the cosmotron » linux

Basic Emacs Tutorial

Ryan Lewis — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:43:38 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about how I had to write a guide to using a piece of software for a class. Well, I had to do another one, but this time it was individually rather than in a group.

So, I wrote a guide on how to do some basic tasks in emacs.

Let me know of any mistakes/improvements that you can think of in the comments!

P.S. I’m pretty fond of the mock terminal that I made with CSS.

Fedora 10, Subversion, and WebSVN

Ryan Lewis — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:59:21 +0000

Justin and I recently wrote a guide to installing Subversion for a class that we’re taking. It’s a pretty simple process and we’ve tested it twice now, but if you try it and something it unclear/doesn’t work, let us know.

Fix “Unexpected clusters per mft record (-127)”

Ryan Lewis — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:44:07 +0000

I encountered this error yesterday after trying to fix some Windows bootloader issues in Ubuntu with ms-sys. Needless to say, I just created more issues and eventually couldn’t even mount my Windows partition from Ubuntu, as this would happen:

# mount -t ntfs-3g -o force /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
Unexpected clusters per mft record (-127).
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.

I tried to recover it using a Windows XP disk, but that didn’t work because it wouldn’t recognize my C:\WINDOWS folder! At this point, I was getting pretty worried.

So, back in Ubuntu, I do a bit more reading and find out about the testdisk command (apt-get install testdisk) and a nice post about how to use it on the Ubuntu forums. To summarize, this is what I took out of that post to get mount to actually work after:

After starting testdisk, choose “No log”, choose the correct HDD and “Proceed”, choose “Intel”, choose “Advanced”, select the Windows partition, choose “Boot”, then choose “Rebuild BS”.

If testdisk gives you a warning that the “Extrapolated boot sector and current boot sector are different”, then choose “Write”.

Sure enough, something was messed and it was able to fix it after I selected “Write”.

After all this, mount worked, and when I rebooted, the Windows XP disk detected the installation and I was able to fix my MBR like I wanted.

Samsung LN32A450, nVidia Drivers, and Ubuntu

Ryan Lewis — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:43:08 +0000

I just recently purchased a Samsung LN32A450 television and wanted to use it as a monitor. I figured that it shouldn’t be too hard, just plug in my computer to it’s VGA port and then change the resolution.

But, when are new things ever easy?

To make a long story short, I had to generate a custom modeline for X to be able to use the TV’s native resolution, 1360×768. I read to use the command cvt 1360 768 60.015Hz, but the returned modeline resulted in a “Mode Not Supported” error from the TV. Instead, I had to use a Windows program called PowerStrip to grab the custom timings that actually worked. Though, the only reason they worked was by luck because Windows didn’t properly detect the monitor either, so I used PowerStrip to add a custom resolution to my registry which was preset with working timings.

Anyway, PowerStrip was nice enough to generate an xorg.conf modeline for me and had to edit the following in my file (this is assuming that you already have the proprietary nVidia drivers already working):

…

Section "Monitor"
    …
    Modeline "1360x768" 85.500 1360 1440 1552 1792 768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

…

Section "Screen"
    …
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth  24
        Virtual 1360 768
        Modes "1360x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

…

Note: any ellipses (…) in the above are just cutting out parts that were not changed in my file.

UPDATE: I figured that I would make a note that I recently tried getting a new computer to work with this television and didn’t have as much luck. The new computer was using an ATI Radeon 4850 rather than the nVidia card that I got working previously. Ultimately, I couldn’t get the VGA out to work and had to switch to using an HDMI connection. After I did that, Ubuntu 8.10 (the same OS that I was using previously) automatically detected the native resolution of this TV. Therefore, I recommend using HDMI over VGA to get this TV to work in Linux.