NathanDrew.org

Having nearly given up on fixing the hardware issues on my old laptop to get it to have both the wireless AND the keyboard working at any one time (some sort of ACPI issue ) I decided to try and install xubuntu a really old box.

By old I mean AMD 475Mhz old and when it eventually loaded up the installer it got so far as partitioning the disks and then failed! I thought it must be yet another hardware issue so gave up for a while. I tried again and this time booted into the live cd and tried to partition it manually – it failed with the following:

/dev/hda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

So, did a bit of digging about and it seems like its a long standing issue in some installations of Ubuntu based installs, but there is a fix that worked for me and to save anyone else that might be looking to fix this error I’ll post it here so you dont have to sift through forums or bug reports to find it:

From the bug report here:

vi /lib/partman/commit.d/30parted
Put ‘update-dev’ right after close_dialog.

#!/bin/sh

. /lib/partman/definitions.sh
for dev in $DEVICES/*; do
    [ -d "$dev" ] || continue
    cd $dev

    open_dialog IS_CHANGED
    read_line is_changed
    close_dialog
    [ "$is_changed" = yes ] || continue

    disable_sap "$dev"

    open_dialog COMMIT
    close_dialog
    update-dev
    done

Ever wanted to use the simplicity of Bonjour on your home network but don’t have a zillion squid spare to spend on an entirely mac based collection of computers? Well if you’re like me and tend to end up fixing up previously used computers and making them useful again then you’d probably either leave Windows on them (yeah right) or stick a distribution of Linux on to test it out.

Thanks to my friend Spode I tried out Mint Linux on my old Laptop (HP dv2054ea) and started wondering how well I could integrate it with my Mac.

Mac’s have a nice discovery service called Bonjour which will look for devices that are advertised using Bonjour. There is an open source version called Avahi – this will allow you to use Linux to advertise services that you want to share from your Linux box – such as afp based file share (where Netatalk comes in).

Now this is where you need to be careful – Mac’s will require encryption to let you connect up to any file shares and so you need to do a bit of compiling with ssl enabled of the netatalk package. There is a blog post by someone who’s set up his share’s so that you can even use your linux box as a remote time machine (similar to Apple’s time capsule).

Since I already have a time capsule, I didn’t need to set up all of the things suggested there but most of it applied to what I needed and all in one page!

The “ndrew’s rem…” below minty is the VNC connection advertised from the avahi daemon running on ‘minty’ (the Linux Laptop). I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to define that in avahi, it just advertised it.

So, if you want to set this up, go follow the relevant parts on the article at kremalicious.com.