Odd Lots
- There’s a useful overview of the latest Ubuntu release (9.10) here. Note the cautions about the 9.10 partitioner, especially if you have more than one SATA drive in a system destined for a clean install on a shared drive. I ran into some still-unresolved difficulties with the partitioner recently, but they seem to be machine-specific and may be due to BIOS limitations. More on that as I learn it.
- A similar site for Kubuntu 9.10 is here.
- I’m not much into costuming (or Halloween, for that matter; my sister got that gene instead) but within the genre of one-person-pretending-to-be-two, this may well be best-of-breed.
- On the other hand, this one comes close, for sheer attention to detail if nothing else.
- And while we’re talking tauntauns, didja see the tauntaun sleeping bag? Authentic right down to the tauntaun guts pattern on the lining. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- 2009 is now #8 on the most-sunspotless-years-since-1849 hit parade. Ten more spotless days and we move into position #7. I’m laying odds that 2009 will eventually get into 6th place but no higher.
- God may not like the Higgs Boson, but hey, I’m not all that fond of opera. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Here’s an interesting pamphlet from 1945 on what the future of television might be. If they only knew…
- Frank Glover sent a link to an article sponsored by the ESA suggesting some SF ideas that have been realized to some extent or still may have some promise in our own (and not some alternative) future. A little breezy, but has a lot of full-color SF art and classic magazine covers. (5 MB PDF.)
- This may seem like a weird stunt, but it was (and may still be) a common thing on dairy farms. When I was 10 or 11, I watched Auntie Della milk a cow by hand one morning for the day’s needs, and the barn cats (who kept the barn free of mice) would line up for their milk squirts. Auntie Della’s aim was very good, and by all indications the cats were completely good with that.
- Make Magazine published a brilliant little project: A vacuum cleaner hose trap for small parts like screws and washers. (110K PDF.) Doesn’t rely on magnetism, but is more like a lobster trap, in that parts enter easily but can’t leave, and rattle around tellingly when the hose pulls them in.
- From the Jolly Pirate comes word of the Corsair Flash Voyager GT: A 128 GB thumb drive optimized for speed, and (according to him) capable of holding over 20,000 MP3s. $400 now…but check again in six months, heh.
- Turn the Dodge Viper logo upside-down, and what you’ve got is Daffy Duck.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · hardware · humor · linux · Memoir · physics · software
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Jeff, In trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 in a multiboot configuration with Windows 2000 and Mepis 8 I discovered that Ubuntu 9.10 has moved to GRUB2 for it’s boot manager.
GRUB2 numbers partitions beginning with 1 instead of 0 as the older versions of GRUB did — this DID cause a bit of confusion.
Also, the old System Commander boot manager does not seem to be able to chain boot a partition with GRUB2 on root, whereas that was no problem for GRUB. However, the old GRUB can directly boot the Ubuntu 9.10 partition (as long as you get the partition numbers right)!
I don’t know if this is related to the problems you were having, but there are some issues of using having distro’s using both versions of GRUB on their respective root partitions or not understanding how the version of GRUB you are using numbers partitions.