Clean Up the GRUB2 Menu

I'm on my Christmas break and so I get to use my personal computer most of the time. I am currently using an Ubuntu run netbook and lately I did a kernel upgrade as per advice of the update manager.

I noticed that the Grub menu at the boot screen is presenting me with way too many choices of the different kernels installed and it looks messy (for me). So today, since I am on vacay and I don't have much to do, I decided to try and clean up the Grub menu. This will not only make the Grub menu look cleaner, it will also remove the unused kernels and recover some disk space.

First up, I had to make sure which is the latest kernel installed so I don't accidentally remove that one. So I went to the command line, issued an command and got a result of the latest kernel installed.

ric@ubuntu-nb:~$ uname -r
2.6.32-27-generic

How I Got My Wifi Running Consistently on PC-BSD 8.0

Had a hard time looking for the way to setup Wifi on my PC-BSD 8.0 installation. After much navigation, I found it nestled within System Settings -> System Network Configuration.

So I did my configuration here and expected Wifi to connect instantly with no problems. And it connected, for at least 5 mins. then it cut-off and after a few seconds it connected again only to disconnect after 20 secs. (or less). In other words, it was giving me intermittent connection.

How I Got PC-BSD Into The GRUB2 Menu of Ubuntu

Long story short -- I followed a guide for this; CLICK ME and I will take you there.

Long story long, this is how I did it personally.

I went into Terminal and typed:

riclags@nix:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for riclags:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00095910

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        2432    19530752   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            2432       15076   101561345    5  Extended
/dev/sda3           15076       19458    35195737+  a5  FreeBSD
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5            2432       14590    97654784   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           14590       15076     3905536   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I took note that FreeBSD, the base of PC-BSD, is in /dev/sda3 device.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes installed with GRUB2 so doing changes to the menu is a bit different.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 3: Post Installation and Final Thoughts

So it's early in the morning and finally everything is installed. I don't know exactly if they will work as expected, though.

First boot - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
The first boot for Ubuntu was as I expected it to be having installed it 2 times prior to this feat. On a fresh install, after setting up the WiFi connection, the Update Manager instantly kicked in presenting me with a whooping 224MB worth of updates. It took close to an hour to get all these updates to install before I went about and did the routine checking if sound worked, setting the display resolution, installing packages, etc. Since I am fairly familiar with Ubuntu, I didn't have a hard time navigating around the system.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 2: Installation

After creating the necessary partitions for the 2 *nix OSes, Ubuntu 10.04LTS and PC-BSD 8.0, I proceed with the installation.

Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
As I am more experienced in installing Ubuntu, having done so many times in the past, it was not really hard to get it installed to the first primary partition on the disk. I ran the live USB I created and clicked the install to hard disk option in the desktop. I subdivided the 1st primary partition further to different mounts, namely: /, /home and swap as is my practice when I install Ubuntu (and I don't exactly know why). The installation took about 20 - 30 minutes for it to get installed in my laptop.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 1: Pre Installation

As I installed Ubuntu  10.04 LTS prior to my decision to do a dual-boot with PC-BSD 8.0 setup, I needed to make changes to the hard disk partition. So I decided to edit the partitions using GParted. According to the site:

"The GParted application is a graphical partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.

A disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions. The GParted application enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions."

On the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation, I did an install of GParted.

$sudo apt-get install gparted

After the installation of GParted, I ran into some problems.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 0: Overview

I continue to learn about Ubuntu by searching forums or good ol' Google. In some of my searches, I noticed that some people think negatively about Ubuntu, or Linux in general. And those people also think that BSD is better. So I did a search and came upon PC-BSD.

Based on the PC-BSD site:

"PC-BSD is a free operating system with ease of use in mind. Like any modern system, you can listen to your favorite music, watch your movies, work with office documents and install your favorite applications with a setup wizard at a click."

I decided to download the PC-BSD 8.0 DVD image and try it out. And as it is still downloading as of this posting, I have decided that I will make my laptop go dual-boot with Ubuntu and PC-BSD.

First order of business -- repartition my hard drive to accommodate the PC-BSD install. Details will be posted in a new entry in the near future.

Sysinfo on Ubuntu

Sometime ago, I was wondering what the equivalent of the Windows command dxdiag was for Linux, specifically for Ubuntu. Then I came upon an article, I don't know exactly where now, that talked about Sysinfo. So I installed it.

$ sudo apt-get install sysinfo

After install, you can run it in command line by typing sysinfo or go through menu Application, System Tools, Sysinfo from the top panel (I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS so it may differ where the menu will be created for other Ubuntu versions).

Here are some screenshots of Sysinfo.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Initial Impression

I recently finished installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop. Having used Ubuntu before, I can see that there has been a massive push for improvement. Some changes include the Ubuntu rebranding. Most notable is the default theme which is no longer brown and now has the Close - Maximize - Minimize window control buttons on the upper left corner ala Mac OS X style.

The last version of Ubuntu that I extensively used was 9.04 but I had problems with the Wifis so it only took me a month and I decided to take it down and return to the Redmond-centric OS. But much has changed in 10.04 LTS. Almost everything basic works out of the box. The Wifis is now easily configurable and connects instantly after the initial setup of access point, etc. In fact, I have removed Windows XP from my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as the main, and only, OS.