Tag Archive for 'tech'

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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firefox nightly in a portable format

want to use firefox nightly in a port­able apps format on windows?
grab the latest version of firefox port­able from here and install to the loc­a­tion of your choice (usb key etc).
get the latest version of the nightly build here (scroll to the bottom and down­load the appro­pri­ate zip…not the exe) and extract it to a temp dir­ect­ory some­where (not on the usb key). once you’ve extrac­ted it go into the firefox dir­ect­ory (it may be in sub-directory depend­ing on how you extrac­ted the archive) hit ctrl-a to select all the files. do a ctrl-c to copy them and then head over to where you installed firefox port­able. now for the firefox dir­ect­ory, which should be in firefoxportable\app\. click into it. delete all the files that are in there then do a ctrl-v to paste all the nightly files, in.
that should be it. start firefox port­able in the usual way (FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe) and you should be running the new version you chose.
be warned that some of your exten­sions will no doubt be broken.

and please note that in my defence i have to use windows at work, rather than linux, so i run firefox port­able within a truecrypt con­tainer through a vpn tunnel. so there.

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linux mint 12 rc — a little look

linux mint 12 rc is avail­able for down­load. grab it here. i’ve gone with the 64 bit version. not a review (as usual) just a quick look at the new version and a couple of the changes. the install was rather speedy and smooth. the biggest delay was down­load­ing the uk lan­guage packs…and that only took 35 seconds. whole thing was com­plete within 5 minutes. after reboot­ing 100 MB of updates were available…another reboot and we’re ready to go.

biggest change? gnome 3. there was much dis­cus­sion as to whether mint should switch. i’ve tried various imple­ment­a­tions of gnome’s new inter­face and i have to say that mint’s is prob­ably the most usable so far. it retains the lower panel which helps when many windows are open at once. think they’ve made the right decision. caught up with the latest kernel too. see below for some grabs. seems stable…quick enough…and comes with much of the soft­ware that isn’t installed by default with ubuntu (gimp, build-essentals and more) although ia32-libs isn’t for some reason. if you plan on playing with 32 bit code then issue an apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch as root.

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