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• Low recording volume in Skype and Ubuntu Hardy

I got a brand-spanking-new 1tb external drive (Western Digital MyBook) for archival, and I decided it would be a good time to redo my partitioning scheme on my current Linux Mint machine. I have two drives in that box, a 160gb (sdb) and 320gb (sda). For some reason, I had sliced and diced them partition-wise: sda had a total of 5 partitions, sdb had 6. most of the partitions were in small chunks, between 40 and 80gb, but there were a couple of smaller ones (15gb and 20gb). This resulted in me constantly running out of space in one of the partitions, then trying to shuffle data between other partitions. (I was too impatient to set up LVM. )

So I came up with my plan: copy the contents of each partition to a directory on the MyBook, then use gparted to combine all of the partitions on each disk. It would be a simple process: copy all data to the MyBook, unmount the current directory, create a symlink to the corresponding directory on the MyBook, then use gparted to nuke the corresponding partition. Simple and straight-forward.

My issue, hwoever, was that I didn’t stop to consider what the ramifications of unmounting part of a filesystem could have. I had no problem moving /home. And I actually had no problems copying /usr onto the MyBook. But then I made the mistake. And learned my lesson:

Never umount /usr if you are not logged in as root! Doing a “sudo umount /usr” worked perfect, of course. However, since sudo is in /usr/bin, and since I had just umounted /usr, there was no way to do a “sudo ln -s /media/mybook/usr /usr”. Or sudo. anything else, including mount. In short, I was hosed!

The easy fix, of course, would be to reboot and let the system re-mount /usr. Except that I had already removed the reference to that partition in /etc/fstab, and since sudo didn’t exist anymore, I couldn’t re-edit /etc/fstab.

With rebooting out, the next solution would be booting off of a recovery CD. The problem with that is I was not at home; I was making these changes remotely. Yeah, that was quite stupid of me; I won’t be doing that again!

I spent a couple hours last night trying to fix everything. I booted off a GPartEd Live CD, and then finished copying files from the various partitions to the MyBook. I then nuked all of the partitions off sda and created one nice, big partition. I’ll be mounting that as /data, and making symlinks where necessary. I also deleted all of the partitions off of sdb except for the root partition. I made this bigger (figured I won’t come close to 50gb anytime soon), then made the rest of the drive a big partition, too.

Of course, I am still running from the gparted CD. I need to copy everything back onto the new partitions. I am also decomissioning a file server, so I’ll be adding another 320gb drive to the system (all as one big partition). That’ll put my Linux Mint box at around 800gb of internal storage plus 1tb external. I think that might handle my needs for a while.

Assuming I don’t break anything else, of course.

Remember The Milk has all the features required to be a great web-based task manager for Getting Things Done (GTD) but its sheer flexibility means it can be daunting to build a well-oiled GTD machine. In this post I’ll show you how to use RTM Lists, Tags, Smart Lists, and Locations to create a full-blown project and task management system based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

I have been trying to follow the Getting Things Done method. I read through the book, and found it to be a brilliant system, one that I can follow and will make me much more productive in all facets of my life. I was searching for tools that could allow me to take advantage of the GTD system, but would also be accessible from wherever I might be. Which meant that it had to be online.

I have also been toying with Remember the Milk, the most excellent online ToDo/Task tool. The linked article, written by Doug Ireton, is an in-depth tutorial with step-by-step instructions for setting up RtM for GTD.

via Remember The Milk - Blog.

After I upgraded to Intrepid, I was very annoyed to find that sound no longer worked on my system. Turned out that PulseAudio (which I once was a fan of) was the culprit. PulseAudio was taking exclusive control of the sound device, effectively not allowing anything else to play sound. Which was bad in many ways, including me not being able to watch The Daily Show and the Rachel Maddow Show.

Follow the steps in the link below to get sound back in Intrepid:

After upgraded to Intrepid RC, I once again fiddled with Ubuntu sound system to use ALSA instead of Pulseaudio in a non-destructive way (a.k.a no removable of Pulseaudio packages and configuration which in turn not remove ubuntu-desktop package which is needed for future distribution upgrade).

via ALSA instead of Pulseaudio for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid - a Non-Destructive way. « Tux’s idyllic life..