Mastodon

You can now follow me on Mastodon.

CES Pictures

Pictures from the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show

 

CES Day 1
CES Day 2

Anime Expo 2011 Pictures

Anime Expo 2011 Day 1
Anime Expo 2011 Day 2
Anime Expo 2011 Day 3

I'm Going to Anime Expo 2010

Anime Expo 2010 is just under a month away, from July 1st – 4th.  I haven’t been there since 2004, and a lot of growth and change has occurred since I was last there.  My first Anime Expo was in 1995, and I believe the total attendance was around 2,300 attendees.  In the last few years, attendance was near 40,000, an amazing amount of growth.  I’m looking forward to seeing (and hopefully meeting) Danny Choo, a blogger living in Japan.  Other guests I will be looking forward to seeing  will be May’n and Megumi Nakajima, who will be having a concert on July 2nd.  You can see my pictures of past Anime Expos here.

Dual Booting Fedora and Windows 7

I purchased a new Toshiba NB305 netbook this week (in Blue to match Fedora).  It came with Windows 7 Starter Edition, the one that’s been slightly stripped down.  My intention was to dual-boot Fedora 12 and Windows 7, so I used the Fedora 12 Unity DVD I downloaded the weekend before, burned it to a blank DVD-R and hooked up my external USB DVD drive to the NB305.  The installer recognized I had an existing NTFS partition so I choose to have the installer resize the NTFS partition to create free space for the Fedora install.  The repartition went well, I finished the installation from the DVD, rebooted and added a new user.  I proceeded to add the Adobe and RPM Fusion repositories to add flash and multimedia codec.

At this point, with Fedora installed and all working well, I decided to set up the Windows 7 side.  There is where my trouble came in.  Each time Windows 7 SE started up, it would blue screen and restart.  Trying Safe Mode produced the same problem.  Having the external USB DVD drive still hooked up, I booted into the Windows 7 Pro 32Bit install disc I got during the holidays and pulled up the Recovery portion of the disc.  It could not find a Windows 7 installation.  I thought that perhaps since Windows 7 SE hadn’t gone through it’s set-up out of the box, the partition wasn’t marked correctly.

The NB305 did not come with any recovery media and the set-up ‘sheet’ said you should make recovery discs when Windows 7 was booted.  And here is where I thought you should have set-up Windows 7 SE first, made the recovery discs, then installed Fedora 12.  Luckily, I noticed there was a hidden partition on the hard drive with the label HDRECOVERY.  A quick Google search determined pressing 0 when the Toshiba logo appears, then repeatedly pressing 0 should launch a recovery console.  Which it did.  The recovery options presented me with the ability to Factory restore the NB305, returning me to the state of purchase.  When selecting this option, I was asked to set-up the C: partition size.  I found this rather nice, as I didn’t want the NTFS partition to have the whole 250GB drive, so I set it to 100GB.

The restore took almost 2 hours, and put on the usual bloatware that a new PC comes with (Office 2007 Student and Teacher edition on a netbook?  That’s just pain…).  I removed all the extra bloatware from the Windows 7 SE partition.  Once completed, I put in the Fedora 12 Unity DVD and installed Fedora per the usual instructions (partition, install, add the Adobe and RPM Fusion repositories, add the flash plug-in and gstreamer media plug-ins).  This time around everything went much smoother.  Everything with Fedora worked out of the box, no driver issues (wireless worked without a hitch).  I only had to configure NetworkManager to run on boot-up in runlevels 345 (chkconfig –levels 345 NetworkManager on), that was my only problem with Fedora.

Dual Booting works flawlessly now this time around.  The Fedora partition is the default boot target in GRUB, and will be used 99% of the time.  The Windows 7 SE partition will remain on the hard drive, simply as an option for testing purposes for VPN, and firmware management for my Garmin GPS.  I ran the netbook for almost three and a half hours last night, with another 4 hours remaining on the battery.

Fedora Kernels and Package Cleanup

If you want to clean off old kernels on your system, do this as root:

Change /etc/yum.conf –

find this:
installonly_limit=3

change to:
installonly_limit=2

save

Next, run ‘package-cleanup –oldkernels’

This will remove old kernel and kernel-devel packages based on the value of the
‘installonly_limit=’ option.

This will keep two kernels installed at any one time instead of three. When you update
your system, you’ll get the new kernel, and keep the one you are currently running.
This will keep things trimmed down space wise, especially if you are using a netbook or
laptop.

Youtube Storm Videos

My Youtube videos of the storm that hit Omaha on June 27th. Videos here

Twitter

I now have a twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/relayer370

2008 OLUG Linux InstallFest

The 2008 OLUG Linux Installfest will be on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at Turning Point in Omaha, Nebraska. We’ll be using Ubuntu 8.04 as the main distro of choice. I hope to see you there!

Atlanta

Spent time last weekend in Atlanta for my cousin Jennifer’s wedding. While we were there, we visited the World of Coca-Cola. An interesting place.