logic involved

Installing Ubuntu on a netbook is trivial. Installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu with full disk encryption is absolutely easy. Unfortunately, installing it on a netbook with full disk encryption is not (at least not without a CD-ROM drive).

First of all, the desktop Ubuntu and Kubuntu install images don’t support full disk encryption. So get the Alternate ISO from here (Kubuntu users this way, please). Then create a bootable USB drive using UNetbootin.

Ready? Then boot your netbook from the USB drive, and proceed with the installation using this guide. You will be able to select your country, keyboard and configure your network. Then the installation will fail, because the installer won’t find a CD-ROM drive. Yuck.

Okay, if there is no CD-ROM drive we just have to mount the installer ISO. For this we copy the alternate installer ISO to a second USB stick, plug it into the netbook and give the system a few seconds to recognize it. Then we use alt+F2 to switch to a command line and hit so we can enter commands. First, we should make sure that both USB drives are there:

ls -la /dev/sd*

should return something like this:

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

/dev/sda is your hard disk, /dev/sdb is the USB drive you booted from, and /dev/sdc is the second USB drive containing the installer ISO file (unless you have a second hard drive). Use mount if you are not sure if and/or where your USB drives are mounted to.Now you can mount the second USB drive to /mnt and the ISO image to /cdrom:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt
mount /mnt/ubuntu-10.04-alternate-i386.iso /cdrom/
exit

Next, hit alt+f1 to return to the install menu and select “Detect CD-ROM”. The installation will proceed as described in the blog post above.

Have fun with Ubuntu 10.04!

It’s pretty convenient to list and kill processes using ps and kill / pkill on *nix. Actually, you can do that on a Windows command line as well:

• tasklist: shows a list of all running processes
• taskkill: kills processes

Among other options, processes can be killed by their process ID (taskkill /PID 4711) and by the name of their executable (taskkill /IM firefox.exe).
So, if you have perl scripts running wild, just execute taskkill perl.exe to kill all of them down with a single command.

More lesser known Windows commands are described in this PDF.

Some tools just keep amazing me. They are flexible, stable, small – basically, they just work. One of these tools is 7-Zip.
It does a lot more than just creating 7zip archives: it is able to create and open almost any package type I’ve run across so far. And it even reads .iso image files.
Thanks a lot for this marvelous tool – it’s a joy to use and a definitive must-have!

You are new to *nix and/or you need a concise overview of your new toys’ command line tools? Then don’t miss the Unix Toolbox!

Whether you are looking for a handy summary to carry around, or a help to get started quickly – this is what you are looking for.

NetBeans 6.7 has just been released, and I am really curious about it. Installation worked like a charm, but the app failed when being launched in the Finder.
I tried “open /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.7.app/” in the Terminal, but all I got was “LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error …”.
Luckily there’s this blog with a decent solution:
1. open Terminal.app and log in as root (sudo -s)
2. enter this:
# cp -p /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java /tmp/java_original_binary
# lipo /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java -remove x86_64 -output /tmp/java
# cat /tmp/java > /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java
NOTE: you need root powers for this hack – don’t try this if you don’t understand the code. If it fails you are on your own…

Feel free to launch NetBeans now