Friday, July 24, 2009

How we installed Debian Lenny with Software RAID on SATA drives

The hiccup in our latest dual redundant Manna Mail Server implementation created a real challenge for our engineers.

The servers were Dell Poweredge 750 1U with 2 x 1TB SATA drives. Installation of Debian Lenny from netinst CDs would hang (possibly they were just painfully slow) around 33% to 44% when installing core packages.

Anybody seen that problem before?

We resolved it by installing without software raid to just one drive.
Then used Falko Timme's excellant guide on howtoforge.com - How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running System (Incl. GRUB Configuration) (Debian Etch)
Thanks Falko! It works for Lenny as well!

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Mobile Note Taker

Its rare for us to promote any piece of hardware but we just could not resist trying out the Mobile Note Taker and sharing it with you. After all, this is using technology to love you.

The NCP® Mobile Note Taker is a portable device capable of capturing handwriting. It uses handwriting recognition technology to capture your handwritten notes, drawings, sketches – anytime and anywhere. You can upload, file, email your handwritten notes, drawings, sketches once connected to computer.



The Mobile Note Taker does exactly what it says on the tin, no gimmicks. It doesn't require any special pad, just a few sheets of ordinary paper and no need for a special ink. The refills are commonly available in any bookshop. Best of all, its small and portable and fits in any ladies handbag.

Its not meant to be used in graphic design. Our graphic designer says that while whatever was drawn does not match exactly what gets imported onto the PC, it does however excel in OCR, recognizing 22 different languages. Thus making it ideal for taking minutes in meetings or writing a journal, (no need to re-type anything), great in class and on long journeys.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

A practical way to relax with beautiful graphics to boot!

Pingus is a free Lemmings-like game covered under the GNU GPL. It features currently 22 playable levels and runs under a wide variety of operating systems (Linux, Windows, etc.)

I was a real fan of Lemmings back in the early 1990s. But Pingus graphics are better. The staging area, penguins, the tools and the actions are beautiful and they have a techie theme to them. One example is in the little propellers used to float penguins down. In Lemmings these used to be parachutes.

Anyway do try it out. It runs pretty stable and is great for children and adults alike. Install it using synaptic or "apt-get install pingus" as root and then launch it.

Be prepared for 1 thing though. Make sure you have plenty of time before you start playing. It can be addictive.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Asus Eee PC

I had a chance to play with the eee pc last week. Thanks very much to my colleague Rosalind.

Its a really neat device. The button on the touch pad is really stiff so its hard to use it comfortably but other than that, its great!. No complaints at all and hey, Its Linux!

It could do with some fine tuning to reduce the space taken up. I wouldn't use it as a workhorse so OpenOffice is a bit overkill. Better to replace it with Gnumeric and Abiword.

One really useful feature is that it allows a factory reset just by pressing F9 when rebooting. Everything is restored to its original setting from the hidden partition. This makes the device a prime device for testing software packages and maybe even installing other OSes.

Now if we could only get access to that hidden partition.... what wonders that would hold.

By the way, did I mention that I'm the first in company to recover a crashed eee pc? Yay!