Yes, I’m guilty of running for ‘weeks’ with a pending reboot required, this is probably not helping the situation.  I’ve probably also had several power fails etc with the system in a suspended state. Still, I didn’t expect my Ubuntu system to get to the state it did.

After rebooting my system, the system drive would no longer boot and I was dumped into the (initramfs) busybox

mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target Filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init=bootarg.

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-2ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

Ok I think, so there is some filesystem issue with my boot drive – booting a live CD version of Ubuntu should give me the tools to fix it. It turns out the answer was no – the live CD won’t help me either. Sigh, this is the type of thing I’d expect of Windows Vista but not Ubuntu.

Off the to forums and I turn up a post which shows others have had the same issue and the solution. From here it was a simple matter of booting the Ubuntu live CD to download a copy of SLAX to burn to CD then boot from the new SLAX CD to repair the ext4 filesystem. Good thing I had a Ubuntu live CD around.

Once your booted into SLAX, start a root shell and find the volume.

root@slax:~# fdisk -l

This will list all of the drives (if you have more than one) and the partitions on those drives. Next is simply a matter of issuing the filesystem check and repair command on the correct partition

root@slax:~# fsck /dev/sda2

You’ll want to say yes to fixing the problems obviously. Once this completes, simply reboot back to a working system.

I’m not entirely certain which event triggered my gear lust for a solid state drive (SSD), it was probably a mix of Jeff Atwood’s post, TechReport’s storage section, and the falling prices resulting in smaller SSDs down below the $100 price point. Whatever it was, I couldn’t really shake the idea of having a SSD in my work laptop – so I decided to get one.

Initially I had thought that a 60G-64G drive would fit the bill, being under the $100 price point and just big enough to hold the OS plus my Lotus Notes mail installation. After reviewing benchmarks, and reviews I decided to focus on the 120G size – in part due to a general recommendation that the 60G size is a bit small for most, and the benchmark numbers on the 120G are a bit better. The price was higher, but still within a very reasonable budget as SSDs are approaching $1 a Gig. The TechReport comparison of 120G-128G size helped me narrow my choice down to the OCZ Vertex 3.

While the Vertex 3 has been on the market a year, it still ranks as one of the fastest drives available. There were some issues with the SandForce SF-2881 controller, but firmware 2.15 is reported to be solid.

My laptop was running a 500G SATA2 Toshiba drive, configured as a single large partition running Windows 7. I had no interest in re-installing from scratch so my approach was to clone the working system onto the smaller drive. There are likely plenty of ways to do this, I was able to easily find a blog post describing how to do it – I roughly followed those steps but will document exactly what I did here.

Step 1) Reduce the partition on the big hard drive to be a bit less than the formatted capacity of the SSD. Initially after reading a bit I was hesitant to use GParted to do this as it seemed some folks had had problems with Windows 7 and GParted. Windows 7 also has a built in partition resize capability.

I ran into several issues trying to use the built in Windows 7 functionality. First up was some unmovable files causing issues. Even after turning off virtual memory and system restore, I still had issues. The Event Viewer was a help in identifying Chrome as holding onto some unmovable files, then I hit what I believe was an issue with NTFS Metafiles being unmovable and blocking my ability to shrink the partition smaller than 245G. At this point I threw my hands in the air and ran GParted from an Ubuntu Live USB key.

GParted ran to completion, but oddly gave me an error indicating something was wrong – but I couldn’t spot anything actually wrong. [Normally GParted should not give an error] The damage was done so I just rebooted and let Windows perform the necessary chkdsk activity. Things were fine, so either I mis-read that there was an error or it was something that was recoverable. Either way I was now happily running with a 100G partition.

Step 2) Use Clonezilla‘s “savepart” option to capture an image of the partition. Since I had a 500G drive which now had lots of empty space after the 100G system partition, I created a 2nd volume to store the captured image to. You can use a second USB mounted drive, or any number of other options including ssh with Clonezilla to store your image.

I will comment that Clonezilla is not for the timid, the user interface appear very complex and requires some careful reading to make sure you’re doing what you think you’re doing. Youtube has a number of walk throughs. For the 100G partition it took about 1:35 to backup.

Above you see the SSD attached to the ultra slim sled that the laptop hard disk was in, this is a very slim metal sleeve with a pull tab and some rubber bumpers. It fit nicely into my W520.

Step 3) Swap the drives. If you have a password on the drive, it’s a good idea to disable before removing it as USB enclosures and passworded drives don’t mix well. Install the new SSD, and place the existing drive into a USB enclosure. Boot the laptop into Ubuntu Live again and partition the new SSD drive, make sure to tag the new partition as with the ‘boot’ flag.

Step 4) Restore the image you saved with Clonezilla’s “restore part” option. In this case I was restoring from the 2nd partition on the original hard drive that is now mounted as a USB volume. Clonezilla warns you twice when restoring a partition to validate you’ve got the correct destination, a nice paranoid touch.

The restore ran nearly 3x faster taking about 37 minutes.

Step 5) Boot into windows, chkdsk may have run again but with the SSD it seemed to take no time at all. You might want to visit the OCZ site and grab the toolbox utility to validate you’ve got the latest firmware, I did this to verify I had 2.15.

Performance

After I did the clone, I ran some boot time tests on the hard drive. I tested immediately after I had completed step 5 with the SSD. For work I need Lotus Notes up and running to access my calendar etc, so that was a logical pattern to benchmark – how long to get back to key information? I used a stop watch, and the times include the time I spent typing in the two passwords and navigating to the icon to launch Notes. It’s not terribly scientific, but I think the results still speak for themselves.

This is crazy hot - more than 3x faster, under a minute from a cold boot.

Now certain operations don’t seem any faster. Resuming from hibernation feels to be about the same speed. This makes sense as the performance difference for sequential reads isn’t much different. It seems in normal usage, lots of little things are more immediate too. Some of this is likely simply moving from a SATA2 to a SATA3 drive, but I’m convinced no spinning platter could keep up with the SSD.

I’ve been a fan of DD-WRT for some time, a Linksys WRT54GL is the heart of my home network. While I don’t have an immediate need for a new router, I’ve been thinking for some time that I should pick up a reasonable backup in case the WRT54GL fails. There are also some really interesting projects you can do with a modified router, and having a spare will let me tinker with some of those.

I came across a good deal on a refurbished Netgear WNR3500L, it was about half the price of a new unit. This was too tempting: N networking (I don’t really need it, but why not stay current?), gigabit wired networking (a must have), USB port (I wanted this for expansion options), but the feature that really sold me was 64MB RAM and 8MB ROM – more than enough for DD-WRT with all the features.

This particular router is also supported by Tomato another very popular firmware. There is also a somewhat suspect Netgear sponsored open firmware, the site seems to have instructions for installing an older version of Tomato – personally I’d steer clear of this. Unfortunately the other popular router firmware OpenWRT doesn’t currently support this router. Of course, I prefer DD-WRT which does support this router.

One of the reasons that I blog is to have a record of what I did, far too often I end up needing to do something again, or refer back when I’m doing an upgrade. Another reason is to help me get organized to do some of these things – finding the instructions is usually easy, understanding them and what you’re about to do takes some time. I probably spent 2hrs reading through forums and searching various things before I leapt in to flash the router, I strongly recommend you do the same. Also this write-up skips over some of the frustrating head scratching I do when things don’t work, that’s part of the learning process.

There is a v2 of this router, and v2 is NOT supported by DD-WRT. Apparently the boxes they come in are identical, but the router itself has a v2 marking. I did find a wiki that documents the v1 and the v2, I was able to match the FCC numbers listed to confirm I had a v1. For what it’s worth, my stock firmware was V1.0.2.50_31.1.25NA.

The DD-WRT site has some excellent instructions on doing the installation, I’ll avoid repeating those but will document the steps I took. I will repeat some of the cautions from the site:

• The WNR3500L requires a NEWD-2, K2.6 build of DD-WRT
• You will first need to upload a special .chk build (also K2.6) of DD-WRT to the router to go from Netgear’s factory firmware. Then you may install a .bin build of DD-WRT.
• Spend some time browsing the DD-WRT Forums. There’s a lot of chaotic information to ingest.
• Read the peacock thread.

Before we get started, let’s talk about the 30/30/30 reset. Yes, it’s over the top and very conservative. Weigh those 90 seconds against the potential problems you might run into trying to by rushing through this, sure building a JTAG connector to resurrect a bricked router might be interesting but it’s going to take you a lot more than 90 seconds.

The following steps should not be considered an alternate installation procedure, please use the official DD-WRT instructions – consider this a walk through of the official instructions:

1. Power on the device. Give it a minute to finish booting, the front panel LEDs should stabilize.
2. Plug in your linux box, it’ll automatically get an IP address (192.168.1.2)
3. Perform a 30/30/30 reset
   a) With unit powered on, press and hold the reset button for 30s
   b) Without releasing the reset button, unplug the router, wait 30s
   c) Still holding the reset button, plug the router in and wait 30s
4. Now wait for the PC to get an IP address assigned to it, this may take a minute or two be patient.
5. As I’m using Linux Firefox will be the browser of choice
   Connect to 192.168.1.1
   user: admin
   password: password
   (the default user and password)
6. Since the router isn’t connected to anything except my PC the automatic upgrade process will fail due to no internet connection, that’s fine.
7. Click on “Router Upgrade” in the menu on the left side.
8. Choose the .chk file you downloaded as per the DD-WRT site
9. You will get a warning: “Warning! You are trying to download the firmware which the region is different from the current firmware you had.” – this is ok, continue.
10. Wait for the upload process to complete.
    Once the upload is done, it will automatically move on to updating settings.
    A minute or so more it will show a DD-WRT screen.
11. Start a timer for 5 minutes and wait. Yes, likely paranoid as we could have probably started the timer when we started the upload process, but again this isn’t something you really want to rush. Time for coffee.
12. At this point we’re running DD-WRT, just not the version we want.
13. Do another 30/30/30 reset
14. It took my system about 2 minutes to get an IP address (192.168.1.101)
15. DD-WRT will force us to set a username and password, for now I suggest the same as stock.
16. Click on the Administration tab, followed by the Firmware Upgrade sub-tab.
17. I set ‘After flashing, reset to’ ->  ”Reset to Default settings”
    Pick the big file you downloaded as per the DD-WRT site.
18. It will flip to a reset screen once the firmware has been installed
19. Wait 5 minutes. If you’re really paranoid perform another 30/30/30 reset after that.
20. Done. Configure you’re new router.

I primarily use Chrome, but have experienced problems with DD-WRT and Chrome in the past. It turns out this time that FireFox was unable to configure the router (but it did handle the firmware install just fine). Consider this a caution, if you’re having trouble with this process it might be your browser.

There are many different ways to take some video on Ubuntu and convert it to a physical DVD that will play back on most DVD players and while the command line would be fine, it’s certainly nice to see there is at least one option that provides a reasonable GUI and supports the creation of menus.

I tried DeVeDe before coming across Bombono. I was trying to take a number of 15 and 30 minute recorded children’s shows stored as mp4′s and convert them into a playable DVD. For some reason DeVeDe aborted with little to no diagnostic information after a couple of videos, it was easier to move on than mess with it.

Bombono was able to convert all of my videos, but the version available in the Ubuntu repository was older and had some serious issues related to menu editing. It turns out there is a PPA that is current (1.2.1), instructions for installing via the PPA are hosted on the bombono wiki. I expect in future the Ubuntu repository version will catch up and be the easiest way to get this utility, but in the near future I recommend getting it from the PPA.

The PPA install places things in the /opt/bombono-dvd-testing hierarchy, which is fine but it doesn’t provide an easy way to run it. I added a link in /usr/local/bin so that I can launch it from the command line

$sudo ln -s /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/bin/bombono-dvd /usr/local/bin/bombono-dvd

It does appear that there is a .desktop file in /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/share/applications so a little creativity and I’m sure you could easily integrate it into the Ubuntu menu system.

The 1.2.1 version (via the PPA) has quite nice menu editing. I wouldn’t claim this is the same level you’d expect on a Mac, but it very easy to use. One of the more polished utilities I’ve seen on Linux. Menus support background images and buttons that can be stills or motion video clips. I did experience problems trying to use too many motion clips on a single menu (it rendered most of them as stills), it may be possible to work around this by generating the DVD folder then manually adding the appropriate video clips. The alignment and snap to grid tools are handy for making the menu line up.

You of course can choose to create a DVD without a menu. Simply omit any menu and the DVD will play the video when the disk is inserted.

Before you get going with Bombono, make sure you use the Project menu and select Preferences, you’ll want to choose NTSC or PAL as appropriate and choose how many cores for it to use.

The size estimation is terrible, a 4.4GB estimate (with warning it wouldn’t fit) resulted in 3.3GB iso. This is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to maximize the quality of a full length movie on a single layer DVD (then again, if you’re burning a 2hr movie to a single layer DVD you’ve already made a number of compromises). There is an option to create dual layer DVDs, but I didn’t try this out. It appears to create 16:9 animorphic DVDs just fine, but either mixed 4:3 content (or possibly 4:3 content in general) ends up stretched.

I’ll include a reference to the forum, but it does seem fairly quiet there.

Like many geeks, I’m the family tech support. Somehow my nephew’s Windows Vista laptop had stopped booting. You’d get the blue screen of death (BSoD) on boot. Using F8 on boot also resulted in a BSoD. I even tried using a Vista recovery disk and it too crashed and burned in the same way.

My first thought was to check that the hardware was ok. Running some diagnostics from an Ubuntu live CD indicated that side of things looked fine.

So I tracked down the Vista Install disks, maybe I’d need to do a full re-install or at least it’d give me a way to move forward. What? Another BSoD?! This time instead of ignoring the data on the BSoD I wrote some of it down, it the main error code was: 0x0000C1F5. Searching for this turns up the specific problem, there is even a Microsoft knowledge base article. Of course the fix that is supplied by Microsoft won’t help you until you can actually boot Vista again.

I though I could solve the issue using Linux as was described in one of the forums. While I could easily boot Linux and poke around, there was no sign of a $TxfLog log file. I suspect in this particular case there was some other file that was corrupted, but which one? A bit more digging around and I found another Microsoft knowledge base article.

This ended up being the solution: Windows 7 knows how to recover from this type of filesystem corruption. The knowledge base article suggests that you use a Windows 7 Beta installation disk – I wasn’t able to find one of these. What I did find was some Windows 7 recovery images, these will work for what we need to do.

Burn the image to a CD or DVD. Boot the Windows 7 Recovery disk to the point where it’s going to try to recover, now shut down and cancel the recovery. The Windows 7 Recovery disk should have repaired the Vista filesystem so we can now boot from the hard drive into recovery mode and the system will perform it’s “self repair” fixing things up.

So while the BSoD screen can be intimidating, taking a bit of time to read the screen and take note of some of the magic numbers can help guide you to the right solution. Or just call up the geek in your family and get them to fix it.

Pretty much since having high speed internet at home I’ve had a machine externally accessible, initially through dynamic DNS and later via a static IP. Even prior to running a full mail server, I had a mail server setup to pull email using fetchmail from the couple of email sources I was using. Being able to access my email over the web was pretty handy, and I trusted SquirrelMail to provide this function.

Setting up SquirrelMail under Ubuntu is fairly straight forward, the packages are in the repositories and setup is a snap following the instructions. The version I have installed is a little dated but it handles email when I’m not home just fine, I particularly like the ability to setup alternate identities making sending email from an alias easy (actually easier than messing with aliases in Evolution).

The version of SquirrelMail I have isn’t really that slick on a small (mobile) screen. I looked at just installing the right theme/skin to SquirrelMail to support mobile browsers and there doesn’t seem to be any (free) solutions. This got me looking around.

First stop was NaSMail, a fork of SquirrelMail but apparently better for mobile. Long story short – NaSMail looks a lot like SquirrelMail, even on a mobile device. There is a mobile browser plugin – but it didn’t change very much of the look and feel. The install process was easy and things went smoothly.

Since NaSMail didn’t address what I was looking for it was back to searching around. RoundCube seems to have a strong following and there is a version in the Ubuntu repositories. Sadly the repository version is quite old and didn’t appear to be compatible with the theme I was trying to use.

Installing RoundCube from “source” was also quite easy, there was a howtoforge article which was useful. I got a bit hung up with something that turned out to be my error in the end – I had mixed up ‘username_domain‘ and ‘mail_domain‘ in the configuration file causing my IMAP logins to fail. Turning on some additional dovecot debug helped.

If you find yourself debugging IMAP login issues, the Ubuntu guide for postfix is a good resource. Basically you want to edit the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file and add:

auth_debug=yes
auth_debug_passwords=yes

Then restart dovecot:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dovecot restart

Then monitor the /var/log/mail.log output to see what’s going on.

So RoundCube is very pretty, but it completely fails on a mobile device as the UI expects double-click actions. You can manage to navigate if you are persistent but it’s a bigger barrier than my existing SquirrelMail setup. There are commercial mobile browser skins, but the only free one I found (MobileCube) was mostly a cosmetic change of the default. I will mention that the commercial skin cost is only $32 – probably less costly than the time I sunk into poking around. The double-click UI for RoundCube turned me off, I much prefer a web like single-click UI even when using a full browser.

My last stop on the webmail search is HastyMail. There is no Ubuntu support of this one, but installing from source is fairly straight forward and well documented. I will note that there is a site_key in the configuration file you’ll want to change for security purposes, I generated a new key using a web based password generator and would recommend you do something similar. The config file is human readable and is processed into a machine readable format, I found the command line version more convenient than the web – but both work fine.

HastyMail looks prettier than my existing SquirrelMail, appears to format nicer on mobile browsers (but not perfectly). The image at the top of this post is from my Android phone in landscape mode, I’ve blurred some details but there should be enough to get a sense for how it appears. It also has a ‘simple mode’ which is great for low bandwidth or low capability screens, this is captured in the second picture on the right. I wish there was a theme somewhere in between the default and simple modes, maybe I’ll poke at that sometime.

There are many other webmail options out there: AtMail, Xuheki, Horde, … For the most part they seems to target niches. Most people are migrating to hosted webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN) or simply using the mail client on their mobile device.