Linux

Cheers, didn't realise dd could be used for that. Any idea how long it would take for a 1TB drive, I seem to remember it doesn't show progress.

It'll give you a transfer rate. A block size of 1024 works fairly well, but you might want to fiddle with that to get the highest write rate you can.

I usually put it within a for loop and just echo the current value of $i at the beginning of each loop.

dd does show progress, you just need to ask.
On a separate tty/console find dd PID whilst it's running with

pgrep -l '^dd$'

Then execute "kill -USR1 $PID"

Return to the console/tty where dd is running and you should see the stats.

Or just run that kill command with "watch" to see stats every X seconds.

watch -n $x kill -USR1 $PID

Your phone isn't working then?

You may have missed the point.

dd if=/dev/pies of=/hippy/is/fat32

I wouldn't give HDDs away. Give away the machine with a fresh drive in it or without a drive.

2nd hand hard drives can't really be trusted anyway, since they could have had a backdoor installed into the firmware if someone tried hard enough.

running Elementary OS on my work laptop. Omg it's sooooooo much faster than the stupid Win 7 image provided from work (which is slow as they insist on using McAfee (and not even the drug comatose fun one)).

Except for VPN, I've no idea what I need to go back to Windows for (obviously gaming PC currently still needs Windows).

Also using elementary OS, pleasure to install like other flavors I've used before. Nice and fast, no problems so far!

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/03/critical-crypto-bug-leaves-linux-hundreds-of-apps-open-to-eavesdropping/

Anyone use Redshift? I've just installed it and although Geoclue isn't working, I can start it providing the lat and long for London. However, the colour for now (around noon) is a pretty dark redish hue. Is this right? It's not particularly attractive, tbh. I figured it'd be more blue during the day? Am I backwards?

Something to do with two monitors. Works fine on my laptop screen (which is usually off) but not the external. x.flux seems to work fine.

Anyone using Linux on a MacBook? My masochistic side is toying with getting an Arch install up and running.

Anyone using Linux on a MacBook? My masochistic side is toying with getting an Arch install up and running.

Any reasons why you'd do it from it in a host? I'd advise to just use a VM installation with a guest Arch.

I've done it on an old Mac Mini but the amount of farting about with rEFIt ( http://refit.sourceforge.net/ ) and keeping a partition for OS X just in case the machine's firmware needs an update, and fiddling to get the sound to work, means that I wouldn't do it again.

It works properly, and doesn't need any special treatment once it's set up, but the OS X-specific firmware makes installing anything but OS X a misery.

Not really, boot camp makes installing windows a breeze. But in this thread, yes.

Any reasons why you'd do it from it in a host? I'd advise to just use a VM installation with a guest Arch.

That'd be far too easy! ;)

I've been using various flavours of Linux in VMs for a while but now I'd like to wean myself off of OS X. Dual booting Arch and using it as my primary OS seems like a good way to achieve that.

I've done it on an old Mac Mini but the amount of farting about with rEFIt ( http://refit.sourceforge.net/ ) and keeping a partition for OS X just in case the machine's firmware needs an update, and fiddling to get the sound to work, means that I wouldn't do it again.

It works properly, and doesn't need any special treatment once it's set up, but the OS X-specific firmware makes installing anything but OS X a misery.

Thanks for this. I'm happy to partake in some initial faffing and keeping a small OS X partition. I'm not sure what resources you had available when you set up your Mac Mini, but the Arch wiki now contains lots of information with regards to setting up everything on a MBP.

It was around 2011 and I was using Debian; there wasn't a great deal of information in the wiki at the time.

It's still going, it's my mum's desktop computer.

I ran gentoo on a g4 for ages.

Anyone got suggestions for a PDF viewer that can handle large PDFs (50+ megs, 100s of pages, scans of pages)? Evince is absolutely shit at it. I've had to tab into terminal and kill it a few times a day for the last few days. No more!

xpdf?

I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

gtk-theme-config

It's basically the only way to make Firefox lovely on Ubuntu. It allows one to customise the colours that are used by GTK (which Firefox uses), meaning that hover text on mouseover labels can now be black on white, rather than black on black.

^Cool.

Just downloading Elementary OS to try as a vm - it looks really good from what I've seen so far. They've changed the name of the release from Isis to Freya, I don't really blame them...

Anyone running iDevices on Linux? I fancy an inexpensive Shuffle for use on the bike due to it's simplicity and convenience.

According to this blog post, it looks like one can simply copy MP3s directly to the iPod and run a small python script to update the database on the device.

Anyone doing anything similar?

I did with the previous generation shuffle, no problems. When I last looked into it there were issues with the ones with voiceover. Also managed to do it with an old touch witha few workarounds.

When both of these died, I just used a sansa clip, super easy to use.

I'd buy a Sansa Clip instead. Not much difference in size, fits more and, if you want, you can actually choose which track you want.