Posts tagged Linux

Now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is out, it was time to update my bootable USB drive with a bunch of ISO images. Except I got tired of editing grub.cfg by hand. So I wrote a script. Now all I have to do is plug in my USB drive, download a new ISO into it, run make in the /boot/grub subdirectory, and presto! It works. What the script does: finds all ISO files in .

I haven’t used configuration management tools in a very long time because I didn’t know which tool to pick (Chef? Puppet? Ansible? Salt? cfengine?). Now I use Ansible and am very happy with it. Here’s how you start – with an empty git repository: $ mkdir my-infra $ cd my-infra $ git init . Let’s start by making sure a couple of Ubuntu servers will have unattended upgrades enabled. First we tell Ansible what the servers are

I've a Jenkins server running tests for most of my open-source projects now: https://jenkins.gedmin.as/. It was not too difficult to set up: Send an email to Jesse Noller about that free Rackspace Cloud hosting for OSS projects, expecting to be rebuffed because all my projects are small and insignificant. Receive a positive response with the instructions. Yay! Sign up for an account, type in all my credit card details and personal phone numbers, get it verified by a phone call (I hate phone calls, but apparently it prevents fraud or something).

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.

Unix is an IDE. I do my development (Python web apps mostly) with Vim with a bunch of custom plugins, shell (in GNOME Terminal: tabs rule!), GNU make, ctags, find + grep, svn/bzr/hg/git. The current working directory is my project configuration/state. I run tests here (bin/test), I search for code here (vim -t TagName, find + grep), I run applications here (make run or bin/appname). I can multitask freely, for example, if I'm in the middle of typing an SVN commit message, I can hit Ctrl+Shift+T, get a new terminal tab in the same working directory, and look something up.