Monday, March 26, 2012

Grub error 17 and 15 after installation Arch

I installed the March Archbang iso today on a old pc and all went very well regarding Archbang but there were two grub errors, first error 17.
I was replacing an older Arch installation that I hadn't updated in more then a year but functioned flawlessly. The grub error 17 was a result of a changed partition table.
How to fix that is clearly described here .
But after doing that my problems weren't over.

The only change was that error 17 was now replaced by error 15.

The renaming of the booting items issue led to numerous grub 15 questions on the Arch forums: Solution
Modify /boot/grub/menu.lst so vmlinuz26 is vmlinuz-linux, kernel26.img is initramfs-linux.img and kernel26-fallback.img is initramfs-linux-fallback.img
But his was also not the problem;
I changed two aspects of my /boot/grub/menu.lst.
The reason this sort of problems is difficult to solve is that there are so many scenarios people use regarding making a dedicated booting partition or not, how the root folder is designated in /etc/fstab.
Anyway in etc/fstab my root partition was designated by the UUid that you can find by typing in the terminal
blkid.
Changing
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda6 ro
to
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxx6840d-8769-41f4-xxxxxx ro

was one part of the solution. If in the fstab /dev/sda6 was mentioned I would have had to change the menu.lst to sda6; what I conclude is that naming should be identical in fstab and menu.lst.

Second issue
Use an absolute path to vmlinuz and initramfs.img

The fact that I don't use a separate boot partition means I had to change the default

kernel /vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxx ro
initrd /initramfs-linux.img

to
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxx ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
There are a lot more reasons why you can get the error 15; forgetting to add the "ro" at the back of the line for example, but maybe somebody can use this solution.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Don't use packer for installing non-AUR packages

The problem is the breakage that can develop between fully updated Arch repositories and the mostly much slower reacting AUR packages.
So for your own good it is useful to get aware what is from AUR and not
And not mixing the two in your mind as if they are packages of equal quality.
You should go for the official package unless you have strong reasons to use an AUR package and be critical to use elementary packages like kernel builds from AUR sources.
Always install an official, non-AUR package with pacman and consider a system update always when installing a package.
When thinking about installing an important or bigger new package always be conscious of what dependencies it has and consider if it is not a good moment to update first with
pacman -Syyu
(and not packer -Syyu!!) and then install your new package with pacman.
Remember that if you are curious and only do pacman -Syy, it is risky to install only a package and not do a total system upgrade as that might lead to mixing different dependencies that are not in sync ( the update of one package also needs the update of another package).
Start using your system and when everything is OK after a reboot, only then do packer -Su.
At least this is the way I manage to avoid breakage on my system for already a rather long time.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

libpng14 error

People struggling with the libpng 14 missing error in Arch Linux should try to download it from AUR

Monday, March 12, 2012

Howto split one audio file using shntool and the cue file


If you wanna know how to split ONE SINGLE LONG AUDIO FILE into different tracks on linux here is how

cuebreakpoints album.cue | shnsplit -o flac one-big-flac.flac

this will give files named "split-track01.flac" "split-track02.flac" ...

In Arch install:
shntool
#pacman -S shntool

There is a frontend for it: QShnToolkit

To do this with APE files you may need: MAC Port (Arch)
You will have to have the flac and ape codecs installed.

To rename the files use the cuetags from the cuetools package:
Install
#pacman -S cuetools
and use:
cuetag sample.cue split-track*.flac

Another option is to install flacon:
packer -S flacon
It will split and rename in one go.

If you have k3b installed you can use the k3b to separate the tracks… super fast and all the song info is saved as well.
1. Select .cue for burning
2. Menu bar; Project ; Convert Tracks; Choose Settings; Done

See also this older post for other tricks: http://stillstup.blogspot.com/2008/07/split-lossless-audio-ape-flac-wv-wav-by.html

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Make Backups of partitions using spacefm and fsarchiver

This process is described here :
The Backup submenu allows you to perform a backup of a selected device or MBR. There are several supported backup types.

FSArchiver (website) is a modern program which creates an archive of a filesystem. It is similar to tar, except that the archive includes checksums, can be restored if corrupted, and includes additional information.

One disadvantage to using FSArchiver is that unlike Partimage, the on disk locations of files will change when restored. For most files this won't matter, but in the case of grub's stage files, moving them can cause the grub boot process to no longer work. Thus if you restore a volume containing grub's files using an FSArchiver archive, you will then need to reinstall grub to the MBR (so that it knows accurately where it's files are - these locations are stored in the MBR's boot code).

An advantage to FSArchiver is that it supports more filesystem types than Partimage, including ext4 and btrfs, and several compression methods. Other advantages include file exclusion, multi-thread compression, and encryption. The data may also be restored to any partition large enough to hold it, regardless of the original partition's size. FSArchiver is also currently maintained,
So open Spacefm as root, be sure that Show internal partitions is checked in the directory tree and right click on a partition (be sure it is unmounted), Root, Backup, choose FSArchiver, select the place you want to save the backup file and go.
To restore using spacefm, right click on the partition to be restored and choose restore from file. Or in terminal:

Restore Partition - FSArchiver Method

If you created your backup file using FSArchiver, you must use this method to restore it.

WARNING: All the data currently stored on this partition will be overwritten!

Working by example, to restore /dev/sda5 from the backup file /mnt/back/backup-sda5.fsa (substitute the device name you wish to restore to!):

fsarchiver restfs /mnt/back/backup-sda5.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda5
More info: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_To_Backup_Operating_Systems

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