More home sysadmin

The Windows box finally wonked out. I've booted it from an Ubuntu 7.04 install disk to read the Windows NTFS disk and I'm rsync'ing important files from there over the LAN to my new Ubuntu box. After lifeboat operations are complete, I dunno - wipe & install Ubuntu? My old copy of Windows? Both? We'll see.

Aitutaki

Sometimes I set Google Earth to scroll slowly across the landscape and leave it running overnight just to see where I wind up. I'd forgotten that I'd done that last night and just now found it sailing through the south Pacific. After a few minutes, land ho! There was Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands. Much easier than leaving home for years in a leaky wooden boat.

How to switch monitors in ubuntu 7.04

So I have a little 4-foot "church basement" table in our library with two computers on/under it, along with their keyboards and mice (obviously I need a KVM switch - maybe the junkyard will have one next payday). The new computer gets the big monitor, naturally, and the old one gets some old monitor I dug out of the garage. The problem is that ubuntu 7.04 was installed on the old computer when it used the big monitor. Now that I've switched monitors on it, it doesn't recognize the new one.

Solution: boot into recovery mode (or whatever it's called - hit Esc at the right moment during startup), then at the root prompt do this:

dpkg-reconfigure -pcritical xserver-xorg

How to install VMware under ubuntu

Vide: VMware runs beautifully on my new ubuntu 7.04 installation. I'm installing xubuntu under vmware so I can do some Mathematica frontend craziness. Some of the documentation tests open each of the 10000+ files in a Mathematica installation. On this new machine this happens fast enough to short-circuit the mammalian the nervous system if you happen to look at the windows flashing by as they open and close.

I couldn't find a way in gnome to isolate all an application's windows in one workspace and I couldn't get multiple X sessions working, so I'm giving vmware a shot. Very promising so far.

Can I post from the new machine?

Which, by the way, has two 2.13GHz CPUs and 2GB of RAM. The fastest machine I've ever used. We used to call our old Windows box "the supercomputer", but it's horse-and-buggy compared to this.

vpn error 800 blues

My boss bought me a shiny new Lenovo ThinkCentre M55p to take home, and the WRI sysadmins got it all set up & working at the office. It's running windows since some Mathematica documentation tests I run work a lot faster under windows. I'll also run ubuntu 7.04 under vm once I get things up & going.

Now the box is at home behind my Linksys WRT54Gv2 router and I'm singing the aforementioned blues. Upgraded router firmware, opened ports, no joy. Waiting for sysadmin advice, which is understandably slow early on a Sunday morning. Meanwhile, I have an itchy install finger with the ubuntu 7.04 cd just inches away, and I'm intrigued by this open-source router firmware.