A light bulb in a bigger balloon!

OK, at the end of the previous post, I had decided that if there was a 1 watt light bulb inside a round balloon that had a radius of 1 meter, then the surface area of the inside of the balloon was about 12 square meters, and each square meter would get 1/12 of the power from the bulb, or 1/12th of a watt.

This all came about because of this formula I found on the internet:

Surface Area of a Sphere = 4 pi r ²

I had rounded pi off to 3 to make it easy to figure.  And having r be 1 meter was nice too.  That’s my kind of math.

But, what if the balloon were bigger; what if the radius were 2 meters, not 1 meter?   Well, in that case, we would have to figure out a new answer.  The only thing that is different is r, it changes from 1m to 2m.  In the equation, r is squared, so instead of dealing wih  (1m) ² now we are dealing with (2m) ² .  Well, the superscript 2 after the parantheses means to multiply what is inside by itself.   So that is just 2 meters * 2  meters, or 4 square meters.

We could go ahead and figure out the rest of the equation, but why bother.  We know the rest did not change, and it is obvious that this part went from 1 to 4, or got 4 times bigger.   So there will be 4 times more square meters than before.  So each square meter will get only 1/4th of what it got before.  That is what is important.  When we double the distance from the light bulb to the balloon surface, the power for each square meter at the surface got smaller by 4 times!

And if we double the radius of the balloon again, to 4 meters, guess what?  The power at the surface will decrease by another factor of 4, so now it will be only 1/16 of what it was at 1 meter.

Just to be complete, we need to double the radius one more time, to 8 meters.  Now, the power that hits 1 square meter on the inside of the balloon will decrease again, by the same factor of 4.  The power hitting the inside surface always drops by 4 when we double the distance.   So now, for a radius of 8 meters, we have a drop in power of 4*4*4, or a decrease by a factor of 64.  Or 1/64th of the power at each square meter.

OK, we did the increase by 2, and if we figure out what happens if we increase the radius by a multiple of10, then we could have some nice tools at our disposal.  So let’s plug r=10 meters into the formula:

Surface Area of our Sphere = 4 pi r ² = 4*3*(10m) ² = 4*3*100m ² .

Now we can see that the radius squared part changed from 1 square meter to 100 square meters.  And 4*3 is still 4*3, so lets ignore it.

So we learned that by increasing the radius by 10, we decreased the power hitting any 1 square meter by 100.

Now we have enough information we could make a chart, just remember the chart.  Then we can try and avoid remembering the formula, and pi, and all that.   The chart might look like this:

distance multiple:        power decreases by:

2                                    1/4th

4                                    1/16th

8                                    1/64th

10                                   1/100th

Now, we can consider almost any distance change just by using these multiples in sequence.  For example, if we increase the distance by 40, that is just 4 * 10, so the decrease is just (1/16th) * (1/100), or 1/1600.

I am working my way towards radio here, and these numbers can be clumsy to use.  In this case, when I started with a radius of 1, it is obvious the decrease in power is just the square of the new radius, and inverted if you want it as a fraction.   But in real life you don’t always get to start at one.  The table of change in power with distance change always applies though, regardless of where we start.   So except for the darned fractions, the need to multiply and divide, and the hint we see that the numbers might be to bit to do in our head, we have a system.  It just needs refined.   And to refine it, we need to change to a different measuring system that is easier to work with.   So we will introduce logarithms so we can add and subract instead of multiply and divide, and it will help keep the numbers within a range of -100 to +100 typically.  Most of us can add and subract in that range!

A lightbulb in a big balloon!

Yes, you should put a lightbulb exactly in the middle of a big round balloon. I normally like to use 100 watt lightbulbs around the house, but that might get too hot inside the balloon. So I think a 1 watt light bulb would be better. And 1 is a nice round number. It should be a perfect light bulb, so that it actually sends out 1 watt of energy.

Maybe we should make the light bulb round too, and send out the energy equally in all directions. That would be perfect. And we will have perfect air in our balloon too, so that the air does not block any of the light from getting through. No LA smog in our balloon!

I’m wondering just how big our big balloon is. Maybe it has a radius of 1 meter. Maybe it is really big and has a radius of 1 mile! I just don’t know.

I was thinking about how much warming the light bulb would cause on the balloon. If the inside of the balloon does not reflect the light, then I suppose that the balloon will get 1 watt of heat, no matter how big it is. All the energy from the light bulb will travel straight out and hit the inside of the balloon, and heat it. So the amount of energy that heats the balloon is a constant 1 watt, as long as our light bulb is turned on.

But I guess that does not mean that regardless of size, a specific sized piece of the balloon gets the same amount of heat. If we look at 1 square meter of surface area of the balloon, and ask how much heat it gets if the balloon radius is 1 mile, then we have a math issue. But it seems obvious that it is less heating per square meter than it would be if the radius were only a meter. That is, assuming that a balloon of 1 meter radius really has at least 1 square meter of surface area.

I shall look on the internet and see if I can find out how much surface area a balloon with a radius of 1 meter really has. BRB!

.

.

I’m back! I found it, here it is: Surface Area of a Sphere = 4 pi r ²

I found it at this web site, where it has other stuff too.

http://www.math.com/tables/geometry/surfareas.htm

Or you can look here:

http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/QQ/database/QQ.09.99/wilkie1.html

So, 4 is a number that is always there, r is the radius.

Pi seems to be a number that no can write down exactly. But it is about 3.14159 or so. Using it in math might be easier if we just rounded it off to 3. It would be even easier if we did not substitute a number for it at all, just let it be pi!

So, back to the question of whether or not a balloon with a radius of 1 meter has a surface area of at least a square meter or not. Well, if we apply the formula, and say that pi = 3, then we get:

Surface Area of our Sphere = 4 pi r ² = 4*3*(1m) ² = 12m ² , so the area is about 12 square meters, certainly more than one.

Now we are prepared to figure out how much power from this 1 watt bulb each square meter really gets. If the surface area inside this balloon is about 12 square meters ( 12m ² ) then each square meter of the 12 would get its own share, or 1/12 of a watt. True, we rounded of pi a bit, so the answer is not exact. But this isn’t the bank. We don’t need to be exact. We need to be sure we are right, which means we should be able to figure it out in our head, or at the very most, on a napkin with a pen or pencil.  Stated another way, I am not looking for precision, I am looking for certainty that I’m about right.

So this brings me to Dave’s rule #1: Don’t bet a million dollars on anything you can’t figure out in your head or on a napkin. (Don’t be watching for Dave’s rule #2. All my rules are ‘Dave’s rule #1′.)

Critters; and the whiptail

I have two brothers that know a lot about critters.  They have done much studying, excavating, sifting through the dirt looking for bones.   And written these scientific papers.

I know a cow from a horse, and I can tell the front end from the back end.  So when I ran across references to the whiptail lizard on the internet, I thought that looked interesting, and maybe I should mention it here.   Just in case they have not run across them.  They seem to have some odd characteristics, such as being able to reproduce without males, in some cases.  Or lack of a male of a given species (if it can be called that).

http://home.pcisys.net/~dlblanc/articles/whiptail.php http://members.aol.com/Attic21/CreatureofDay/whip.html

Anyway, I thought it interesting.  But I guess I don’t have much more to say about them.  I knew this site needed something besides unintelligible computerese, so this is a tiny bit of that.

446642 dd mbr

OK, that should be a good workout. Do two 5 minute segments on the treadmill at 4, two more at 6 to get you aerobic activity up, then cool down with 5 minutes at 4 and 5 minutes at 2. So its 446642.

Or you can divide the numbers like this, 446, 64, 2. Add them up and you get 512. That must be some power of two (9, I suppose), so maybe this is really a computer thread. I guess it is really the number of bytes in a sector on a hard disk.

So here is what you could do with those numbers. Start out with a hard disk, as set aside a portion to dedicate to getting code running on it. IE, Boot It Up! Set aside some space to tell the computer where stuff lives on the hard drive (the partition table). And add a marker signifying the end of all this. So we would call the the Master Boot Record, or MBR. We could do this:

# bytes use

446 bootloader

64 partition table, tells us where partitions are on the hard disk

2 magic number to signify the end of this section, 55aa

The 64 bytes for the partition table is nice! By convention, there are only 4 entries allowed in the Master Boot Record to designate locations of drive partitions. So we need space for 4 descriptions. We have 64 bytes, so each entry gets to use 16 bytes to describe it.

But those numbers are not typical computer geek numbers. They are too simple. To be talking computereze, we have to learn to start counting at zero. So doing that, we can define the memory byte address of these things:

bootloader … | … partition table … |… signature (55aa)

(446 bytes) … |…… (64 bytes) ……. |.. .. (2 bytes) …..

start .. end … | … start …… end … | .. start … end

0 …. 445 ….. | …. 446 ……. 509 … | .. 510 ….. 511

So, armed with this knowledge, we could make a backup of the Master Boot Record of our hard drive, so we could reconstruct it in case it gets wiped out. It is important to realize that when people say a virus ‘destroys everything on your hard drive’, this is physically impossible to do with any speed at all. That would take many minutes, or maybe even an hour. What really is more likely is that it deletes the MBR, and you just have no way to boot. And you have lost track of where it is.

It is really easy to make a copy of the MBR on a floppy disk, using the dd command in Linux. You just put a spare floppy in the floppy drive, and use the dd command like this from the command prompt:

sudo dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1 and hit enter. Give it your password to allow it to do this as root. Watch the little LED on the floppy, and you should see it come on as the MBR is written to the floppy.

Here is how to interpret this:

sudo -> super user do, means do this as the system administrator. Unix/Linux will not let a normal user issue the dd command that follows.

dd -> copy something somewhere using the instructions that follow

if -> what to copy, the input file. Here we copy starting at the beginning of the first hard drive device, /dev/hda.

of -> where to copy it to. Here we put it at the beginning of the first floppy drive, /dev/fd0. Note that is a zero, not the letter O. Also note we count the hard drives a, b, c etc, but we count the floppy drives 0, 1, 2 etc. So if you count your toes like this, you will likely have either ‘j’ toes, or ‘9′ toes.

bs=512 -> When you copy, do it using a block size of 512 bytes.

count=1 -> Copy only one block

But this should be all be put in persective. There is the old tale of the Berkeley/Stanford/your choice professor that told his engineering students that the person who knows how will always have a good job working for the person that knows why. So maybe we should know why, and by implication, why not.

First, the easiest way to lose all the data on your hard disk is to lose either the boot loader or the partition table. It is normally fairly easy to reinstall the boot loader, it is not easy to reconstruct a damaged partition table. It is a record of where things are on your hard drive. And they could be almost anywhere, depending on how your drive was configured. So by doing the dd thing above, we make ourselves a backup copy in case we get wiped out by a virus, or more likely in my case, I do it to myself somehow.

To put the MBR back, all we have to do is boot the computer with a bootable CD with minimal Linux tools, and issue the command again, only this time sending the data back. It would look like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda bs=512 count = 1

So in one easy stroke, we have taken our backup information and put it in the MBR, wiping out what was there, and presumably bad. Why else would we have done it?

So all this power should give you a warm fuzzy feeling; or give you a panic attack. If you are a normal user, spending most of your time on Google and YouTube, then feel warm and fuzzy.

If you are like me, and spend one days a week “updating” and adding new operating systems to your computer, and six days trying to fix how you just screwed it up, you will more than likely realize that you just overwrote your hard drive partition table with data from a week, or a month, or a year ago! Who knows how many times you have moved the partitions around since then? So unless you have been religiously making this backup, it is sure to wrong data in the MBR. Take gun, point at foot, pull trigger.

So you should think about what you are trying to do. If you are backing up the partition table, then go ahead and do all 512 bytes. But if you only want to backup the boot loader portion, then only do the first 446 bytes, using bs=446.

For many tons more information just Google ‘dd mbr’.

Or look here: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/master_boot_record.htm

KDE K Menu, after the storm

Well, below I talked about how I really screwed up the KDE start menu in my new installation of Kubuntu Edgy Eft. I got it totally hosed by trying to modify a copy. At first I could not find the config file it was based on. After creating a new user, I found it. I copied the file from the new user back to my original user, changed the ownership so it could be used. It now looks like the default system menu is, which I now know I had already made a few mods to. That’s OK, I have back a working start menu. Here is what it looks like with all the stuff I have added to the machine so far. I am still missing ethereal, my favorite ethernet port sniffer.

An enigma – grub

Grand Unified Bootloader, that is grub. It can boot lots of operating systems on many different platforms. It is the default bootloader now for most, if not all, common linux distributions. Yet I say grub is brain-dead. That is not really a good description. What I should say is that grub is not well designed to keep your operating system boot code safe, secure, and reliable. Instead, it places it out in the middle of your hard drive, maybe in multiple places, only one of which is valid. It is commonly placed in the /boot/grub directory of the last operating system you install. This makes it very vulnerable. When I say ‘it’, I am mis-speaking, because it is really composed of about 3 separate pieces in a typical linux distribution.

I say grub is an enigma because although you can find tons of information on how to configure the grub configuration file /boot/grub/menu.lst, you will find much less information on the detailed sequence that grub follows when it boots. Normally you find something slightly more detailed than this:

run stage 1

run stage 1.5

run stage 2

That is not much help. Nor have I found any information on how to make grub work in a safe, reliable, secure manner. If you install 4 operating systems, one at a time, on your hard drive, then the later systems will contain grub boot information about the earlier systems, but the earlier systems won’t contain information about the later systems. And if you boot the the first system and edit the /boot/grub/menu.list file there to help fill in the blanks, you might as well be spitting into the wind. Unless you do something drastic to tell grub to go back and look at that file, it will never see it again, even though you edited it properly.

To my knowledge, this problem is unique to grub. Lilo does not have this problem. I have not seen a Windows system with the problem, although they have not worked in a similar manner until about Windows XP. But the real grand-daddy of modern bootloaders AFAIK is the OS-2 bootloader. I have been pondering why IBM’s OS-2 worked without fail, and grub crashes your system when you remove things.

The common problem with grub is that the data it needs to boot is at the end of a daisy chain of drive partition table entries scattered out across your hard drive. Break any link in the chain before the partition with the grub info, and you are dead in the water. So it is bad construction to put the data (the menu list) way out there. It should be held close to the Master Boot Record (MBR). But the way grub is designed, that is not possible for a disk with more than 3 operating systems.

As part of the MBR, there is a partition table that describes the location of 4 partitions on your hard disk. No more, fewer is OK. The partitions defined in the MBR are referred to as Primary partitions, as they are in the primary table in the MBR. So if you have 5 operating systems installed, one cannot be included in the MBR. And in a realistic setup, one of the 4 entries would point to the ‘extended’ partition table, leaving you only three entries to use. So now 3 operating systems max can have their location defined in the MBR, thus avoiding the daisy chaining issue. This would place them relatively close to the front of the hard drive.

But is that what the OS-2 boot loader did? Well, no. It put the bootloader in a small partition at the end of the hard drive, as far from the MBR as possible. So how did they do that? I never dug into it really. No need, it just worked. But in thinking about it in terms of what can be done with what we have, an obvious solution is to create a small primary partition at the end of the hard drive, and put grub there. Since is is still a primary drive, it is directly referred to by the MBR, and is not subject to daisy chain breakage. There is no rule that says an extended partition cannot be followed by a primary partition. It is true that this would put the partitions out of numerical order, but that should not matter. It only matters when one partition has to point backwards to the next partition. But only logical partitions in the extended partition point to another partition in the diasy chain. Primary partitions never piont to another partition, they are dead ends. So by definition they can’t need to point backwards down the drive, and being out of sequence should not matter.

So, what if we put create a device, call it /dev/hda3, at the very end of the hard drive, out of the way. When we install our first OS, we create a linux swap file at /dev/hda1, so it has quick access. We create another swap file at /dev/hda2, just to force the numbering scheme. We create a small partition at the end of the hard drive, it will be /dev/hda3. Then we create and extended partition in the rest of the disk space, it will be hda4.

Now, logical partition in the extended partition always start with the number 4, whether you use all 4 of the previous numbers or not.

For OS#1, we will create /dev/hda5 for it / (root) directory, and /dev/hda6 for its /home directory.

For OS#2, we will create /dev/hda7 for it / (root) directory, and /dev/hda8 for its /home directory.

For OS#3, we will create /dev/hda9 for it / (root) directory, and /dev/hda10 for its /home directory.

So our file system table for system 2, say would have entries that contain:

/dev/hda7 / (yes, I left out some more parameters)
/dev/hda8 /home

/dev/hda3 /boot/grub (we put the grub directory on the small partition at the end)

And our file system table for system 3 would have entries that contain:

/dev/hda9 /

/dev/hda10 /home

/dev/hda3 /boot/grub (It’s the same place as for OS#2!)

So, by doing this, OS#3, when we create it, will overwrite what OS#2 ut in /boot/grub. But maybe that is OK, because grub is grub. It will have newer entries, as it will have data for OS#3 that was not there before. And if we boot back into OS#2, and look at the grub menu list /boot/grub/menu.lst, we will see, and be able to edit, the list that is now one and the same file for all three systems. We no longer have to wonder which of the menu lists grub is really going to read. We see a consistent list regardless of which system we look at it from. And it is a primary partition, and not subject to the daisy chain vulnerabilities of the extended partition.

Will this work? I don’t know, I have not tried it. But think I will, as the present operation of grub is driving me crazy. It just does not work logically, when it works at all.

Kubuntu Post Install things I did

Post-install of Kubuntu

Update all packages using Adept Updater.

Backup the partition by copying it to the end of the hard drive. You should do this by rebooting into GpartEd live CD, and doing the copy. You can tell it to put it at the end of the drive. You could try this with Partition Magic, but it does not let you specify putting it at the end. You have to do a copy, then move. Too slow.

Use Adept to install Synaptic. Adept crashes frequently, apparently with mouse movement like in the very old days of Windows. Plus Synaptic knows about a lot more packages, and is the tried and true GUI front end for apt-get. Now with Synaptic, lets install some software.

Install java-common and jcc. Might as well do these first in case they kill your installation.

Install firefox, firefox-themes-ubuntu.

On the KDE task bar, lower left, remove Konqueror, add Firefox.

Add gthumb and f-spot. Gthumb will add some gnome dependencies, and f-spot will add some mono dependencies.

Install gimp, gimp-data, gimp-help-browser, gimp-help-en, gimp-print, gimp-python.

Install xsane, which also installs xsane-common (a dependency).

Install Quanta, gnumeric, gnumeric-doc, gnumeric-plugins-extras.

Install xubuntu-docs, xubuntu-system-tools, xubuntu-artword-u?splash, kate-plugins

Rebooted, checked startup splash, still blank start up screen until X takes over.

Change icon on taskbar for Kontact to the K-Mail icon, so you can find it. How awful that K-Mail is getting buried in a large blob of programs, making it almost as bad as the Windows equivalent Outlook. All I want is a nice, easy to use, e-mail program. Get that other crap out of there somehow!

In a terminal window, issue the command df. It says the used memory in / is about 2.3 GB.

Install parted-doc, qtparted, gparted, gcompris, gcompris-sound-es (not en?)

Install gftp-common, gftp-gtk, mysql-server, kexi.

Install samba, samba-doc, swat, smbfs, samba-doc-pdf.

Install minicom, kturtle, beagle, dia-gnome, serpentine, atomix, kbounce, gnuchess, ktuberling, tuxmath, tuxtype.

Install gqview, imagemagick, inkscape, karbon, kino, scribus, tuxpaint

Install kdeartwork, knetworkmanager, koffice, ktouch, kfax, kweather, tomboy, e2tools, dnstracer, iptraf, nmap, ntp, ntp-simple (ethereal not available).

Install shorewall, kstars, ubuntu-docs, keymapper, festival, krec,, kmouth, ksayit, kttsd, sensord, bootchart.

Install apache2, awstats, totem-mozilla, dict-moby-thesaurus, kmid, flac.

In a terminal window, issue the command df. It says the used memory in / is 3.23 GB.

Ok, this is about all the good stuff I wanted to install right now. The next step was to make another backup of the / (root) partition so that if something crashed what I had done so far, I could easily just copy back my backup, and be ready to do again.

[tirade]

In reality, this is guaranteed to fail. The Ubuntu team, trying to ‘help’, is now using UUID numbers in the drive partition table (/etc/fstab). Every drive partition in the world will have a different number. So the backup copy you make will have a different number than the working copy. The backup copy will NEVER use the UUID number of the working copy, so it will be guaranteed to be wrong. How to easily fix this is another topic. But realize this will leave you unable to boot this system. And if you are installing this as the 2n or 3^rd, or even the 6^th OS on your hard drive, and you use grub, then grub will overwrite your partition table and refer to the menu in /boot/grub/menu.lst of this now unbootable OS. Grub reads the table before the kernel boots, so it is possible grub will survive. But if you have moved stuff too much and grub can’t find the /boot/grub directory, then grub can’t run either, can’t even give you a grub command prompt, and you are really screwed! This is why, IMHO, grub is brain-dead.

The grub team will say you should have made a boot floppy, and you could get going again. If only current machines really came with a floppy drive, you could. But new machines usually don’t. They are obsolete.

[/tirade]

OK, time to make that backup that I mentioned just before the tirade. Turn off the system and reboot with the GpartEd 0.3.3 boot CD. High light current root partition, and select Copy. Highlight the empty space in the extended partition and select Paste. Edit the Free Space After number, make it zero. This will put the copy at the end of the free space, just before the previous backup you made. Tell it to apply it, and go watch TV while it does it.

Realize TV is for sicko’s, come back and see how things worked out. Just fine, except for one little problem. The backup you just made has a partition number one higher than the previous backup. So now the partitions on the disk are something like this: hda1, hda2, hda3, hda5, hda6, hda8, hda7.

Well, you created hda8 last, and put it before hda7 on the disk, so what did you expect? Maybe a smarter partitioner? That out-of-sequence partition list will come back to bite you. It implies that the partition table in hda7 points backward to the location of hda8. In other words, a negative relative reference. All bets are off if you do this.

OK, we will fix this! Now restart the system with a bootable CD called systemrescuecd-x86-0.3.0, or newer. Or any bootable CD that contains a terminal window that will get you to the linux fdisk program. In a terminal window, type fdisk /dev/hda (assuming it is hda), and get the fdisk prompt. Now hit m for menu, and see that there is no entry to correct the partition order. But there is an x for xpert, so type x and try it. Now hit m for menu again, and look. Yes, Virginia, there it is! Hit ‘f’ to fix the partitin order. It should do it quickly and give you back the prompt. Now you can hit ‘r’ to return to the main menu and ‘q’ to quit. Damn, we’re good!

Restart the system, booting back into kubuntu now. Lets fix some task bar problems. First, the pager belongs in the middle of the task bar. So right click on the little hidden gizmo just to the left of the pager, and bring up the pop up menu. Click on the move icon, and then with the left mouse button drag the pager left over toward the middle where it should be.

Now lets fix the problem that the task bar shows all open apps, not just those in th window you are in. Right click on the taskbar to where you bring up the ‘Configure KDE Panel’. Uncheck the button that says ‘Show Windows from all Desktops’. Close out.

While we are at it, the default number of desktops is set to 4, which can be a bit confining. Right click on the desktop, bring up the Configure Desktop menu, click on Multiple Desktops, and change it to 6, and apply. Close out of the menus, you should show 6 desktops in the pager on the taskbar.

Now we should label those backups. Open a terminal window, and to add or change the label of /dev/hda7, which is now supposed to be the second backup, type e2label /dev/hda7 Edgy-bu2. This way we will remember this is the 2^nd backup of EdgyEft. Now type e2label /dev/hda8 Edgy-bu1, and label the first backup, which now should be hda8.

Now open up the KDE start menu and start QtPartEd, the KDE Partion Editor. Oh oh, there is a problem. It is slow to open, and when it does, we see the partitions are labeled wrong.

This is bad news. Back to e2label, and try and correct the labels. Doesn’t work. Realize the problem is not with the labels, they did as instructed. The problem is the drives are still out of order. Well, QtPartEd cannot fix that, and neither can GPartEd, the Gnome Partition Editor. Grrrrr!!

OK, reboot with the rescue CD, run fdisk again as before. This time take a minute to read the menus. Read the q means quit without writing changes. Read the w means write changes and quit. Relabel them as before, but this time use w to write and exit, not q. Now get a warning that the kernel is still using the old order, and reboot is recommended. OK, reboot.

Up and running again in KDE, in a terminal window just type e2label, and it lists the drives and labels. They now look good here. From the KDE start menu, find and run GpartEd, and see what it thinks. OK, the drives are in order, but it does not display labels. So exit that, start QtPartEd. Labels and order are now OK.

Use Synaptic to add a few games: patience, mahjongg, shisen-sho, ksokoban.

 

 

OK, at this point we should have a working system with up to date software, and lots of it. We have pretty much done all we can adding programs with Synaptic. We still would like to have RealPlayer, Flash, Google Earth, maybe a few others.

And we have seen a few things. QPartEd can’t copy and paste disk partions (is this really true?), it can’t create ext3 partitions, but can create ext2 partitions. Yes, ext3 is just ext2 with journaling.

GPartEd can’t display disk labels. Neither one can display disk UUID numbers, which are used in ubuntu Edgy Eft file system table, /etc/fstab, that we change often. As a matter of fact, nothing we have used so far has given a hint about what the UUID numbers are. GPartEd does not correct the order of partitions as it created them. Not all tools will count out-of-order partitions the same way. So if you go to delete one you don’t want anymore,and its toward the middle of the hard disk, and the partitions are out of order, go spend a little time in church first saying your prayers.

Radical!

Still trying to see why this is wrong…

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