16nov10

= 16-Nov-2010 LUG meeting notes =

Our 5th LUG meeting was held on 16-Nov

Ubuntu Netbook Remix
A presentation was provided by Eugenio on the topic of a Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Lubuntu on LUG Notebook
In addition to Eugenio's presentation on 16-Nov, we also installed Lubuntu on the OCN notebook that OCN were good enough to provide the Linux Users Group (LUG). The installation went fairly smooth. We installed Lubuntu on the second partition on this laptop, leaving WinXP on the first partition.

The laptop is now setup with a dual boot between WinXP and Lubuntu Linux.

We struggled a bit with the Lubuntu wireless, mainly due to my impatience to have the EUMETSAT guest account be displayed. But eventually the EUMETSAT guest account was displayed in a browser, and we did get the login page (although we did not go past that page as we had no spare guest login username/password).

Backing up the MBR
We installed the Linux "grub" boot manager on the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the hard drive. Before installing on the hard drive, while we were running Linux from the Lubuntu liveCD, Eugenio taught us how to backup the original MBR on the first hard disk ( /dev/hda ) from a terminal with a dd command.

In the newer systems, IDE drives, SCSI drives and USB drives/sticks are considered as SCSI devices, so the first drive is /dev/sda, thus the commands are as follows:

Backup MBR and partitioning (as root):
dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR-partitioning-backup bs=512 count=1

The above creates the file MBR-partitioning-backup which needs to be saved somewhere accessible if the install fails (possibly on a USB stick for later access).

Restore MBR and partitioning (as root, WARNING!)
(Extreme caution is needed) - ''It is very important to get that command EXACT (ie do NOT reverse content of "if" and "of"). Note that the idea of the MBR backup is if during install the installation in addition to over-writing the MBR also breaks the boot, then with another dd command we could restore the MBR. The command to restore the MBR would have been something like the following (with order of "if"/"of" contents reversed):''

dd if=MBR-partitioning-backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Backup only the MBR
Note the above above examples also backup the partitioning. To backup ONLY the MBR, the value for the "bs" parameter would be changed from '512' to '440' :

Backup MBR only (as root):
dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR-only-backup bs=440 count=1

Restore MBR only (as root, WARNING!)
To restore (extreme caution is needed) :

dd if=MBR-only-backup of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1

But fortunately we did not have to do that recovery.

LUG GNU Linux Laptop
The loaned OCN laptop boots very fast to the Linux LXDE desktop. Possibly due to a combination of Ubuntu and LXDE being lightweight. It is nice to see such a fast boot on old hardware.

I have the LUG laptop locked up in the cabinet by my desk, and the Linux club members are welcome to drop by and pick it up if they wish to check out Linux LXDE on an older PC/laptop.

We need also to come to a Linux User's Group (LUG) policy as to what Linux distributions we install on the laptop :
 * as a group in a meeting? and
 * posibly as a user when using the laptop by ourselves ? and
 * for how long do we keep the WinXP partition ?