hanez.org

Today a friend gave me his old NAS as a gift… It is an Acer easyStore H340 with 2 x 1TB harddrives. There was a broken Windows installation on it which I directly replaced with the very nice Debian based NAS solution called OpenMediaVault.

I setup the box within some few minutes and it is wonderful. I must say that I installed the OS on an external USB stick because I wanted a mirrored RAID and didn’t wanted to insert a 3rd harddrive just for the OS. I will maybe add a small SSD or flash on the SATA bus at some time and will then put the OS there… but only if I am not adding two more harddrives… ;) For now everything is nice like it is.

The web GUI is very clean and easy to use. The RAID was also setup within the web GUI. Everything is just some clicks and you’re done… :)

I am happy about this new device!

I was not very active in the past few month on writing here. Now I am back!

The new Year began with a very hard influenza and I was in bed for nearly 3 weeks… In that time I thought a lot about what to do next. After Christmas I ordered a SSD disc for my Thinkpad and I am impressed. The system boots in a few seconds now. I upgraded my RAM from 4GB to 8GB too… ;)

Since I am producing electronic music (techno and trance) again, I needed to install Windows on a seperate Partition because the latency is not acceptable when running it in a virtual machine. Making music with Linux is not possible if you want to do it not just for fun… :(

With this decision I replaced my Gentoo Linux installation with the wonderfull Gentoo based Linux distribution called Sabayon. I have tested it some time ago and I really like it. I have the power of Gentoo and I don’t have to compile everything. Thanks to Gentoo and all the developers! After more then 10 years of Gentoo usage I switched… BTW: My Servers are still running Gentoo! ;)

I also added a new page to this site in the main menu. You will there find my selfmade electronic music!

Because Frank, a friend of mine, where looking for an alternative to most well known Linux distributions and he even likes the Idea of Gentoo, I told him about Sabayon Linux yesterday. I have heard of it long time ago but I never gave it a try. Since I am a hardcore Gentoo user I never needed to switch since more the twelve years. I tried Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, some other Linux based distributions and even FreeBSD but I never felt very well and always switched back to Gentoo.

I downloaded the Xfce based ISO file today and installed it in a virtual machine running in VirtualBox. It was so easy to install and everything worked right out of the box. The installation took about 20 minutes and then I was impressed. It runs fast and without any errors. It has its own package management but even the wonderful portage package management is available for installing self optimised packages or even simply my own software packages used on Gentoo.

I need to evaluate this distribution a little bit more before I can say “Yes! That is what I want.” but for now I am very excited!

If you are looking for fast and reliable distribution with the power of Gentoo, Sabayon.org is the right place to read more…

I will post my experiences here in the future and maybe (I don’t think so… :) I will try Sabayon as host operating system some day…

Have fun! :)

I upgraded to Linux kernel version 3.0.3 today and it works!

There were some things to think about but almost everything worked like kernel 2.6.39. The main problem was the Nvidia driver which must be the newest version available. The “stable” version for 2.6 doesn’t compile. I added the following to /etc/portage/package.keywords to get things run:

=sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-3.0.3       ~x86
x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers      ~x86

VirtualBox modules compiled without any problems and is running like before…

Just upgrade! Ask me if you need help… ;)

If You have accidentally deleted files or partitions are lost, take a look at TestDisk and PhotoRec. Both tools are great. PhotoRec is great for recovering files by type. You could select *.mp3 and all mp3 files which are recoverable will be found and recovered. Both tools does have support for many many filesystems. And, YES! FAT*, NTFS etc. are supported too. Both tools are available for many operating systems. This includes Linux, Windows, *BSD, UNIX and OS X. Nice work!

If You need a Linux live CD where TestDisk is included I recommend SystemRescueCd. There are many other tools available for doing recovery work for almost every kind of operating system. SystemRescueCd is based on Gentoo what makes it very attractive to me.