Tuesday, August 31, 2010

list your hardware with lshw

lshw is a handy command to look at your hardware.
To utilize its full capability you should be in root account.
Here is some sample output I got.

$ lshw
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
vendor: RaLink
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 00
serial: 00:21:29:6a:33:fc
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt61pci ip=192.168.1.2 latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg
resources: irq:20 memory:fdbf8000-fdbfffff

lshw can take several arguments. Look at manpages for lshw for full details.

Monday, August 30, 2010

How to reset Gnome-panel

 If your gnome panel goes haywire after tinkering , here is an easy tip to reset it back to normal

  gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Boot up ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx faster

With  ubuntu 10.04 you can enable profiling option  at boot time to speed up booting. The system will  remember your previous profile and quickly boot using it . You can enable profiling using the following. steps.


  1. At your boot screen press “e” (for edit).
  2. Use your arrow key and move down to the entry beginning with “kernel”.
  3. Press “e” again.
  4. Add “profile” (no quotes) at the end of this line.
  5. Hit Enter.
  6. Click “b” (for boot).
 . Your next boot should be considerably faster.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Booting iso images with GRUB 2

With thousdands of linux distributions around , booting iso images with out burning it to a cd or dvd  saves a lot of money and effort.   Let us try to boot system rescue cd. I have  ubuntu  lucid lynx installed on my laptop. Let us see how to boot   system rescue cd  from the iso image.   Get the latest system  rescue cd from here.
I keep all my iso images under /boot/iso folder . You can choose a different folder. (but note the exact path)

Add  the following lines to   /etc/grub.d/40_custom file
 
menuentry "SystemRescue CD ISO" {
loopback loop (hd0,1)/boot/iso/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso
linux (loop)/isolinux/rescue64 setkmap=us isoloop=/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso
initrd (loop)/isolinux/initram.igz
}


 You may have to tweak ( hd0,1 ) depending on  the location of your  iso image.   The line  
   
  loopback loop (hd0,1)/boot/iso/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso

 above  mounts the iso image to  "loop".   The remaining lines specify kernel and initram image within the iso image.  


Now run "sudo update-grub" after saving /etc/grub.d/40_custom to include the new entries into the Grub 2 menu