Just over two years ago I bought myself the ThinkPad X32.  I initially installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 on it, and it got upgraded to the latest dev builds, which turned into 2009.06 stable builds.  However, when I got it out on Monday, it failed to upgrade to OpenIndiana and was running horribly slow.

The reason I grabbed it out was that my trusty MacBook (of five years now) has a problem…The fan that cools the CPU has died.  I noticed this on Monday afternoon, but I’m fairly certain that it had been dead all day – just a testament to how good these machines are, even though they do get quite toasty, they still plod on!

MacBook out of the picture, I take my ThinkPad to work with me.  I struggle with OpenSolaris a bit more, then give up and put Ubuntu 10.10 on.  It’s a very nice system.  I’m not one to advocate Linux and it’s alien commands, but so far, as a general user, I am happy with it.  Software installation doesn’t seem quite as straightforward as Apple’s App Store, but it is all very usable.

I especially like the fact that I can use Dropbox with Ubuntu.  I rely on Dropbox to keep all of my work document in sync across my two Macs (sometimes my MacBook doesn’t get out of my bag in the evening to do a profile sync).

So, I’d like to raise my glass and say: Well done Canonical and the Ubuntu community, you have impressed me beyond what I thought I’d be.

Dropbox offers both free and paid for storage online, the free storage has a limit of 2GB, whereas paid sotrage has a limits of 50GB and 100GB depending on how much you want to pay.

If you use the free option, you’ll start off with so much storage, and if you invite friends to join the sservice, Dropbox will add more storage to your account!

If you want to help me out, click here

Dropbox also integrates really nicely with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, it feels just like another folder on your computer.  Drag and drop stuff into the folder (or cp/mv on the command line ) and Dropbox will sync it to it’s online servers.  If you go to another computer that you’ve installed Dropbox onto, it’ll download any new content!  They also have a nice web interface incase you don’t have permission to install the software on your computer.  Lastly, Dropbox allows you to share files with other Dropbox users, which is really quite handy!

# search for all instances of an executable in $PATH
function whence {
for i in `echo $PATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/ls $i/$@ 2>/dev/null
done
}

It’s nice and straighforward, nothing complicated about it at all.  In fact, to let everyone on your system use it, you could just stick “#!/bin/sh” at the top and stick in a file in /usr/bin !

Today, I wanted to find a man page, the sysidcfg man page to be precise.  Instead of doing the usual trick (`find / | grep sysidcfg”), I thought I’d modify `whence` to look for it for me, and seeing as it’s no longer `whence`, I called it `whenceman`:

# search for all instances of a man page in $MANPATH
function whenceman {
for i in `echo $MANPATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/find $i/ 2>/dev/null | grep -i $@
done
}

As you can see, it’s very similar, and you could do the same thing by putting it in /usr/bin so everyone could use it.

Anyway, I decided to look around and decided on reinstalling the tower with Fedora 8 and Debian 4. Fedora asked for a single DVD to install the OS, which was great, I’ve got two DVD’s left in my supply and about five CD’s. Fedora is downloading now though uTorrent on Windows (slowly through my internet connection ).
I went to the Debian site and looked at downloaded the DVD, surely it’s only a DVD? Fedora was, Suse was, I’m sure Ubuntu is too…But nope, Debian is three DVD’s big! So I looked around the site and found just what I wanted: a network install. All I needed was 1.44MB worth of files that would go and connect to the Debian servers and install the OS for me. I hunted high and low in my room and found that I have no floppy disks…Then, looking in the tower, I realised that I had taken out my floppy drive from the tower…Brilliant stuff eh!?
So, instead I had to download a disk image (all of 44MB I think) and shove it in the machine, it would link to the other images online and install the OS from there! “Great!” I thought, “Simple, may take a while, but only one CD!”, thinking this after looking at the nine or ten CD images Debian asked for…I downloaded this small image, burnt it to a CD and whacked it in the machine, booted it up and tapped ‘enter’ when asked to install. I came to a menu, looking down I asked it to detect my network configuration, but it couldn’t work my network card!!! Grrrr, I’m now downloading the three DVD images via bittorrent I’m not a happy bunny…

Off out for a grump with some friends, and they will be hearing about this you can be sure!