MaximumHoyt

My wife surprised me with an HP Mini 1120NR Mi Edition for an anniversary gift! While it runs Linux, it uses an HP-modified version of Ubuntu, which is a Debian-based Linux. Nothing wrong with that, except that Debian/Ubuntu organizes things differently than Mandriva/RedHat, so it took some getting used to. The first thing I did was to increase the memory from 1GB of RAM to 2GB of RAM, not that I needed it right now, but RAM is currently very inexpensive. Previous version of Ubuntu for the Mini did not have kernels compiled for >1GB support, but this one recognized it upon re-boot. The interface is unlike a conventional desktop and is called harbour-launcer . you can see how HP modified the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop by reading how others have modified their desktops to mimic HP . The first thing that I need to do was install some familiar apps, like mc . Alt-F2 brings up a RUN dialog, and entering gnome-terminal launches a terminal window. I couldn't become the superuser since I ...

I wanted to upgrade to Mandriva 2009.1 and had the .iso image, but the checksum failed. Since I was at my workshop and had only EVDO modem service, I didn't want to download the entire .iso again and I remembered that I could use rsync to "fix" the damaged .iso file. To avoid using bandwidth at the garage, I use a USB drive at home (where I have Verizon FIOS) to mirror the current Mandriva repositories using rsync, so I knew that Georgia Tech had an rsync server. I just needed to find the path to the .iso files. NOTE: Although Mandriva 2009 is now obsolete, the technique described here still works on any downloaded file using and rsync server. Starting with: $ rsync rsync.gtlib.gatech.edu:: I eventually wound up with: rsync://rsync.gtlib.gatech.edu::mandrake/mandrake/official/iso/2009.1/ as the path. Then, I changed directory to where I had the damaged .iso file and executed (all on one line): $ rsync -Pz --stats --inplace --ignore-times rsync://rsync...