Matt Ventura's blog » debian

Going for 100 and 100,000

Matt Ventura — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:33:39 +0000

The server is currently at 85 days, 10mins of uptime as of this post. I am going for 100. Hopefully, there will not be a >1hour power failure, or a software crash (there never has been). I will be going for 200 days of uptime after this. I’d also like to thank the Debian team for a rock-solid OS.

Update: A live tracker is up: http://mattventura.net/uptime

Also, mattventura.net has a folding@home team (team 161515). The team will hit 100,000 points in a few days. I hope to pick up a few members to speed up the team. The team, in it’s current state, will hit 1,000,000 points in about six months. Anyone who wants to join is welcome. If you contribute, I will give you a link back to your site on a page on this site that will list all the contributors to the team (currently only me).

Installing Debian on an External Drive

Matt Ventura — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 02:37:47 +0000

If you want to install Debian on an external drive, you can follow these instructions. THis has the advantage of being portable and persistent, and works for hard drives and flash drives.

Download a Debian CD from debian.org. I recommend a torrent as it will be much faster (I used a lenny CD and switched to sid repos later).
Boot it up and proceed with the installation. Set up the partitions on your external drive however you like, but be sure to make the Debian partition at least 2-3GB. (I have made a customized one that was only about 1.3GB, which used a cut-down KDE desktop, but lacked many of the things you would expect from a full distro.) You should have a FAT32 partition that takes up the remaining space if you want to be able to use the drive in Windows as well.
Do not install a bootloader (press “Go back” on the screen where you would install GRUB and select the next step). If you installed one, you can always overwrite it later.
Finish up the installation, shut down, remove the USB drive and reboot into your normal Linux.
Install extlinux (typically comes with syslinux), RTFM, then mount and run it on the partition that Debian is in.
Write an extlinux.conf, using the UUID of the partition (you can use blkid to find it). The extlinux.conf file could look like this:
default boot
prompt 0
timeout 10
label boot
menu label ^Install
menu default
kernel /vmlinuz
append initrd=/initrd.img root=UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

You can set up a menu if you would like, but it is not necessary. With this config, the system will boot with no user intervention.
Locate syslinux/extlinux’s “mbr.bin” file and copy it onto the block device (cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdX)
The drive should now boot fine.

After this, I recommend adding the sid repos for the latest software and upgrading the kernel to get up-to-date drivers. You may also want to install NDISwrapper and collect some common Broadcom drivers so your installation will support a wider range of wifi cards.

(Re)Installed Debian

Matt Ventura — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:14:03 +0000

Just Installed Debian on my laptop again a few days ago. Already upgraded to sid repos. I like the new network-manager. I’ll post if anything new comes up.