It has been quite a while since I wrote here. Did not find time nor issues to write about.
I tried to install Ubuntu 10.10. The Partition Manager did not detect my partitions. It listed my entire hard disk as one “Unallocated Free Space”. I was puzzled. Everything was fine under Windows XP. Or so I thought.
My hard disk is a 60GB one., partitioned into 10, 25 and 25 GBs. My Disk Management under XP listed thus:
Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.
The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance. This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment.
via Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives | OS News.
If you’re going to grab some new hard drives, the above article is worth reading. The article dates to Feb, 2010 – so I’m not sure if this situation still exists. Further more,
These drives are on the market now. We’ve known about this issue for a LONG time, and now it’s here, and we haven’t fully prepared. Some distros, like Ubuntu, use “parted”, which has a very nice “–align optimal” option that will do the right thing. But parted is incomplete, and we must rely on tools like fdisk for everything else. But anyone manually formatting drives based on popular how-tos that pop up at the top of Google searches is going to cause themselves a major performance hit, because mention of this alignment issue and how to fix it is conspicuously absent.
Been a while since I posted 
For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide + Beginner’s Guide.
Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go -
READ MORE »
In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device! READ MORE »
While I was having a discussion on some of the popular Linux distribution on my favorite forum, CHIP TownSquare one of the members(thanks, Aditya 
) suggested me to try out DreamLinux. And I did that, downloaded DreamLinux 2.2 Multimedia GL edition. Since I was using my office PC, I couldn’t install this on the physical HD, had to make use of VMWare.
DreamLinux is a Brazilian distro, based on Morphix, and Debian. The Brazilian connection is evident from the Live CD screen:
Found this blog while surfing. Very useful!
These are some various linux/unix problems I’ve encountered over the years, but which I was not able to find a solution for online. Hopefully this will save you the trouble I had.
by Vidar Holen
Homepage
Problem:
Network interface (or anything else on the pci bus) says “SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resource temporarily unavailable”
Cause:
No IRQ assigned to the device, check /proc/pci (irq says 0)
Solution:
Enter the bios setup (F1 or Del on boot), disable the option ‘Plug n Play OS’.
Reason:
This will make your bios set up IRQs for you.
Problem:
USB mouse using /dev/psaux, the ps/2 mouse device.
Cause:
Bios usb legacy support in action, probably because Linux didn’t probe for USB devices (which causes the bios to release control of them).
Solution:
Compile the kernel with USB support, Input Core and USB HID.
Reason:
Duh.
Problem:
USB mouse still doesn’t work on /dev/input/mice, but /dev/psaux, even when USB support is compiled in.
Cause:
Legacy USB support again. You might not have compiled in support for your USB chipset (the UHCI parts in USB support).
Solution:
Compile UHCI. If not working, try the alternate drivers.
Reason:
Duh.
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