Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

The “tar trick”

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Part of my motivativation for even having a blog – probably my ONLY motivation for having a blog – is to keep all those little usefull things that I know work but keep forgetting about…  For instance – I was going to do my cisco journal as an extended blog… some day….

anyway…

if you want to copy data on a *nix machine from one place to the other and preserve permissions, you can do this…

From the source directory…

tar czf  – * | (cd /target ; tar xzfp -)

This creates a compressed tar stream from the current directory to the standard input, then changes to the target directory and uncompresses the stream, preserving ownership and permissions into the target directory.

there is an alternative form – not sure if it’s supported by all versions of tar but it runs like this…

tar czf -C/source/ – * |  tar xzfp -C/target/ -

where -C says change to directory blah. I need to check the syntax – e.g. absolute versus relative, and if there is a space b/w the C and the name… if in doubt, check ‘man tar’…

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade helps me spend more time with family…

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade has allowed me to spend more time with my family… By breaking – very badly…  Now rather than do stuff on the computer, I spend quiet evenings arguing with my 5-yo about cleaning up her room, changing nappies for the 0.59 yo and discussing the situation in the middle-east with my wife…

Thank you Ubuntu!

*sheesh*  what a mess.

I started with Ubuntu 6.04 and have used the upgrade path each time – either apt-get dist-upgrade or the upgrade tool. I’ve had to rebuild my machine atleast 4 times as a consequence.  You’d think I’d've learned by now…

I’m rather frustrated. Each time I do a fresh install I have to re install and configure everything.

This time I was using the upgrade tool – which does not show you what it is doing – could not get the console to show anything – so when it hung downloading (on er… about day 2 of the download), I could not see why…

so I shut down the GUI and ran apt-get dist-upgrade instead

fine.

installed, rebooted… er. no dual screen. OK, check the nvidia drivers. Ah, need to activate the  nvidia 180 driver… OK, reboot… no gdm. bummer. OK, reconfigure xorg – xorg not installed. install xorg… can’t – can’t remove nvidia driver. remove nvidia driver – does not exist. install then remove nvidia driver- no install candidate. insert several more hours of frustraction then *scream*

so I’ve burned the ISO to CD and installed on a fresh partition…

said it before… what a mess.

addendum – As an example – things that don’t work now – no pdf viewer from firefox, no youtube vids.  Isn’t it about time they got over their culture war on closed source?