Wired: $200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

The cool part: that system is built on a Mini-ITX motherboard with a 1.5GHz Via C7 processor. Boards like that usually sell for $200 all by themselves; with this deal you’re basically getting the RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, case, power supply, keyboard, mouse and speakers for free.

It would make a great home server as-is, or you could use the components to build a very capable HTPC or carputer. Oh, and the Via C7 has a hardware AES accelerator, so performance with encrypted filesystems should be excellent.

Yep, that’s going on the Christmas list.

Friend of the Blog MauserMedic asked for advice on backing up his hard drive last week. I’ve been meaning to write up a little guide but, well, I had a pretty rigorous drinking schedule over the weekend…

You can read a dozen different articles on backup strategies and you’ll get a dozen different versions of the “best” way to do it. Here’s my highly sophisticated method:

• Buy a big external hard drive and copy your personal data to it on a regular basis.

Alright, I guess I should expand on that a bit further. You really don’t need to back up EVERYTHING on your hard drive; you only have to worry about your personal files (your MP3s, pictures, emails, Word documents, etc.). Assuming you’re running Windows and you don’t save things in random locations all over the hard drive, you can just copy the entire C:\Documents and Settings\ folder to your external hard drive and you’re all set.

What about everything else? Well, that’s why you already have (or should have) CDs or DVDs to restore your operating system and programs. Your computer probably came with a set of “System Restore” discs that you can use to reinstall Windows and get running again after a hard drive crash. Then you just need to reinstall your programs and copy your personal data over from your external hard drive.

One potential snag: some new computers are coming with the “System Restore” stuff installed on a hidden partition of the hard drive instead of on disc. This is a profoundly stupid thing for manufacturers to do, in that it (A) wastes a big chunk of hard drive space and (B) destroys your ability to fix your computer after a hard drive failure.

The good news is, you should have a program somewhere on your PC that allows you to burn a set of “System Restore” discs with your CD/DVD burner. You might have to poke around on the manufacturer’s website or (horrors!) call their tech-support drones to find out how to do this, but you REALLY, REALLY want to either burn those discs yourself or get the manufacturer to send you a set.

Finally, there’s a whole bunch of backup programs you can buy to automate the backup process for you. I can’t recommend ANY of the ones I’ve used; caveat emptor.

So… that’s my take on backups. Just plug in your external drive, copy the whole Documents and Settings folder, paste it in the external drive, and have a few drinks while you wait for your computer to copy all your dirty pictures valuable documents to your backup drive.

You people are backing up your damn hard drives, right?

I ask because the 160-gig Seagate in my Power Mac went tits-up today, within a few days of its fourth birthday.

Fortunately, I do actually back up my systems. But I only back up my pr0n data files, not the entire disk. So recovering from a dead drive is a bit time-consuming. Swap in a new hard drive, reinstall the OS, update the OS, reinstall all my applications, reconfigure everything, and copy all my data over from the backup drive. [grumble] hours later, I’m up and running again.

Remember, folks, there are only two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed, and those that WILL fail.

Through the magic of OpenSSH and Privoxy, I now have a nice secure tunneling proxy available for those times when I have to use public WiFi. Thanks to Dr. Strangegun for serving as a remote tester.

In other news, the One Laptop Per Child people finally went ahead with their “buy 2, get 1” sales scheme. You pay for two machines, they send you one and donate the other to a poor child. The little machines are especially appealing now that there’s a team working to get Debian running in place of the goofy Red Hat-derived distribution with the strange interface. That’s going on my Christmas list.

The Unforgiving Thinkpad has just been updated to the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10. Haven’t fully explored the new features yet; I’m too busy playing with Compiz Fusion effects.

A sample video (not mine).

One nice discovery: the video driver for the laptop’s Radeon 9600 is giving about 30% better performance under 7.10. In fact, it’s working better than ever.

Updates to follow…

I’m into my first cycle of exams right now so blogging will be light. Ah, the joys of being back in school…

I don’t have much for today, but I must say that GNU Screen is incredibly handy for managing a headless server. I’ve been playing around with Unix-ish systems for over 10 years but I never bothered to use Screen before; I would always just fire up another instance of xterm and go about my business. Of course, then I’d end up with seven different terminal windows scattered all over the place.

That’s the thing about Unix; there’s a million different ways to do everything and one of them is invariably more efficient than what you’re used to doing. I’m always learning more, but fortunately I haven’t yet reached the point where I need to expand my goatee into a Unix beard.

Following up on the decTOP mini-PC group buy:

My decTOP now sits tucked away in an otherwise-wasted corner of my desk, quietly working as a LAMP server on my LAN. It doesn’t actually serve up pages to the outside world, what with Comcast taking a dim view of people running servers from home. Instead, it lets me play around with Stupid Apache Tricks without the very real risk of me inadvertently wiping out my blog during a bout of temporary stupidity, and, as a consequence, having to beg the techs at my hosting company to clean up my mess for me.

And really, it’s PERFECT for the job.  It’s nearly silent (and once I set up hdparm to spin down the hard drive during idle times, it will be completely silent).  Since it draws only 8 watts, it doesn’t heat up my room like my dual-G5 system. That trivial power draw also means that, should the power go out, my UPS can keep it running for, oh, a decade or so. And by running it headless and doing everything over ssh, I don’t have to add any more peripherals to my already-horrendous clutter.

The only change I’ve made so far was dropping in a 512 MB RAM chip so it can run everything without swapping to disk. I’ll eventually change out the hard drive for something more capacious, but 10 gigs is more than enough space for now. I also went ahead and installed Xfce so I can use the decTOP as a desktop system if the need should arise.

Overall, it was $85 well spent. Recommended.

… when you blow off your Networking homework because you’re too busy setting up your own local DNS server.

But hey, ssh iggy is soooo much cooler than ssh 192.168.1.5, right?

I’ve been swamped the past two days with school stuff, side projects and veterinary issues (came home last night to find The Unforgiving Puppy hobbling around on feet the size of softballs), so blogging hasn’t been a priority. I’ve also been working on some things that will be published elsewhere under my own name instead of appearing here.

Anyways, here’s today’s comput0r tip:

What with just about every website incorporating Flash these days, it’s almost mandatory to have the Flash Player plugin installed in your web browser. I bet you didn’t realize, though, that the plugin can, as Wikipedia puts it, “silently compromise its users’ internet privacy, and do so without their knowledge.”

It gets even better, though. While you can change some settings to better protect yourself, you can’t do so without going to a special page on Adobe’s website. And Adobe doesn’t exactly go out of its way to let you know about that page.

So I’d urge you to take a minute to go here and review your Flash plugin settings. You might be a bit unhappy with what you see. Be sure to let Adobe know.

I’d love to get my hands on the stupid asshole who scheduled me for a programming class at the end of a 12-hour school day. Oh wait, I’m that stupid asshole. I really need to plan these things a little better.

I’m truly impressed, though, with my ability to actually do the work correctly while nodding like a junkie and experiencing wild hypnagogic hallucinations. Tonight in class I managed to throw together a perfectly functional implementation of the greedy algorithm, except that it didn’t actually make any sense to me. I wrote the damn thing in about 30 seconds and then sat there staring at it for a good 5 minutes, trying to figure out how it works.

I’m either a natural-born programmer of I’ve finally gone ’round the bend.