I used to connect a Mac Mini to it and changing the video to turn it upside down was something easy. Now that I have switched to my newly acquired Atom N330 ION machine, I have to learn how to do it in Linux Mint (ubuntu derivative)

If you use the stock drivers, you can use XrandR to rotate the screen, but i wanted the proprietary drivers in order to have hardware accelerated graphics and video playback.

After you have installed the propriety hardware drivers for your nVidia card, do the following changes:

Add the following line to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in the “Device” section (ignore the extra ” coming from the WP theme I’m using)

Option  “RandRRotation” “True”

Now you can simply restart GDM by issuing the following commands in a TTY (ie: CTRL+ALT+F1):

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

Once you login into your account you should be able to specify the rotation of the screen in Preferences>Monitor

If asked if you’d prefer to use the Nvidia panel, simply say no.

You will notice that the login screen will still be upside down, this can be fixed by adding the following option below the one you just inserted in your xorg.conf:

Option  “Rotate”        “Inverted”

Please note that you will not be able to change your resolution using the Preferences>Monitor application anymore.
The Rotate option takes Right, Left and Inverted as parameters.

Blow is my xorg.conf, for reference:

Section “Screen”
Identifier      “Default Screen”
DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load    “glx”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier      “Default Device”
Driver  “nvidia”
Option  “NoLogo”        “True”
Option  “RandRRotation” “True”
Option  “Rotate”        “Inverted”
EndSection

1. Pre-selection of components from Tank and I
2. Shopping with Tank of the following components:
   Cheap Keyboard, Mouse ($68)
   SATA to MINI-SATA adapter ($35)
   Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.93 gHz with 3MB L2 cache ($1090)
   ZOTAC Geforce 9300-ITX WIFI motherboard ($1190)
   SILVERSTONE NT07-775 cpu heatsink ($200)
   2THEMAX 8KR1 ITX case with 120W PSU ($455)
   TEAC DV-W28S 8x DVD+-RW – slim ($360)
   2x OCZ 2GB DDR2 @ 800 mHz (w heatsink) ($260)
   HITACHI 640GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB HDD ($450)
   TOTAL: $4108 (leaves $892 to purchase 19″ LCD)
3. Assembly of the computer with Tank(very easy)
4. Installing Windows 7 beta and Linux Mint on the drive
5. Finish installing drivers and compiling wifi drivers for Linux.
6. Bring it back home, use the “stress” command under linux. Stressed RAM + CPU + HDD at maximum for 24hrs. No problems. Consider system stable
7. Test of HD video playback with videos from Apple.com/trailers. No dropped frames under linux and windows. Settings: Max resolution on 22″ + 15″ dual-screen. Windows with Aero turned on and using the task switching to stress system. Linux with Desktop compositing enabled (Compiz), rotating cube effect applied without any problem.
8. installing XBMC – Xbox Media Centre (www.xbmc.org) on linux in order to test more video playback.
9. Installing the “ubuntu-studio” suite of programs under linux
10. TODO:
    Installing, Processing.org and Arduino suite of programs.
    Buying 4more copies of the config
    Buying 5 LCDs (ended up with 5 19″ ACER LCDs. they are quite decent and have a vesa mount on the back. The plan is to hang the computers at the back of the screen.
    Testing on HDTV using HDMI port
    Backup and restore system for ease of use by all
    Restricted account for casual internet browsing by other users

Below, a shot of the small ITX case that will eventually be hung behind the LCD screens.

In order, from left to right: cheap Linksys router, SIG-CALCULATOR1, Mac Mini G4 (1st generation), 1TB backup E-SATA drive, (under all of this) my home computer

Well… I always believed in backup, but never put it into practice. Since my first PC computer with a hard-drive inside (aged 10) I have been loosing data on a regular basis. The only reason why this happens less and less frequently is because I run Linux and do not have to re-install my system every other day and also because I have more than one drive, thus spreading the data over several mediums.

During my recent holiday in France I was lucky enough to slightly fry one of my drives. The cause? It was an external drive that suffered from the several power cuts that happened at home. You see, this winter the power consumption was the highest, ever, due to the intense cold and many people switching to electric heating.

Enough background. How am I trying to save the data (obviously essential data. Work, exhibition material, video footage) and how will I try to remedy to this problem in the future.

How to save my drive:

Since the drive is still under warranty, I decided that it was not an option to open the case and plug the drive straight into my computer. Furthermore, the logic of the USB case was not dead so I did not see the point. From the preliminary tests, the issue seemed to be noise and possibly the reading heads hitting a platter while the power cut, thus damaging some sectors. FYI, the drive was formatted in NTFS since I need to use it on my office computer running XP.

First unsuccessful attempts were the following:

• Mounting the drive under Linux and using the cp command to put the files on another drive. The copy would stall at some point and would stay stuck.
• Same as above using rsync
• Same as above using dd_rescue for each of the files
• Then I tried mounting the drive under XP and using Roadkills unstoppablecopier, some of the files would copy, but it would take forever and leave a lot of errors.

After all these trials, I decided that the NTFS partition must have been corrupted and that there is some physical damage to the disc. If I eliminate one of the problems, the recovery should be easier. I took the step and finally did the expense of buying a hard-drive that would have enough capacity for me to image the broken drive, fix the image if need be and then mount the NTFS partition and go from there.
For this, after some reading, I used ddrescue (and not dd_rescue). GNU ddrescue is praised by many and seems to be the way to go. It combines all the good aspects of dd_rescue and dd_rhelp and where all the others have failed so far, it seems to be doing quite good.

The current ETA is: 227663MB copied at an average of 3438kB/s and still counting.
The partition that is being copied is about 300gig.
More update on this later.

How to prevent the same thing from happening

I have a total of 5 systems currently:

• “home” computer / multi-purpose machine / home server (ubuntu studio)

• SATA II 250GB – system disk
• SATA II 320GB – home folder
• SATA II 250GB – misc documents
• SATA II 250+250+250GB raid 5 array – backup of important documents

• IDE 80GB – system and data

• IDE 30GB – system and data (on different partitions)

• SATA II 160GB – 80gb for data and 80gb for system
• FW External drive 250GB – for work files, video files, office-related data (the data which i’m trying to recover)

• SATA II 160GB

The new drive I bought is a E-SATA/USB2.0 1TB drive.

My new plan for backing up is to use the 1TB drive to make backups of the most important files on each of the systems. The Raid array, since it can be easily reconstructed, will also be holding some of the most important files. The really important files will be burned to DVD and spread over several physical machines so as to make sure that there is also a working copy in at least one place.
I also have some online server space. I will make sure that this will also be put to use for some of the important files.

Further plans:
Frequent check of the SMART status of the drives.
Frequent backup
Try and add more space to RAID array so that more data can be kept safe. (I know that RAID is not a replacement for a good backup, but it sure does help keeping the data safer than having just a single point of failure. Also, the RAID is software so it can be reconstructed easily if the motherboard came to die.)

edit /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

and then:

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins

and you should be good to go.

You might also add some more GUI tools to configure PulseAudio:

sudo apt-get install padevchooser paman paprefs pavucontrol pavumeter

/! PLEASE NOTE that I only write this so that people can try to make a full clone of their mac’s hard-drive including the partition table. If you have any mis-hap while playing with the following instructions I am in no way responsible for it. It worked for me, but may not work for you. At least you are warned.

Checking you have everything:

• a PPC Mac (using the HFS+ hard-drives that don’t have a MSDOS disk label)
• a firewire cable (and a firewire card in your linux box)
• following linux tools:

• gparted
• mount
• dd

Backup your mac:

• First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
• Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
• After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
• [OPTIONAL] Open Gparted (only if you want to be able to mount the disk image on your linux box later on)

• find the correct device id and display it (in my case /dev/sde)
• right click on the biggest partition (the partition normally containing your system and data, the two other ones are only holding the partition table and boot firmware) and display properties.
• copy the “First Sector” in the calculator and multiply this number by 512bits (see why here) (/!keep this number safely)
• close Gparted

• in a root terminal type the following after replacing the /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename you want your file to have:
  dd if=/dev/sde of=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage
• be patient…. it will take a while~

Restore your mac:

• First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
• Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
• After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
• If your system auto-mounted or you mounted some of the partitions of your mac, please unmount them now (ie: umount /dev/sde1)
• Now let’s copy the image back to your mac

• in a root terminal, after replacing /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename to the real filename of your image, type the following:
  dd if=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage of=/dev/sde
• once again, be patient

MORE TO COME:

Compression

mounting the image file

1. backup your /etc/localtime
   sudo cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak
2. now let’s link to the correct file after making a backup of it. In my case “Asia/Hong_Kong”, look for other regions in /usr/share/zoneinfo/
   sudo cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong.bak
sudo ln -s -f /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong /etc/localtime

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

For windows:
Windows>Run>”cmd”
then type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

For Linux/Macosx:
open a terminal window
then type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

please see more on http://wubi-installer.org/ 

People using Mac OS X or Win XP might know that the simplest steps if your VCD is not recognised by your VCD playing tools is to simply copy the biggest of the *.DAT files on the VCD to your desktop and rename it to *.mpg to play it.

Well…apparently under ubuntu Fesity, it’s still not the case. But I found a nice way to do it though

1. Install CDFS
   1. get the source files from http://www.elis.ugent.be/~ronsse/cdfs/download/
   2. unzip the archive and open it with a terminal window
      1. ALT+F2
      2. type bash
      3. check the “run in terminal” box
      4. press OK
      5. then type “cd ” and drag-drop the folder where you extracted the file
      6. finally press enter
   3. install the sources
      1. in the same terminal window as above type:
         1. make
         2. sudo make install
         3. sudo insmod cdfs.ko
   4. remount the CD
      1. in the same terminal window (after having inserted the VCD)
         1. sudo umount /dev/scd0
         2. sudo mount -t cdfs /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom
      2. You may now access the CD from /media/cdrom (from nautilus: CTRL+L, then type /media/cdrom)
         You will see that you will have each *.dat file already renamed to a *.mpg file. You can now drag-drop it wherever you want
   5. Don’t forget to unmount the drive before removing it
      1. sudo umount /dev/scd0

Hope it all helps