We all know that Linux can read NTFS partitions. Right? Well maybe. Maybe not. But you can. NTFS-3G works great and it comes installed with Ubuntu. I hate to say it, but I still have to dual boot sometimes. So while I spend 95% of my time in Linux, I still game everyonce in a while with Windows. Its nice to be able to grab files from Windows while I'm in Ubuntu.

Its especially handy when I find out that I can run yet another game in Wine or Cedega. I can often just go and grab save files or configurations from the Windows partition when I set it up in Linux. I did this with both City of Heroes and with Wow. Both of which run faster in WINE under Linux than they did in Windows.

So what happens when I need to read a Linux EXT3 partition from Windows? Well its easier than you think! Firstly we can thank the EXT3 design for being backwards compatible with EXT2. Because there is a great EXT2 driver for windows called fs-driver (Often called IFS). There is no journaling support because it is using the partition in EXT2 mode. In fact, if for some reason you try to use an EXT3 partition that still has data in its journal, IFS won't mount it at all.

Finally! At long last I will be able to ditch horrible Windows for broadcasting on uStream! I am a member of the Lords of Tyr gaming group. I broadcast our games live over the internet using uStream on the Lords of Tyr Channel. Its not really for others to watch, although they are certainly welcome to. Really uStream is used as a remote gaming tool for members can cannot join us in person, and as a way to record sessions online in case we ever need to review something that happened in an earlier session.

uStream is awesome, but I was forced to use Windows, because it uses Flash. Flash for Linux does not support Video for Linux 2 (V4L2). Instead it uses the completely dead V4L standard. Yuck! So guess what? I couldn't use my USB camera or my Sony Digital firewire camera in Linux for uStream. But now all that is going to change! I haven't try it yet, but I just found this new project call The Flashcam Project.

It creates a loopback and forwards frames from V4L2 to V4L devices. Something I thought would be possible, but haven't the time to figure out for myself. Thank you for making this awesome little app Oliver! I'm going to give it a try tonight to make sure it works before our game tomorrow afternoon.

Even Gartner, who I have always thought as company that has over-hyped Microsoft, has come to realize that Vista was a horrible horrible mistake.

The entire Windows eco-system is collapsing because it is too big and not secure enough. So much of the corporate expense of Windows is not just the Microsoft licenses, but the huge cost of management and security software. This cost also includes massive hardware costs that are incured by every system that needs to run that software.

I think the tipping point is here. Look at the success of hardware like the Asus Eee laptop. Apple! Are you listening? Blot is out and you are next on the chopping block if you aren't careful! 

I was just messing around with my Zaurus PDA this week. I've been installing Android, the gPhone software. I also installed a full debian distro on it called Titchy Linux. Then I installed Angstrom, which is also a Linux distro based on the former OpenZaurus project. 

I've been messing around a lot with virtual technologies recently. Partly due to the virtualization technology that we have been using at work, but mostly because its cool and every once in a while I need to run something in Windows and I don't want to reboot on my dual boot laptop.

I ran out of room on my 8gb windows vmware partition. I decided to double the capacity. Easy enough. I've done this before. I'll just run the vmware command:

vmware-vdiskmanager Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk -x 16Gb 

Then I will just boot up from the gparted-clonezilla livecd and expand the NTFS partition.

What, may you ask, does this party have anything to do with Linux? Well have you heard of "Free as in Freedom, Free as in Beer"? Well this is the FREE BEER part. Just bring a new unwrapped toy to the party and you drink and eat for free all night. Also, if you come during the Family Fun part you will see me and my wife dressed up as Mr and Mrs Claus.

This is the 11th year my friends and I have put this event on. It gets bigger and better every year. Last year we were able to donate $35,000 worth of toys to the U.S. Marine's Toys for Tots Program. And we had a really really really fun time doing it.

Party Info:

11th Annual Toys for Tots BBQ
December 1st, 2007
3PM - ?
The Piano Man
3801 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL

Free admission with new, unwrapped toy.
$25 at the door without toy

Family Fun starts at 3pm
Magician, face painting, games, goodie bags, and Santa!

Adults only after 7pm
Live Music starts at 8pm. Raffle at 11(ish)

Official Donation link http://bigkids.pbwiki.com/FrontPage
Now tax deductible!

I saw this link to Launchpad on Digg and Slashdot today. Evidently its bad to constantly load/unload the drive and Ubuntu does this a huge amount of times per hour (like 180 times instead of around 5). This can lead to nasty wear and tear on the drive and limit its life to only a few months instead of 3-5 years. I've added the updates suggested in the launchpad entry. It seems like this could be nasty, or it could be much adieu about nothing. I'll keep track of this bung though and see what transpires. 

I've upgraded 3 machines to Kubuntu 7.10 already. I've upgraded all of them using the online method. My gaming desktop was the smoothest. That is also the machine that I've hacked up the least, so that is to be expected. I used adept_manager and upgraded to the RC version of Kubuntu a week before 7.10 was released officially.

My personal laptop was a nightmare while trying to use adept_manager. It was never able to really even start the upgrade process. It kept giving me an error about how some other process must be using the apt database. Which was total crap. I even turned off the auto download of security patches. I had read that some other people that got that error did that and it worked for them. Not for me. Finally after running "sudo dpkg --configure -a", few apt-get clean up commands and a reboot, I did finally get it to work... kinda. The process kept on hanging with adept_manager. Additionally my laptop was confused as to what Ubuntu distro it was (ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu). I reinstalled the kde-desktop packages to fix that. Then I finally just gave up and went all command line on its butt.

I found this brilliant parody at Groklaw today. I love the Princess Bride so much, and this was just brilliant.

Oh and in case you didn't know, software patents are stupid. How could you possibly patent logic or math? If it can't be done fairly than it shouldn't be done at all. These systems were created to encourage innovation not stifle it. At this point I'm not even that concerned about the big "threat from Microsoft" against free/libre and open source software. I'm just amused by it all. The more useless Linux vendors that sign agreements with MS the happier I am. They just make it clear who actually understands FLOSS and who doesn't. I wouldn't want to deal with supposed FLOSS company that doesn't even understand that philosophical and legal basis that underlies their main products. So no worries from me about any of this. To me this is like watching a bad reality show and just enjoying the complete melt down of contestants that can't take it anymore. 

I updated my old Gentoo server to Ubuntu on Monday. I haven't finished the conversion totally yet, but I'm getting there!

My existing server was setup Gentoo with the following disk setup

/dev/sda1 50mb boot partition with ext2

/dev/sda2 512mb swap

/dev/sda3 250gb / with ext3 (about 60% full)

So I booted up on Gparted Clonezilla to shrink sda3 and create a new 20gb partition for Ubuntu. With Gparted its so easy! Once I had the new partition I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server. The install process is... passable. It was fast, but having to manually choose the drive for grub to install its MBR to (especially when there is only one drive in the server) was a little surprising. I imagine that a first time user of the server install might have a difficult time knowing what to enter unless they have hacked around with Grub's menu.lst file before and understand what (h0,0) means.

The topic of imaging Linux partitions came up at the COD LUG today. I thought I would drop some links to some FLOSS software that can replace much of the functionality of Ghost. In the past I've used Knoppix to run gparted and partimage to backup Windows and Linux partitions. 

Now there is a new bootable Live CD called Gparted-Clonezilla. Its a very small distro that can fit on the business card sized CDs. They also have a script that can convert the iso to a bootable usb key.

I'm going to have to check out the bootable usb key this week. That would be great to have on an old 128mb key for imaging and backing up PC's.