New blog and new ideas

Few days ago I decided to start my new blog. It’s in Polish and I’ll be writing there mainly about Warsaw Stock Exchange, investing and economic issues. The address is www.stocktrader.pl, but despite I’m not a stock trader yet, I’m going to start my experience with stock exchange soon. The main purpose of my blog is to monitor my own learning progress and learn on mistakes, but I hope the others would also somehow benefit from it.

I bought my domain in Polish domain registering company nazwa.pl for approx. 3€ I use free web hosting on orgfree.com – they provide very good hosting service with 500MB disk space, 5GB daily or 100TB (!) monthly traffic limit, php, MySQL5 database, FTP support and phpMyAdmin (whatever it means) – it’s much more than my WordPress installation requires, and that’s all for free! Moreover, we can install WordPress, phpBB or joomla with just one click. I think it’s the best free hosting I could find.

I also have another (commercial) website idea, but it’s still in its infancy so I think it’s too early for sharing. I can only tell it’s something connected with social blogging. I’ve installed joomla! on my other orgfree.com account and now I’m testing my idea.

So if you understand Polish, you’re welcome to visit www.stocktrader.pl!

acerfand in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

As some of you might notice, the script acerfand (fan control for Acer Aspire One) doesn’t run automatically in th newest Ubuntu 9.04 when you add its path to your rc.local. I don’t know why, but the file rc.local behaves differently from previous version during booting (it looks like it’s not executed, but in fact it is, and when I run it manually after I log in everything works).

How did I fix it? Instead of the line:

/usr/local/bin/acerfand

in my /etc/rc.local file, I added:

start-stop-daemon –start –name acerfand –startas /usr/local/bin/acerfand –background

Now the acerfand script is executed at startup. I hope this tip may be helpful for somebody.

EDIT:  There should be double minuses before –name, –startas and –background, but – as Erwin noticed – wordpress transforms double minus into dash.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on Aspire One

The new Ubuntu 9.04 has been released, so yesterday I decided to try it on my AAO. I preferred to perform fresh installation rather than upgrade from 8.10, because I wanted to try the new filesystem – ext4.

Hint: if you want to reinstall system instead of upgrading, and keep all your installed software, the trick is very simple – it requires using just three commands. Before formatting drive, you should save your packages list in a file by performing dpkg –get-selections > installed-packages-list in terminal. After fresh system installation, you can install all packages from the list by typing dpkg –set-selections < installed-packages-list, then sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade. You can also edit the list and remove lines containing the software you don’t need, but you should watch out on dependencies. Reinstallation may take some time, depending on how much packages you have on your list – in my case, it took over 2h. (I found this trick here, but hte command dselect just didn’t work for me).

Installation was incredibly fast – it took about 20 minutes to install it from pendrive. (Nice surprise – wireless works out-of-the-box in live CD version!) After installation, I noticed huge improvement in booting time against the previous version (even though I was using customized kernel) – now system boots in about 30 sec, measured from grub to login screen. Login screen itself has also new, refreshed appearance, as well as the default Gnome theme.

All hardware in Aspire One works out-of-the-box, excepting the right-side card reader (the left-side one works). Even the image from the built-in webcam in my opinion is better and doesn’t frame.

OK, now it’s time to tell about bad experiences. When I logged in first time after installation, system freezed and all I saw was black screen and a pointer. Even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn’t help and I had to hard reset my machine. Next time everyhing was ok. I don’t know what wat the reason, maybe some of the files from my /home catalogue (which I left) weren’t compatibile with the new Gnome version. I also had problems with sound while using Skype (sometimes I couldn’t hear anything during call), I hope to fix it soon.