New Primary HDD: A full Ubuntu backup & restoration experience (Draft)

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

Steps:

  1. Use “SystemRescueCD”
  2. “fsarchiver savefs”
  3. “fsarchiver restfs”
  4. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
    mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot  #skip this if don’t have a separate /boot partition
  5. grub2-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

Operation Stats:

  • Original Disk Space used on the HDD to backup: 45 GB
  • Size of the backup images using “fsarchiver” default settings: 30 GB
  • Time taken to restore the whole HDD: around 45 min.
  • Bootloader restoration (grub2): 1 min.

Impression: Very fast, very little disk space used, very happy 🙂

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Install Bluecurve theme on Ubuntu box

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

Here’s the way to install Redhat’s most famous theme “Bluecurve”:
It worked me on Ubuntu 10.04

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=342060

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convert files from one encoding to another using iconv

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

I have subtitles that was written on M$ windows that were saved using WINDOWS-1256 encoding and were not working on my Linux box.

I found this command to convert from one encoding to another:

iconv -f WINDOWS-1256 <Ice_age_3.sub> Ice_age_3_utf8.sub

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Display CPU Temperature Graphically using a Panel Applet in Ubuntu

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

“sudo apt-get install sensors-applet”

Right-click on any panel and add the new applet, then easily configure it to display the temperature, fan speed, HDD temperature …etc

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know the return value of a native (c) program in linux

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

Hi folks
use this command:
echo $?
to know the return value of a native program in Linux.
try it yourself:

scenario 1: 

more 
echo $?  #(watch the result, it will be 1, which means unsuccess)

scenario 2: 

echo "hello world" > file
more file
echo $?  #(watch the result, it will be 0, means success)

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