arotau

I dug up my ancient Toshiba Portege 3480CT laptop, and installed Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 on it by connecting the hard to my desktop PC (as the laptop doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive). Then I found that the wireless card I had, a Cisco Aironet 350, doesn’t support WPA. After trying and failing to get a Belkin card to work at all, I tried the Linksys WPC54GS-UK. With some help from the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki, which I’ve summarised in a new wiki page, the card works perfectly and I now have web access all around the house instead of having to go and sit in the study.

Have a look at FAlbum if you use WordPress and Flickr.

If you are using Skype on Linux and want to use your USB webcam’s microphone with the soundcard speakers, you need to get this program and compile and install it. It’s a bit annoying, but until Skype supports GStreamer it’ll have to do.

Apparently, in order to get the inotify device to show up under Ubuntu, you need to execute the following command:

sudo mknod /dev/inotify c 10 63

See the Ubuntu forum thread for more info.

Later: Apparently inotify no longer uses a /dev device – the above isn’t necessary to get it working.

I was going to upgrade this website to “WordPress 1.5″:http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrade_1.2_to_1.5, but only got far enough through my todo list to get backups working as I want them to. Now I have a complete backup of all my files to an external Firewire hard drive (if it’s plugged in), a partial backup to an account on a remote host, and a full backup of this website back to my home machine every night. That’s all done using “rsync”:http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/ so it happens fairly quickly and efficiently.

The only thing that can’t be backed up remotely this way is our photos, which already amount to over 2Gb of images. Those will be backed up manually about once a month using an external Firewire DVD writer, along with a copy of all the other data, and the DVDs are then stored away from the house.

Getting it all set up was a bit tedious, but at least I now know that I can quickly retrieve any important files from at least two places, and that I have DVDs to fall back on (stored in a third location) if necessary. The thought of losing all my data is rather scary, so it’s a weight off my mind to have an automatic system in place. I wonder how many people realise how easily they could lose all their digital photos from a hard drive failure?