finnieston crane

glasgow’s finni­e­ston crane next to the river clyde. not used for ship build­ing these days. some­times maniacs bungee off it…occasionally others leap without using a rope. tene­ments at the front there…the whitelee wind­farm on the hills behind (click to view the image in a larger format).

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guinness glass

i like a glass of guin­ness. i don’t drink a huge amount of it and i’m not ter­ribly fond of the extra cold stuff (ruins the con­sist­ency i feel) but i do like it. also the export variety that’s sold in the bottles is worth a try. put hairs on your chest it will…or make them fall out…one or the other.

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migrate to a new linux server

i’m upgrad­ing my home server. a faith­ful 1GHz PIII with 512MB has served(!) me well for 4 years but i though it was time to expand. got a rather nice box with a 1.6GHz pro­cessor (quad core atom d510), 4GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA disk (room for another 2 disks also).

the old machine runs debian 6.0.3 and deals with a few chores…apache, postfix, remote ssh tun­nel­ling, sub­sonic and a couple of samba shares. the old install is obvi­ously 32 bit…the new one will be 64 bit (also running debian 6.0.3…i haven’t found a more stable server os) so that pre­vents a straight rsync as many of the pack­ages will be incom­pat­ible with the dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture. a chum got me thinking…a simple way to get a new box running the same apps as the old one is to rep­lic­ate the pack­ages that are installed. this can be done simply with the following…on the old box issue the fol­low­ing in a terminal…doesn’t need to be as root…

dpkg –get-selections > installedpackages

this creates a file called ‘installed­pack­ages’ that con­tains all the applic­a­tions that have been installed on the old system. if you have the new server up and running and access­ible via ssh you can then copy the file over with scp…if not use USB

scp installed­pack­ages username@newserver:/home/username

this will plonk it into your home folder on the new machine. so now log into your new machine and as root issue the command

dpkg –set-selections < installedpackages

and then

apt-get dselect-upgrade

this will install all the pack­ages that ran on the old box…to the new one.

NB that this, obvi­ously, doesn’t move your /home dir­ect­or­ies, email, web sites or any con­fig­ur­a­tion files. you can do this via USB or using the scp method detailed above. lots of the con­fig­ur­a­tion files are stored in /etc, web sites are gen­er­ally in /var/www. i’m not dealing with things like mysql now but here’s some info on that.

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ubuntu 12.04 and xubuntu 12.04 — a wee look

as usual i like to have a mess about with ubuntu alpha ver­sions. this time it’s a look at ubuntu 12.04 (precise pangolin…again…fine work there people) an LTS release which means it’ll get support until april of 2017…that’s a while. get the daily iso from here and burn it to a dvd or whap it onto a usb stick using dd or unet­bootin. the install process still fea­tures a lot of the artwork from 11.10…unity is still in use…and looks much the same as it did previously…and that’s not, in this users opinion, a good thing. in fact if you follow this post down you’ll see that i quickly tire of ubuntu 12.04 and turned it into xubuntu 12.04…

doing the initial update using apt-get update and then apt-get dist-upgrade (as root). a couple of the ‘extra. repos­it­or­ies were unavail­able. also neither ai32-libs or ia32-libs-multiarch would install due to depend­ency problems.

this build of ubuntu is ship­ping with firefox 9 and thun­der­bird 9 but by the time april 2012 rolls around both of these will prob­ably have morphed to version 11 with no notice­able improvements.

as i said…they’re stick­ing with unity. just as feature-rich as always…

not too light on resources either but then i’ve got a bit of ram to spare.

now as i men­tioned before…unity isn’t for me. i could have installed gnome 3 but prefer things to be slightly more con­fig­ur­able so here’s how to add xfce as a desktop environment…in other words change ubuntu 12.04 into xubuntu 12.04…

as root issue the command apt-get install xubuntu-desktop this will grab 120MB or so from the repositories…after it has fin­ished log out. when you’re greeted with the log in screen click the wee gear icon next to your user­name and choose ‘xfce session’ or whatever. this’ll give you some­thing slightly more usable. i’ve used xfce a fair bit in the past…still not 100% sure of it but it kicks unity’s arse…see below for a quick look.

too many icons…not sure why all my drives have to be shown by default. right-click the bottom menu and go into panel options to make it auto-hide.

ah…proper menus…bliss…

and there’s my daily look at el reg…with some thumbnails…

to sum up. ubuntu’s going in the wrong dir­ec­tion for me interface-wise. they won’t change and i don’t think i’ll ever like it. for an alpha version it seems stable though…adding xfce makes it a lot nicer to use. how long will i stick with it? prob­ably until this afternoon.

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Bear