a blog by Marius Gedminas

Posts tagged Ubuntu

New laptop: ThinkPad X390

The time has come to replace my trusty ThinkPad X220 with something more modern (that has enough horsepower to run Subnautica). I picked a ThinkPad X390 for the usual reasons (it’s a ThinkPad, it’s small and light and portable, the keyboard is reasonably sized, it has a trackpoint). I installed Ubuntu 19.04 from a USB stick. This time I did not wipe Windows (because Subnautica), which gave me an unpleasant surprise: the Ubuntu installer does not allow you to enable full disk encryption if you’re using dual-boot.

ImportError: No module named _md5

If you're using virtualenv, and after a system upgrade you get errors like ... File "...", line ... from hashlib import md5 File "/usr/lib/python2.6/hashlib.py", line 63, in __get_builtin_constructor import _md5 ImportError: No module named _md5 this means that the copy of the python executable in your virtualenv/bin directory is outdated and you should update it: $ cp /usr/bin/python2.6 /path/to/venv/bin/python or, better yet, recreate the virtualenv.

Booting ISO images from a USB drive

Dear lazyweb, I would like to download an arbitrary ISO image (say, a Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop CD) into a directory of a USB flash drive, and then make that USB flash drive boot that ISO image. I do not want to re-partition or re-format the flash drive (this eliminates usb-creator, AFAIU) extract the contents of the ISO image into the root of the USB drive (this eliminates unetbootin) skip the ISO's bootloader and directly boot the kernel+initramfs from the ISO (eliminates this recipe, and thisrecipe) I just want a bootloader on the USB to read the VFAT filesystem, mount the ISO image as a loop device, then chain-load the bootloader from that ISO.