Steve Levine

So far, so good with my new Eee PC (1005PE) Netbook. The machine came pre-installed with Win 7 Starter edition, so the first task for me to do was to get rid of Windows 7 and install Ubuntu Netbook on it. So I downloaded the Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 daily build image (yes, I am daring), and was on my way.

At first, this task seemed easier said than done because I was running in to the most fundamental problem possible, namely, I could not get the Eee PC to boot from the ‘bootable’ usb stick I created on my Mac Pro desktop. I checked every single bios settings, made sure that USB was chosen as priority boot drive, Still nothing. Kept getting the Windows 7 startup sound which was starting to get a bit tedious.

The next thing I thought was maybe the Cruser U3 software was causing the trouble so I went out and found a U3 uninstaller, and ran it. Still didn’t boot from the USB Stick. I then found out that in order to get the boot menu on the Eee PC, you need to hold down the Escape key while its booting. I tried that, it had the USB as a target bootable device, I selected it, but still went in to Windows 7.

At this point I was quickly running out of ideas, the only other thing I can think of was perhaps the USB stick was some how not bootable? Maybe the USB stick was not created correctly even though I followed the Ubuntu Mac instructions step by step. I downloaded the Ubuntu 10.04 daily build on to my Eee PC while booted in to Windows 7, and then downloaded this program called UNetbootin. This time I used that program to create my bootable USB stick, and then I tried to reboot again.

This time it booted in to the Live CD version of Ubuntu, yes, I was saved! I couldn’t believe that it was a bad image on my USB Stick. Why can’t a Mac create a bootable USB Stick? The strange thing is that the Eee couldn’t even read the files on the USB Stick when connected in Windows 7, but when the Stick was plugged in to my Mac Pro, I was able to see the files fine. And vise versa, once I created the USB Stick in Windows, I coulsn’t see the files on Mac. What is the deal here? I thought ISO images were platform independent?

With that being said the USB Stick problem is well in the past for me. Look for my next post where I will give my impressions of Ubuntu Netbook 10.04.

Who doesn’t like easy upgrades? Easy upgrades are great when implemented correctly. There are two speciifiic easy upgrades I have been (enjoying) using recently, namely, Wordpress and Ubuntu Server.

Wordpress

This blog has been powered by Wordpress for a long time, and has been upgraded many times along the way.  Download the latest tgz file, unzip it, save your wp-content directory, upgrade your database, and then you are good to go.  Keep in mind this was a very simple procedure, as they call it their “famous 5-minute installation”, which it typically was.

Once upgrading to 1.7, the procedure became as easy as clicking a link on the admin page, and stepping through a wizzard  This blog is now running 1.8, so it has been through several automatic upgrades already, and each one of them has been completely boring, which when talking about upgrading an environment, is a very good thing.  This magic does not only apply to upgrading the entire platform, as you can automatically upgrade your plugins as well.

Ubuntu

Many years ago I set up several Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) Servers in my basement to serve different purposes on my internal network.  These servers have been running without issue for the past 2 years.  They would probably run seamlessly for another 2 years, but unfortunately, I needed to install a new package that didn’t have a deb available for the current version of Ubuntu.  At first I was trying to find ways around this, installing the sources instead, but that didn’t work well for me, as it needed a newer version of a dependent library.   Even considered trying a different software package, but it seemed like all of the software packages I was trying to install, required a newer version of Ubuntu.

What was I left to do?  Either upgrade or rebuild from scratch.  Based on past experiences with other distros, upgrades have been nothing but headaches for me.  Since, I really didn’t want to invest the time to rebuild the server from scratch, decided to try my first Ubuntu upgrade.  Again, based on my past experiences, I assumed I needed to download the media, and then hook up a monitor to the server, and finally go through a set of upgrade screens.

To my delight, after a little bit of research I found that you can do the entire upgrade from the command line, no user interface required, no media download required, no monitor required!  This was too good to be true right?  Well, no.  I ran the do-release-upgrade command, and now my server is running Hardy Heron (8.04). Couldn’t be any easier.  Ubuntu’s upgrade infrastructure is very impressive.

What is the moral of the story?  If you want to build a loyal user community, treat the members of the community well by providing them with an easy upgrade path.

Have you ever wanted to scan recursively through a directory to find out how much space each sub directory was taking up? Well, there is an easy way of doing this on *nix. Just run du “Disk Usage”.

On a Darwin (OS X) based distro you can run:
du -hd1
which tells du to render the results in [h]uman readable format and to traverse a max depth of 1.

To achieve the same results on a Linux based distro you can run
du -h --max-depth=1

For further information (rtfm) refer to the man page.

0. The basis of using ssh without typing your password is public key based authentication. You need to generate a pair of public/private keys for this.

1. Firstly, generate your public/private keys using ssh-keygen

% ssh-keygen -t rsa

You must use the -t option to specify that you are producing keys for SSH using RSA. This will generate your id_rsa and id_rsa.pub in the .ssh directory in your home directory.

2. Copy ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server.

% scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host:.

3. On the server run the following commands:

% cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
% chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Thats it! Easy as 1,2,3.

Now you should be able connect to the server via ssh without being challenged for a password.

If for some reason, it is not working for you, you may also need to do one of the following things to get it working:

• Put the public key in .ssh/authorized_keys2
• Change the permissions of .ssh to 700
• Change the permissions of .ssh/authorized_keys2 to 640