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Sometimes I find it useful to keep long-running processes in a session of screen.  And sometimes I launch one of said processes outside of screen, and then I yell something like “doh!” or an expletive, because, as I said, I do find screen useful.  Depending on how far the process has gotten, whether it was the sort of operation that would not run happily again, or how much cleanup a second run would require, I either kill the process and restart it or I suspend it with Ctrl+z and send it to the background with bg % so that it doesn’t die when I log off.  The latter is a decent option.  But, darn it, I like screen.

Well, perhaps I’m the last to know, but there’s this neat little tool called retty that allows you to attach running processes to your terminal.  I installed it in Ubuntu Hardy the typical way (sudo apt-get install retty).  So, the next time I screw up, I’ll Ctrl+z, bg it, and then screen retty {PID}.  Voila!

In spite of how irksome I find “oh hai i upgrayded!” posts, I’m about to be guilty of same.

I upgraded my Optiplex GX620 from Gutsy to Hardy yesterday afternoon and it seemed to go as smoothly as it did on my HP box at home.  All looked a-okay this morning until, upon returning from a meeting, my display was all funky and jerky and laggy.  The right edges of my windows were uniformly screwy — I would have to click about an inch to the left of whatever I wanted to click on — and the right and left edges of the screen caused visual trails when I dragged windows around.  (And this has nothing to do with my usual breakfast of bacon and psychedelics.)  This wasn’t the first time I’ve run into problems with compiz/beryl and Ubuntu and so I was hopeful that things could be easily remedied.

I was still able to get around a bit and I found a Hardy installation guide that fixed me all up (I hope).

I should probably note that the Optiplex in question has an ATI Radeon X600 series video card.

Pining for the visual trails,

Mike from Arlington

P.S. Ubuntu, I still ♥ you.

The hard drive on my laptop is slowly failing and a combination of being busy, lazy, and cheap is preventing me from replacing it. About once every two weeks over the past couple months, one of the Windows registry files becomes corrupted and the XP disk is unable to repair it. And the HD fails basic manufacturer-provided diagnostics. But I’m stubborn. So I’ve been routinely resuscitating this box and I decided to post the process I use.

If you boot and see a message like

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
C:\windows\system32\config\system

then you may be interested in this.
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This is a slightly modified (read: rough) transcription of the talk I gave at this year’s NJLA conference, called “Library Revolution.” Continue reading…

I noticed this response to the Fedora users survey on Peter Murray’s blog, and figured I’d post a response. Since my previous employer did not use Fedora, and I haven’t begun my new job yet, I’ll be posting about our use of Fedora at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

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