There's an exciting world out there, and I want to conquer it.

As mentioned previously, I’m reusing a Dell Dimension E521 to run my media server in CentOS 5.5.  The funny thing is that I couldn’t start up the system because it would hang at “Starting udev”.  I looked at the boot sequence and noticed that it was trying to initialize peripheral drivers.  So, I went ahead and started disabling peripherals from the BIOS.  The sound card did the trick.

I’m installing CentOS 5.5 on an old Dell E521 in the hopes to use it for my new media server.  The first time I booted to the CD, I was presented with the normal Disc Boot Install options of running it graphical or text.  I chose graphical, and the system halts at a line that says: “Enabling HT MSI Mapping”.  I waited 5 minutes and there was no movement, so I restarted the system and was back at the Disc Boot Install screen.  From here, I decided to type in “linux noapic” and the install has gone through.  Just a little tip!

I’ve been using Ubuntu 9.10 on my Lenovo Thinkpad T60p for a while and decided that I should update my OS to Ubuntu 10.04 to keep up with the kiddies.  My setup is having a Dell monitor attached to my Lenovo where I usually do most of my work.  After ~2-3 hours of updating packages, I was finally prompted to restart my system.  Once the 10.04 desktop came online, I noticed that there were a ton of squiggly rows on my secondary monitor which signalled a bad video output.

I decided to do a quick google search for “Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade squiggly monitor”.  This lead me to this forum post: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466072

Several forum posters reiterated what the OP was mentioning and finally, someone had a solution:

“create file /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf with contents “options radeon new_pll=0 modeset=0″ and reboot.”

Boom, I did that and all is good now.  If you want to follow this bug, here is a link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/linux/+bug/541501

-K

I’ve been really wanting to convert the file type of my .cbr and create some php pages with them to view from anywhere. The first step I’m covering is how to convert the files into a compression format that I can work with.  First of all, .CBR and .CBZ files are .RAR and .ZIP, respectively.

So, starting with CBR:

for file in *.cbr ; do cp $file `echo $file | sed ‘s/\(.*\.\)cbr/\1rar/’` ; done

CBZ:

for file in *.cbz ; do cp $file `echo $file | sed ‘s/\(.*\.\)cbz/\1zip/’` ; done

Next time, I’ll write this in python.  Just for fun.