Using and Configuring Linux Category
Ubuntu Installer can't find my SATA Drive
Ubuntu Installer can not find my SATA drive: I recently experienced a problem installing Ubuntu on a particular computer. Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer could not detect my SATA drive, although sudo fdisk -l found the drive just fine, and the drive also appeared in gparted. As it turns out, the SATA drive had left over raid configuration information that was telling the installer to skip the drive (as if it was unsupported). In the following tutorial, I will show you what I did to get Ubuntu to detect the SATA drive, so that I could proceed and install Ubuntu.
Create a Larger than 4GB Casper Partition
The following tutorial will show you one way to create a casper-rw partition on your USB flash drive. The benefit of using a casper-rw partition as opposed to a casper-rw block file is that you can expand your persistent storage beyond 4GB. This is very useful if you have a flash drive that is 8GB or larger and you want to use all of its remaining space for persistent storage. The drawback is that Windows will not see the secondary casper-rw partition (in Windows, your drive will appear to be smaller than it is).
Installing WINE on Ubuntu 9.10
How to Install WINE on Ubuntu 9.10. WINE (Windows Emulator) appears to be currently missing from Ubuntu 9.10 repositories. In the meantime, the following tutorial explains how we quickly and easily got WINE running on Ubuntu 9.10, so that we could continue emulating or proceed to emulate Windows software in Linux.
PDL Casper-RW Creator – Make a persistent file from Windows
How to Create a casper-rw persistent file from Windows: Due to popular demand from our pendrivelinux subscribers, we have created our own simple Casper-RW Creator script that will enable a user to quickly and easily create a casper-rw persistent image for storing saved changes and then restoring those changes on subsequent boots.
Access Ext2 and Ext3 from Windows using Ext2Fsd
Accessing Ext3 and Ext2 partitions from Windows can be accomplished using a few different methods, as previously noted in (How to access a Linux partition from Windows). However, one of the easiest methods is by using a tool called Ext2Fsd. This tool ships with the drivers necessary for windows to detect and mount an Ext2 or Ext3 filesystem as read only or read/write. Additionally, Ext2Fsd comes with a Volume Manager and many other useful tools like mke2fs.exe (allowing you to actually create an ext2 formatted partition from windows). Installation is simple and straight forward.
Cairo Dock Black Background Fix
How to Fix the Cairo Dock Black Background problem. On many Linux systems when hardware rendering is disabled and a composite manager is disabled, Cairo themes will display a black box or rectangle behind the dock. This issue can be fixed by installing a video hardware driver, activating desktop effects, starting compiz or activating composition in metacity. However, to quickly address the issue, we can simply emulate a transparent background.
How to Install Cairo Dock on Ubuntu 9.10
In the following tutorial, we will show you how we installed Cairo Dock on Ubuntu 9.10. Cairo Dock is an animated application launcher or desktop dock that works much like the dock used in Mac OS X, but is much more flexible and customizable. Cairo-Dock also supports composition and Open GL rendering, allowing for some fascinating animated effects.
How to resize casper-rw Images in Windows
How to Resize casper-rw images: TopoResize is a Free Image Resizing Tool create by Chris Semler that can be used to resize images containing an ext2 or ext3 file system within Windows. This nifty tool can be used to create a new image and shrink or enlarge an existing image. Cygwin is used to port Linux file system tools like efs2progs to Windows. TopoResize can be used to resize casper-rw loop files and even resize Pendrivelinux 2009 filesystem images. TopoResize was witten by Chris Semler and was mainly used to resize coLinux ext2 and ext3 file system images.
Sharing Files Between Ubuntu Flash Drive and Windows
How to Share Files Between your USB Ubuntu Flash Drive install and Windows. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to modify the casper script to allow you to mount your USB Flash Drive as read/write. By default casper only allows the root user to gain full access to the drive, preventing the live user from saving files back to the fat formatted device. This tutorial allows for the default Ubuntu user to also have the same read and write access.
What is Persistent Linux
Persistent Linux – What is it? After looking through some of the tutorials offered on Pendrivelinux.com, you may be wondering what Persistent Linux means. So in the following segment, I will cover my understanding of persistence in relation to Linux, data storage and recovery. In addition, I will try to explain some of the limitations of using a USB Persistent or Persistence Data storage structure.
Create a larger casper-rw loop file in Linux
The following tutorial explains how to create a larger casper-rw loop file for your Ubuntu based flash drive install. For example on: Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Crunchbang or Linux Mint. A larger casper-rw loop file is particularly useful for those who have performed a Linux install to a large thumb drive using a Windows USB tutorial and need more persistent storage space for saving changes. The default casper-rw loop file we used in the Windows USB installation tutorials is only 1GB.
How to Fix Ubuntu 8.04 Casper script for Persistence
Along with the final release of Ubuntu 8.04 came a bug which broke the persistence feature, ultimately dropping the user to a shell when booting with the persistent option. As it turns out, the problem lies with permissions being set to 755 for the cow device (strangely enough the prereleases did not have this problem). In the following tutorial, I will show you how to quickly fix the problem. This is the same process we used to create the custom initrd.gz file that is distributed with our Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron related USB flash drive installation tutorials.
Make your own portable Mandriva Flash
The following tutorial covers the process of creating or making your own Mandriva Flash drive. If you already have a USB flash drive, why not put it to use? The MCNLive team has done some outstanding work with their latest Mandriva based MCNLive CD releases. The persistent loop features and USB installer are nearly flawless. The persist boot option allows a user to save "ALL" system changes and settings back to the loop image file. This remastering process is fairly simple, so let's get started.
Ubuntu Remote Desktop Sharing
The following tutorial covers the process of remotely accessing and controlling a Ubuntu installation from another PC that is using Windows or Ubuntu. This process should also work for other Debian based operating systems (with minimal changes) running either from a local hard disk, CD or portable USB device as long as the system is connected to a network and or has an internet connection established and has Remote Desktop (vino vncviewer) installed.
How to install deb packages
This tutorial is for those who use Ubuntu, Debian or a derivative of Debian Linux and have downloaded a .deb package that they want to install. Typically you can use synaptic, apt-get or aptitude. However, if the package is not available via the repositories you may need to download and install them yourself.
Upgrading NVIDIA Drivers in Debian Lenny
One of the drawbacks to installing NVIDIA Proprietary drivers in Linux is that when the kernel is updated, you have to reinstall (recompile) the software to match the new kernel. This tutorial explains how to upgrade Proprietary NVIDIA video card drivers after your Debian Lenny Linux system has been upgraded to a new kernel version. The process is pretty much the same as installing Proprietary video card drivers from scratch with the exception that we assume your already at the shell, unable to boot into X windows due to a kernel upgrade.
Use a Floppy to Boot USB Pendrive Linux
If you have a system that does not support booting from a USB device, but do have a floppy drive, you can try to boot Pendrive Linux from a USB flash drive using a Grub Boot floppy disk. When using a Boot floppy with a Grub boot loader, Grub locates the USB partition and then attempts to boot loading vmlinuz and initrd.gz from the USB device.
How to set up your own Debian Linux Mirror
Looking to build your own Debian Linux Mirror? Use your local hard drive or a network drive and share your mirror over a network or even on the internet. Having your our own Debian/Ubuntu Linux Mirror enables you to drastically speed up the process of installing packages or complete netbuilds on your single or networked Linux PC (s).
Using the following tutorial, the same method can be used for building a Ubuntu Mirror if desired.
How to install Compiz Fusion on Debian Lenny
The following tutorial covers the process of installing Compiz Fusion on Debian Lenny. Compiz is the original compositing window manager. By using 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL to render, Compiz provided intense immersing graphical effects on Gnome and KDE desktop environments. The Beryl window manager was a fork of Compiz and had shown great success. Currently, Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between Beryl composite window manager and Compiz. It exposes the best features of both products.
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How to install Intel PRO ipw3945 wireless drivers
The following tutorial covers the process of installing ipw3945 drivers in Debian. Enabling you to get your Intel® PRO Wireless 3945ABG Wireless network card working in Debian. The Intel® PRO Wireless 3945ABG network cards are commonly used in various laptops ranging from HP to Dell. These drivers are in the non-free section and thus are not included with Debian or Debian remixes by default.
How to exit a Linux man page
How do I exit a man page when finished viewing? Although the answer to this question is well known, due to how many times I have been asked how to exit a man page or info page once done viewing, I thought I should put up a quick answer. Linux manual pages aka. man pages are provided with almost all software available for Linux and house important documentation about a program and explain how to use it.
How to install and enable Compiz in Debian
Installing Compiz in Debian is a relatively simple process. What is Compiz? Compiz is an advanced compositing window manager that uses 3D Graphics acceleration to produce neat graphical desktop effects. Originally succeeded by Beryl (a fork of Compiz), Berl has since merged back with Compiz and both efforts are now one. If you have a decent video card and a 3D Linux graphics hardware driver enabled, there is good reason to install and take full advantage of Compiz.
How to install NVIDIA video card drivers in Debian Lenny
The following tutorial covers the process of installing the Proprietary NVIDIA video card drivers from the Nvidia Website into your Debian Lenny Linux system. We have known a lot of people who have had some issues trying to get the NVIDIA drivers to install and work with Lenny, so we decided to write this tutorial to offer up some tips and help. This tutorial should have you up and running video hardware accelerated in just a few minutes.
How to remove old kernel images
At some point in time, almost every Linux user will have updated their kernel image. After you've used Linux with the new kernel image for a while and your content everything is working properly, you might want to remove the old Linux image or images that still reside on your system and appear as grub boot options. The following process explains how to entirely remove the old Linux image which in turn also unclutters your grub menu.
Mouse pointer disappears after switching users
In Linux, if your mouse pointer disappears after switching users or after logging out and then back in, the problem is most likely caused by a bug with your video card driver. In most cases the mouse will still continue to work even though the mouse pointer is hidden or has disappeared completely from screen view. The fix is actually quite simple and only involves adding a single options line to the xorg.conf file.
I've personally seen this problem occur in various Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu and Pendrivelinux.
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