Steven Harms’ Blog

Technology, Linux, Life

Archive for September, 2008

Windows to Linux USB key

Sep 29

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 1 Comment

I am working on a USB key image that will convert a windows install to linux. We have some programs with data in specific places that needs to be transferred over. Also the user should click a minimum of buttons as we won’t have a tech onsite with them.

The best idea I have to this is take an existing Live USB image (2 partitions, one for the image and one for migration data), and do a gnome autologin, throw my installer icon on the desktop and lock out everything else. The actual program I am thinking PyGTK. Does anyone have any better ideas on how to do this, or that sounds reasonable?

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Encrypted Private Folders in Intrepid

Sep 25

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 3 Comments

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EncryptedPrivateDirectory

Just thinking about this, haven’t been involved in it, but is there any kind of notification to users letting them know that their password to decrypt the folder would still be in /etc/shadow?

FGLRX driver rolls along

Sep 18

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | No Comments

They finally got my favorite issue fixed:

“When it comes to WINE, AMD has fixed the screen corruption issue that has plagued users for a number of months now. However, AMD is continuing to address problems with WINE as well as delivering performance optimizations, which should be in the pipeline shortly.”

Great job AMD, the release schedule for fglrx is working out for me atleast. Phoronix has the full details.

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OpenSUSE 11 fglrx

Sep 12

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 2 Comments

I bought a HD3870 ATI card, and for some strange reason, using the proprietary catalyst driver on OpenSUSE 11, just by feel mind you, not benchmarks, is about 2x slower with compiz than Ubuntu. What does Ubuntu do that is different than OpenSUSE that could cause this? Both distro’s are using Xorg 7.3 so I am a bit confused. Compiz on OpenSUSE is 0.7.6, on Hardy its 0.7.4 but I couldn’t see that making that big of difference.

Anyone else experience this? One thing to make firefox usable I did is disable smooth scrolling, but the effects on windows are still very slow.

On a side note, DropBox works great on my Ubuntu box and OpenSUSE box, definitely a cool tool.

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Google Chrome

Sep 2

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 7 Comments

Giving it a try today. So far it ‘feels’ faster than firefox. This could really change the web, and is an awesome move by google.