Category: Software

Categories
Software Worldly Matters

On Oracle, Sun and Google

I haven’t had the opportunity nor the inclination to use software from either of these corporations for longer durations of time. Java was my first real programming language at college and I did very little of it. Never have I touched an Oracle database, nor have I had stories to tell of Solaris or Opensolaris as much as I’ve told stories about Gentoo or OpenSuse on this blog.

Yesterday’s news about Oracle planning to put Opensolaris to rest wasn’t as much of shocker as it was a late announcement.

The other news about Oracle trying to sue Google for Java is a little, what should I say, not completely serious?

Oracle seriously suing Google or what?
Categories
Software

On (Adobe) Flash

I despise it.

Being a Linux user for a while now, there have been very few instances when I haven’t cursed Flash for what it is. An abomination on the web. I have not investigated whom exactly to blame here – the list of shared objects in `ldd /usr/lib/flashplayer-mozilla/libflashplayer.so` or the actual shit that’s in libflashplayer.so or the browser’s interface with this blob.

Awesome Web 2.0(tm) sites such as slideshare use it and trying to view a presentation fullscreen is more painful than watching your laptop die due to overheating. I’ve given up on watching youtube on the browser too. These days I wait for the video content to load into /tmp and play Flash* file with dear old mplayer. Such is life. Can’t wait to get my copy of Windows 7 license now.

Yes, I’m beating a dead horse here but I post this at the backdrop of the news of Mr. Jobs having announced that the iPad(sic) isn’t going to have Flash on it. I don’t know if I’m ever going to use this piece of locked hardware ever – maybe it’s useful in the hospitals – but the “no-flash” stance makes me happy.

I sincerely hope that HTML5 and related bling really does take off and take Flash off of my laptop.

Categories
Linux/BSD

On resizing filesystems and LVM2 logical volumes

I’ve been using Debian squeeze/sid for a while now (with apt-pinning) and for the past few days I’ve been facing the “no space left to write” problem. I used the default LVM2-based disk partitioning scheme offered by the Debian installer. I thought it was okay to have a 6.5G root partition and the rest for the swap and my home partitions. Looks like 6.5G wasn’t enough for me. And the root and home partitions used the ext4(!) file-systems.

Now, here’s how you go about reducing your home’s size and increasing your root’s size.

  1. Reduce the filesystem size of the partition which has enough free space to spare using resize2fs.
  2. Then reduce the logical volume in which this filesystem resides using lvreduce.
  3. Now extend the logical volume in which the “starving” filesystem resides  using lvextend by the same amount you used in step 2.
  4. Then simply issue resize2fs /dev/VGNAME/LVNAME which should simply fill up the unallocated space in the logical volume it resides.
  5. (optional), if your reduced filesystem doesn’t mount due to a block-size mismatch, e2fsck it and apply step 4. to it.

Glad that it all worked out fine. I didn’t have to use a live cd to do this (was too lazy for that anyway). I dropped into a vt, unmounted my home (which has the “important” data) and performed steps 1 and 2 on it. My root was still mounted while I did steps 3 and 4 on it.