Booting Fedora 19 live USB from within Grub2

This may seem obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. I have spent the last number of hours on and off  trawling bug reports and forums for the answer. Anyway, I’m not sure whether it makes any difference, but I am running Grub 2 as a coreboot payload. Perhaps that makes the command line …

Compiling your own Coreboot firmware for the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook

Okay, so, why would you want to do this? Well, in a nutshell, so your Chromebook pretty much behaves like a normal laptop i.e. no secure boot, will boot from any USB key, no more signing kernels and dd’ing them to obscure partitions, etc, etc. Before you start: It’s important to note this comes without …

Unbricking a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook

I recently tried to enable hardware VT extensions on my Chromebook using the Hacking VMX Support instructions on the ChromiumOS website and it didn’t work. Not only did it not work, I also had a second go at doing it, following the instructions verbatim (despite it leaving 3 “bad” instructions in there). This left me with …

Bonding/teaming internet connections

So, perhaps you are too far from your local exchange to get a decent DSL speed, or you have an urgent large download and want to use a secondary internet connection to boost your speed. This article will allow you to combine 2 connections together. No ISP support is required. Connections could be all DSL, …

Using schroot instead of LXC containers

So, I have been using LXC to host my server services for a period of time, with a view to keeping things portable should I need to change provider. It’s very good in that it’s integrated into the Linux kernel and in Ubuntu at least it’s not too difficult to setup, however there are a …

Holy Cow – BTRFS!

Recently I have been experimenting with BTRFS. BTRFS is a relatively new filesystem which has modern features, high performance, scalability, supporting file-system snapshots and on-the-fly compression. After spending the week running BTRFS on Ubuntu from within a Virtualbox VM I reinstalled my laptop using it. Ubuntu’s installer supports creating btrfs partitions, which is handy, and …

Mobile broadband from the command line in Ubuntu

For people who want to use their HSDPA connection from the command line in Ubuntu – Perhaps you have a server you want to use it on, or perhaps you want to do it from the command line for the craic – This is for you. There are 3 files involved “/etc/ppp/peers/provider”, “/etc/chatscripts/pap” and “/etc/ppp/chap-secrets”.

Managing amavisd-new quarantine from the command line

Just a quick one today. It seems to be a recurring problem for me that every once in a while I want to go into Amavisd-new’s quarantine and look for false positives (not that there should be any if it’s setup right). There are a number or graphical ways of doing this but most of …

Converting to GPT in Ubuntu

GPT stands for “GUID Partition Table” and it refers to a relatively new format for disk partition tables. It was designed to get around the limitations of the MBR format, namely that you can have more than 4 primary partitions and partitions can be more than 2.2 terabytes in size. GPT is part of the …