LearnByDoingIT

More Fedora 16 Grub2 Tips and Tricks

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:22:06 +0000

I resolved the core.img is unusually large problem by expanding the boot partition.

I was reinstalling a server yesterday and I found that Fedora 16 Anaconda will put a 1MB partition first in order to boot, before adding the 500MB (current standard) partition for /boot.

Yeah!

On the first machine, one of the tasks I completed in order to assist in troubleshooting was to create a USB key with Grub2 on it to boot the machine into Fedora. That left me with Windows dual booting just fine and allowed me breathing space to troubleshoot and use gparted to solve my problem.

Put these Grub2 Linux bash commands into Diigo today so you have them when you need them. A reminder that GNU GRUB is a work in progress and the information in this website is incomplete and may be wrong and/or out of date. Please consult the official GNU GRUB 1.98-r2692 manual as well. Still I did use the commands for Grub on a USB and they worked after I translated configuration file locations from grub to grub2.

Raspberry PI’s $35 Computer Enters Production

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:49:37 +0000

From the FutureJournalism Project

Raspberry PI Foundation, the UK-based non-profit, has begun production on its $35 Linux computer. It’s about the size of a credit card and will ship as an open board like that pictured above.

For display, users can plug it into existing monitors or televisions. USB connections are available for keyboard and mouse.

The Foundation’s goal is to put inexpensive computers into the hands of young people to hack upon.

The backstory comes via Raspberry Pi:

The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton was lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University. Eben had noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that. Fewer people were applying to the course every year. Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers…

…There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.

Specs (via the Raspberry Pi FAQ):

Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux will be supported from the start.
256 MB RAM, 700Mhz ARM11 CPU, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s
Size 85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm. It weighs 45g.
Composite and HDMI out on the board. There is no VGA support, but adaptors are available.

Perhaps a great little machine to get if you’re learning to code by following along with CodeAcademy’s Code Year.

Fedora 16 Grub2 Fail with “core.img is unusually large”

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:03:59 +0000

I was upgrading to Fedora 16 on my Dell Dimension E520, originally loaded with XP, and all manners of problems occurred with Grub2. The machine is set to dual boot Linux and Windows XP and has worked fine in this capacity while testing and using a number of Linux distributions including Fedora 14 and Fedora 15.

After upgrading, it began by requiring that grub2-install needed to be run everytime I rebooted. By the time I really had a chance to look at it, updates rendered it foobar.

The error contained your core.img is unusually large, it won’t fit in the embedding area and is readily found here.

The Dell has a RAID controller and although the disk is not using it, Bugzilla #737508 applies. Essentially Grub2′s core image exceeds the 32KiB partition that was originally created. Maddening as it is trivialized in the bug report as unlikely to happen, although if you haven’t repartitioned the entire disk to get a more popular 1MiB BIOS boot partition, it will happen. The fix is straightforward, reduce the size of the following partition without sliding it forward, GParted on SystemRescueCD worked fine, and a larger BIOS boot partition will be allowed. Grub2 installs with no issues

NOTE: if you delete the next partition, and Windows follows it, you will not be able to boot Windows, nor load the Recovery CD, the boot.ini references a partition table that no longer matches and Windows drops the blue screen of death from a CD boot. The confusing %windows%/system32.hal.dll errors is provided off a hard disk boot. Simply add back a small EXT2 partition (assuming what you found was the small VFAT partition DELL installs with the machine) which has a smaller allowed size and everything will run just great.

Anatomy of a Tweet

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:53:14 +0000

THE beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes get much more information. Below is a map of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since.
map-of-a-tweet

Devices In My House That Use Linux

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 05:44:26 +0000

What devices in my house, besides computers and servers, use Linux?

Series 2 Tivo

Of course my

Motorola Droid2

And my

Kindle Fire