Ubuntu update with some display complications

After an update yesterday that included some linux-headers, my screen resolution for Ubuntu 8.04 was all messed up (I couldn't get anything better then 800x600 on my Dell M1710.

Needless to say I was irritated considering the native resolution should have been 1920x1200 @ 80mhz. I tried doing various reinstalls and removals of things referencing nvidia from synaptic, but didn't get any sucess. A least until I found a reference to a little tool called Envy.

That certainly made things function and could not have been easier. It requires that you uninstall any previous drivers, but I had already taken care of that. Typing sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk got the tool downloaded from the repositories and envyng -t got it running. You get 8 options and have to type in one of the numbers (simple right). I choose 1 since I wanted to install the NVIDIA driver. A few minutes letter I had all the drivers I needed. I also got the sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings package for the GUI tweaks for the display.

Simple as that, or complex as that depending on your perspective. Regardless, I'm now running stably at 1920x1200 @ 79mhz and am loving it.

Ubuntu Hardware Info without a GUI

Getting hardware info from Linux, especially without a graphical manager, looked like an insurmountable task. But after some digging I came across this article about hwinfo.

With a simple (in Ubuntu at least) sudo apt-get install hwinfo you can get a quick view on your system hardware without having to dig through manuals or opening the case. Tie hwinfo with using free -m or free -mt and you have just about all you need.

System Backup

Back it on up

While an absolute necessity data backups can often be a real hassle. In an attempt to simplify the management of data backups for our corporate systems I came across the open source solution of BackupPC.

The initial setup of the backup server on my Ubuntu 8.04 Server, was pretty easy. The included configure.pl install script pretty much handles all the heavy lifting for setup. All that is left is the backup machines configuration. The good news, you don't have to go to each individual machine to install any client or special software, and it works equally as good on windows or linux. (Although I've so far only configured for windows boxes so far. After you add the name/IP of the "host" machine (i.e. the computer that you are wanting to backup) you have go to the "select a host" drop down menu and click the one you want.

The main screen is fairly unimposing and will give you an easy snapshot of how backups have been going; that is it will once you've configured everything correctly. When you choose the Edit Config option from the host screen, the array of configuration options and settings may take you aback. It certainly did me, especially since I wasn't sure what a most of the options were even talking about. But have no fear, that's what documentation is for. And BackupPC has some comparatively good documentation for any open source project.

I could go into the minutia of my specific configuration settings, but that will be for another time. Needless to say, I am so far a fan (as I've only had it running for 2 weeks and have yet to try to implement a restore on anything, I will leave a definitive judgment until later.