A taste of Linux.

Using the KDE 4.4.5 of debian 6 the default menu shows as a series of opening folders of various contents, which if you're not quick enough or don't know where to look, close too quickly on you locking you out of them. I much prefer what is called the traditional menu, where folders are listed in descending order and when your mouse hovers over your choice, it opens to the right showing you its contents for you to choose. Much more intuitive!

The way to get this, and get rid of the 'new' menus is to right-click the KDE icon of the menu and 'unlock widgets' and then 'Switch to classic menu style'. Then lock the widgets and job done!

I've just updated my entry with the linux counter [@ http:/counter.li.org] to show that I'm now using Debian in place of Centos, and whilst I was there I noticed that I've been using linux since the 3rd November 2003! I didn't realise it was as long as that. I'm now debating whether to use the auto-update script from there to keep my details uptodate? I'm registered under my gmail account, as I fully expect to lose my talktalk account later on this year when I change ISP's again.

I've been using CentOS for the last four years and got to know it quite well, but I'd become stale, it wasn't fun anymore. I needed a change, so I tried out ubuntu, and kubuntu as I like kde, but neither really satisfied me. So I tried Debian 6 on my laptop and I liked what I saw, so now I have Debian 6 as my main desktop and am getting to know it. Its rock solid and stable, and kmail and kontact haven't crashed in a week of using it, whereas kontact seemed to crash virtually every other day on CentOS.

I haven't got it set up as I like yet, I haven't got my scripts set up so that I'll know when there's updates, but for now, I'm relying on doing an apt-get upgrade every evening to see what it picks up, if anything.

And at the same time of me changing operating systems, my ISP [talktalk] were moving everyone off their old tiscali accounts and onto new talktalk ones. So now I've got the joy of telling everybody about my new email address, which is, and i'm going to obscure it for the sake of bots crawling the internet and harvesting email addresses - but its 'famous British Queen of the Roman period@talktalk.net' There, that should keep the bots away :).

This is just a test to see if I've got the counter working properly now that I've upgraded the software for the blog?

I've now automated my backups with the following line in my users crontab .... 00 */3 * * * /home/boztu/cron/backup.sh ...... which is calling the file 'backup.sh' which consists of .....

#!/bin/bash -x
#shell script for use with rsync in user crontab
/usr/bin/rsync -av /home/boztu/ /media/disk/`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`/ >> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt.

This automates the file creation so that I don’t have to create it and change the date, it does it all for me! And it works flawlessly and does incremental backups every three hours.

With the new LibreOffice that came out recently, I downloaded it and opened it to my programme folder in my home directory, and then cd into the debs folder and ...... sudo dpkg -i *.deb .... and it installed everything into the right place. Within five minutes, or thereabouts, I was running the latest LibreOffice. Short and sweet!

I've finally got Debian 6 set up the way that I want and not the way that the partition wizard wants! It wanted a / of just 350mb which was way too small for any decent work to be done on it! So, at the fourth attempt I've got it set up with
Boot = 256mb
/ = 10g
Usr = 8g
Opt = 3g
Var = 3G
Swap = 1g
Tmp = 2g
Home = 130g

All of which should be stable for several years to come, I hope.

And I've stopped using 'rsnapshot' for doing my backups with, as twice now its eaten all my / which has taken me a long time to get it sorted out and me working properly again. Instead I'm using 'rsync', with the command being - sudo rsync -av /home/boztu/ /media/disk/20110521/ - and i just change the date appropriately.