, I think I have air flow covered. (talked to a friend who is more into the details of technical issues, a network engineer, and he says that an inactive CPU, like when the system shutsdown, can drop 40F in about 7-10 seconds so it might be why I cannot catch it reporting a high temp in the BIOS) The BIOS does not report any temps reaching above 45C ever, so I have no idea why this is happening, I do run widgets reporting the internal temp, but have never seen it change!!!) . most of the time when it shuts there is/has been high CPU/disk IO usage (all 4 cores over 60% sustained, multiple long term large/multiple file movements across drives and/or multiple VMs running). So it could be valid.
I have come up with a couple of things to try to resolve this issue (going with the cheapest first, even if it is not really going to help a CPU issue, it can’t hurt…)
- I could just upgrade some hardware and see if a different BIOS/MB manufacturer makes a difference. I would love a lower watt CPU (or 6 core!), more L2/L3 cache, and USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s, since my current system bottleneck is the SATA 3GB/s HDDs.
- Switch to liquid cooling and installing a new thermal sensor with an external readout.
- buy cute little 5cfm coolling fans to place on my NorthBridge, SouthBridge, and onboard GPU passive cooling fins (cheapest option, not necessarily attacking the actual issue though)
- purchase a pretty new Video card and disable the onboard video (the chip is within an inch or two from the CPU, so there maybe some issue with residual heat from the GPU causing my overheating).
in order from cheapest to most expensive would be 3, 2, 4/1 (really close and might be a tie or within a $20-$30)
My List of things to get working, except this one is for Fedora.
1. VirtualBox is installed, working and I have multiple VMs up and running.
2. Install VMWare Workstation, I have downloaded the newest trial version and it is good for another 3 weeks, but have not gotten around to installing it.
3. Mounting my NTFS drives, all mounted, where I want them, even went through and deleted the Windows OS system folders from all but one.
4. SSH connections, I have started this and was working on it when I decided to start this post, should be done tomorrow.
5. I am posting this from Google Chrome on my Fedora 12 installation right now, so I’d say installed and working. Java shows up in the plugins, although java.com cannot detect it in my browser.
6. Hulu works great in Firefox or Google Chrome, although is a bit spotty when I have VMs running, and the playback is laggy in Chrome… So I am trying to get the Hulu Desktop app running. will make a post after I get some work done on it and let you know how it goes.
7. So far everything is working great, going to try a couple of VM’ed games next week after I get the rest of this done.
8. Firefox is up, running, and is playing hulu; however it does not report Java as installed from the about:plugins page, even though it is and I followed all the steps to link the correct files to the correct places. I believe this is the Firefox 3.6 doesn’t support Java issue though and not an issue on my part.
9. access NTFS drives remotely via ssh and a chrooted account with links to the mounts. After I get my SSH working tomorrow I should be able to test this. I was reading something online I no longer have open and may not have bookmarked that said that I can double mount drives (mount a drive to more than one, specifically 2, locations)
10. convert my NTFS drives to a more suitable linux FS, this again is a last thing item, to be done after everything else is working.
11. convert my drives from MBR to GPT, most likely to be done at the same time as the FS change.
12. GUI package manager for KDE, done, comes with Fedora.
13. eliminate all traces of Gnome from my computer… again, have to be last thing, once all is up and working.
14. build my first kernel, normally done immediately after install, I’ll do it last after EVERYTHING else (including the other things I said I would do last)
15. Wine is installed and works. will try out some things that I have installed in VMs to see about dropping those VMs
16. install older apps, again part of a couple of other items, I will of course be installing older apps on older OS installation I have, and will try them in Wine as stated.
17. X.org port forwarding to Cygwin on a windows machine (laptop) something I might do in a week or two…
18. start regular backups… I’m getting there, I have the drive formated in ext3, I just have not started backing things up.
19. Java, I think it works in Chrome, I was able to see the animated maps on the NOAA website, which most people use to test their Java. not working in Firefox 3.5.9.2
20. Flash, Hulu is working in Firefox and Chrome, so all good here.
21. Yakuake is fully functional and working.
22. Picasa 3.6 (I think) is installed and working great, except I don’t seem to be able to find the facial recognician system.
23. No idea on this one, can not find where I posted what it was, only that it was completed on BSD.
Unfinished items for Fedora: 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 19?
apparently Open Office will not load, for an unknown reason, looking into it at this time.
Well my first choice of Ubuntu’s JeOS is probably a lot more work than I want to go through, so I am preparing my backup plan. Going to my favorite OS of choice, FreeBSD. while looking up VMWare and linux hosts I came across a link that referenced FreeBSD, so I did a little more searching and now I want to list those links so I can find them later and hopefully get that to work when I get frustrated with JeOS (since I am not intending on using it as it’s creators intended, I am expecting it to fail, but want to try anyways as VMWare supports Ubuntu based OS as a Host OS and JeOS is a watered down Ubuntu Server, and overhead is a primary concern when dealing with Virtual Machines. Maybe if I document well enough and it does work, my notes will get added to the VMWare and Ubuntu knowledgebases).
Anyways, FreeBSD links involving VMWare and/or just VMs
- Although dated December 2004 for the first post, this VMWare forum post includes responses from VMWare employees regarding not supporting FreeBSD as a Host OS. Also includes links to a site where a non-employee had been providing a FreeBSD port for VMWare, but stopped maintaining it after VMWare Workstation 3.5 last post in the thread was dated Jan 16th 2010, and still no official support. (fyi I am looking into this, as I just got assigned to a VMWare support team and so I am trying to get more familiar with their products. I would like to run VMWare on the most secure, least overhead Host OS possible, and I am already somewhat familiar with FreeBSD)
- instructions for enabling VMWare tools in *BSD guests
- instructions on installing VMWare tools in FreeBSD 8.x guest
- fantastic instructions on setting up FreeBSD 8 with KDE graphical environment, clear step by step install and post install instructions. I will try them instead of doing Ubuntu’s JeOS as having this running even without VMWare would make me most happy.
- the FreeBSD Handbook page for third party applications for installing, upgrading, and building from source
- the FreeBSD Hanbook’s page on setting up VirtualBox in BSD
- the FreeBSD official wiki-site for setting up VirtualBox
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
- New blog post... resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850 http://t.co/H6bXuMqi
- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
- $7 for $15 Worth of Hand-Tossed Pizza, Calzones, and Drinks at Andolini's Pizza Charleston, SC http://t.co/QnKwPwB
- New blog post... is zdnet.com/news down http://t.co/DThuI4r
- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
