Blogs, Tux the penguin, shells and 64 bit comps.

I am really no good at keeping this blog up to date! In fact, I fail. My neighbours create such great blog entries, keep up the good work!

I have been busy revising again for another exam next month. I may have a work experience placement at an IT firm in Leeds next month. This would help me greatly in my hunt for a career! Thanks to my brother in law and sister =) Again, its often not what you know, but who you know!

In my last entry I posted (quite literally) how to post a computer. I messed around with knoppix a few times. If you get chance, burn yourself a copy of this live bootable CD. You can use knoppix to help rescue a windows install and get a feel for GNU/Open Source.

Knoppix Boot

Download the iso image from one of the many mirrors, then burn to disk. Once burned restart your computer. Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from cd drive and you will get the splash image shown on the left.

If you get into a spot of bother with windows try to recover using Knoppix and one of the many guides available.

Knoppix Hardware Test

I decided to install the new version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. Since I have a 64 bit AMD processor I decided to install the 64 bit version. My test rig has two hard drives, and I want to set up Ubuntu on a RAID 0 array (two hard drives working together striping data across the disks) However, upon reading I discovered Ubuntu (and Debian) do not have support for the SATA RAID (also called FakeRAID) The only distros to support this currently are Gentoo and Fedora Core 5. Not to be hindered I discovered a way to install upon a raid array via the most excellent versatile powerful linux shell. Yes, the shell is that good, im addicted! This would also be an excellent way for me to practice and understand shell commands, and get under the hood of the system and understand what the operating system consists of (debian core, ubuntu-base, linux kernel, dmraid, grub, and ubuntu-desktop) The tutorial I followed HERE was for version 7.04, Feisty Fawn. I had to improvise in certain areas and learn more about each process via various websites till I got it right. But how much fun I had! I can see why so many people prefer Linux over Windows.

Here is a vid of my new freshly installed 64 Bit Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Linux distro on a RAID array:

Ubuntu Vid