Let’s Get Baked!

At work, we use a fair bit of network storage. Too much if you ask me. Well, we have a new initiative to address our dwindling storage needs, but like a good little sys admin, I have to “mine” for free space . I know, you don’t care about my job duties, but stay with me it gets better. I have been having to get stuff to a windows system, then compress it then burn it to DVD, then put it in the storage safe and a copy also has to be stored offsite. We just purchased an external USB DVD burner made by HP. The thing is, in windows you have to install the software that came with it or XP won’t burn anything to it…I don’t like that but we live with it. Today I decided to try it on my T40 (running Dapper)

I read about GnomeBaker and decided to give it a shot. After sudo apt-get install gnomebaker, I was ready to go. I plugged in the burner and it popped up on my desktop…so far so good. Inserted a blank disc and got the little message telling me that I inserted blank media…still looking good. I launched GnomeBaker and it looked like it was ready to use the DVD burner to make a shiny new archive. Found my files and dragged (drug??) them into the “data DVD”. Clicked burn and boom….it was off and running. I was pleasently surprised. It just worked. I love it. GnomeBaker is a really nice little application. I haven’t used it but the once, but I think I’ll keep it Below is a screenshot.

Get a Little Synergy

At work I have a laptop with an external LCD that I have setup using a Two-Head display. I like it a lot. Unfortunately, we use MS Exchange servers and Evolution doesn’t really work that well for me. The solution I came up with is to use my G4 Powerbook and run Entourage for email. I also decided to move instant messaging over there as well using Adium. My only real complaint is having to use 2 keyboards/pointing devices. Enter Synergy! Synergy is a great little client server application that uses the network to share a keyboard and mouse from the server to any number of clients. How cool is that? I downloaded the package, for the Mac, from sourceforge ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/ ) and unzipped it into my home directory. Configuration is fairly simple though, I’ll admit I had a few problems that I can’t explain. I’ll go over the basic config and testing procedures that got me up and running.

I used apt to install Synergy on my laptop by opening a terminal window and typing sudo apt-get install synergy next a config file needed to be configured, this where I had a little trouble but I’ll chalk it up to being late, and me having had a beer or 3. Below is the config file and a little explanation. (synergy.conf)

section: screens #define screens
madpenguin:
badapple:
end
section: links
madpenguin: #madpenguin is the server
right = badapple
badapple: #badapple
left = madpenguin
end

basically, it’s as simple as it looks. Madpenguin is my T40 which is the server. Badapple is my powerbook. Badapple is to the right of madpenguin. Once I had that straight, I just type synergys (server) from the console. On the powerbook, I run the client by typing synergyc madpenguin. That’s it. Now one mouse and keyboard does it all. I did make the mistake of launching the server from my left most monitor and that presented some odd issues but it was quickly resolved by shutting down the server and launching it from the right monitor.

Dale