languor.us

If you run into an error message along the lines of mount: /dev/sdb2 already mounted or /media/data1 busy, and the disk has not been mounted, it usually indicates that something has locked it intentionally to prevent it from being mounted. In my case, the culprit was dmraid, a RAID management tool that I am not using any more. Uninstalling the package did the trick. (Removing the array configuration from dmraid would probably have sufficed)

hth.

I have a Gigabyte board with an nForce 430 chipset that supports RAID. I was hoping to use it to create a simple RAID1 mirror using two hard drives to protect my previous MP3 collection. The system in question is an updated Kubuntu Gutsy box.

Before we start, this is the first time I am playing with RAID and the information below might very well be wrong. Please feel free to correct me :)

(What an attention seeking title :S)

I find it highly annoying when Firefox allows certain pop-ups to open when I click on form elements such as textfields etc. I also find it highly annoying when it allows windows to resize the browser - nothing like clicking a link and the next second finding the browser in a minuscule rectangle on the top left of your screen. While I'm at it, I also dislike websites using the "_blank" attribute to force a link to load in a new window.

The following are the steps to rectify this:

I had an issue earlier today where my microphone was not being detected on my semi-new Windows box. The system uses a Gigabyte motherboard with onboard Realtek audio. All drivers from the driver CD had been installed. But my microphone and front panel input options in the Windows Volume Control were all greyed out.

I am not sure what the exact solution was, but I did all the following things:

Today's Song Of The Day is an instrumental from the OST of the anime Kenichi. I'm not sure of the artist's name, but what a killer riff! I've been listening to it non-stop for the past couple of hours and I'm still not tired of it!

What the fuck is with the Apple updater always asking me to install Quicktime or Quicktime + iTunes when I don't have either software on my PC? I only installed a beta version of Safari. It's an updater. Not an installer. What's with every company going through a phase of this opt-out bullshit.

O hearken to me
All ye marketing morons
Fucking die already!
-Basho

Incidentally, the current beta of Safari crashes every time I open it in XP SP2 :S

Konversation is an excellent IRC client for KDE. However, it lacks a rather fundamental (IMHO) option - event notification via console/system beeps. While it has notification options to alert the user via ogg, wav and other sound formats, if one does not have external speakers / headphones, one does not get alerted. As a result, one misses important messages and thereby one gets mucho cranky.

Recently, when I was just about to shut down my Windows box, I noticed that my ethernet system tray icon was all lit up even though I had closed all applications. These kinds of things usually point at some kind of trojan in your system. So, I took some time to investigate it.

Unlike Linux where updates for both your hardware and software are taken care of neatly, Windows usually requires some manual labour when it comes to keeping drivers for your hardware up to date. This niche can be filled through the use of Driveragent, a service that checks your present hardware setup and recommends appropriate updates.

Twice over the last couple of weeks, I've added a new drive to my Kubuntu box and run into the error hal-storage-fixed-mount refused uid 1000 when I attempted to access any existing partitions via Dolphin or Konqueror. The first time this happened was with a Windows drive with NTFS partitions and the second time with a drive from another linux box with reiserfs partitions.