Sometimes when you install Ubuntu (a flavor of Linux) and then try to install new packages, you get this annoying message:
Media change: please insert the disc labeled
‘Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071016)’
in the drive ‘/cdrom/’ and press enter
To fix that message, click on
System->Administration->Software Sources and uncheck the “CD-ROM/DVD” option at the bottom of the menu:
As I mentioned earlier, my current network-attached storage (NAS) box took a hit in a power outage. This is what it looked like after I took it apart to swap in a new hard drive.
So I’m looking for a new NAS. Price isn’t really a concern at all, but here’s stuff that I require:
Some stuff that would be nice:
Do you have a NAS that you’d recommend?
Recently my home Network Attached Storage (NAS) started acting flaky, so I wanted to back up my data. I picked up a 750 gigabyte Seagate Free Agent Pro drive. Here’s how I fixed a couple annoyances:
1. The drive is formatted with ntfs.
That’s great for Windows computers, but I preferred to format into a native Linux filesystem like ext3 or ext2. Rather than typing commands like mk2efs myself, I installed a wonderful utility called gparted. GParted lets you format and partition hard drives. Type the following:
sudo apt-get install gparted
sudo gparted
GParted is pretty intuitive, and it looks something like this:
If you’ve just plugged your drive into the computer, unmount the drive by selecting the external drive (under GParted->Devices) and then doing Partition->Unmount. Then make sure the correct drive is selected (under GParted->Devices again). Once the right device is selected, click on the partition you want to format. You’ll see a dashed box appear around the partition that you clicked (see the picture above where “/dev/sdf1″ has been clicked). Now click Partition->Format to . I recommend “ext3″ because it’s a very stable file system. Finally, click “Apply” on the menu bar and just wait 3-4 minutes. GParted will do all the formatting for you.
2. Give the partition a label
It’s nice if you plug in an external hard drive and you see something more descriptive than “disk” or “usbdisk”. If you formatted the drive as ext3 in step 1, you can use e2label (from the e2fsprogs set of utilities) to give your drive a persistent name. Each time you plug in that drive, you’ll see the same label for that drive. Attach the USB drive to the computer and use the “mount” command to identify the partition to add a label to. Normally you’ll see something like “/media/disk” mapping to a device like “/dev/sdX” where X is a letter like a, b, or c. Suppose the disk partition that you want to label is /dev/sdf1 and you want to call the hard drive “M1″. Here’s how to do it:
mount
sudo apt-get install e2fsprogs
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1 “M1″
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1
The command “sudo e2label /dev/sdf1″ will query /dev/sdf1 to see what label it has. If there is no label, you will get back a blank line. The above command makes the label be “M1″. The final command reads the label back. If everything worked correctly, the final command should return the word “M1″. I’d stick with a short and simple label (under 16 characters, and nothing fancy schmancy like punctuation/spaces).
3. The Seagate Free Agent Pro drive can spin down under Linux when you don’t want it to.
There’s a setting in the hard drive that you can easily modify with the “sdparm” program. Install sdparm with “sudo apt-get install sdparm”. Then imagine that your device is /dev/sdX (again, X will normally be a letter like ‘b’ or ‘c’). Here’s what I typed to see the setting and modify it:
mount
sdparm -al /dev/sdX
sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX
sdparm -al /dev/sdX
You should see a line that looks like “STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1] Standby timer active” change to “STANDBY 0 [cha: n, def: 1, sav: 0] Standby timer active“. If the drive has already spun down, you can unplug it, reboot everything, and plug it back in. Or the handy command “sudo sdparm --command=start /dev/sdX” might also wake it up.
The “-6″ is a fallback for some older types of drives and I think it’s pretty safe to include on sdparm commands.
Further reading on how the Seagate Free Agent Pro spins down:
http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/0651200
Let’s lighten things up with a gadget post. You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way.
Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version of Ubuntu that is customized to work well with web-based tools from Google, Flickr Facebook, and Skype. When I heard that, I had to order one of these PCs to check it out for myself. 
In this post, I’m just covering the unboxing. I’ll use the PC for a while and let you know what I think in a later post.
First, the box. The “gPC” stands for Green PC, not Google PC as some people have thought:
When you open the box, you’ll find a pretty flyer on top of the PC:
Here’s what the flyer looks like in more detail. For people that have never seen Linux, the flyer is a great little introduction:
For $199.00, I was expecting a barebones machine, but it comes with a PS/2 keyboard, mouse, and even USB-powered speakers:
The front of the machine looks like a standard computer. You can see the DVD-ROM drive, speaker and microphone jacks, and two USB ports. There are also two silver buttons for power and reset:
The back of the PC is pretty standard:
Directly connected to the motherboard, you see four USB connectors and an ethernet port. The expansion card is a modem, but I believe the machine only supports broadband connections, not dial-up.
The machine itself is light but sturdy. I jostled it quite a bit and didn’t hear anything loose or rattling around in the machine. Okay, that’s it for tonight. Tune in later to see what I think of it.
I’m still crunching on my non-webspam logistical project, plus I’m about 400 emails behind. I’m also going to fly up to Kirkland on Tuesday and Wednesday to say hello to the Webmaster Central team and check in with them. I feel bad for not posting much recently, so I rummaged around and found this gadget post. If you want an SEO fix, check out this interview with Eric Enge that I did last week Sept. 24th (time flies!). If you still want more SEO, you may not have seen this interview with Dan Keen that I did several weeks ago.
Okay, back to the gadget post. Conference schwag is mostly lame. Here’s an idea for some killer schwag that people would actually use.
At SES San Jose, the wifi worked really well, but power outlets were few and far between. I snagged one and sat by it during one of the panels. At one point, someone came up and said “Mind if we share this power outlet?” and whipped out a “triple-tap” adapter that converts one AC plug into three. Here’s what they look like:
(The one on the left has all the AC plugs in a row, while the one on the right is a compact cube that also has three plugs.)
“Wow, what a wonderful idea!” I told the other fellow at the session.
“Yup, they’re great at conferences and airports where everyone wants extra power outlets,” he said. (I didn’t get the guy’s name.) You can pick up these AC adapters at any hardware store for a few bucks.
You can see where this is going, right? Rebrand these adapters as “Airport/Conference adapters” or some other cool/hip name. By the way, if you don’t think AC adapters can be branded, I’ll politely remind you about the PowerSquid.
Anyway, once these little items are hot then you give away branded units at conferences. Here’s my proof-of-concept:
I gots teh mad Paint.NET skillz. Anyway, this schwag would beat yet another retractable modem cord by a mile. That is, at least until everybody going to conferences had 5-6 of these.