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I’m managed to totally fuck up moving my home/ directory onto the bigger SSD on my Eee PC. I tried to rollback my changes by copying the folder back to the correct place (as root) and removing stuff I’d added to fstab.

And then rebooted my machine.

Bad news, by copying the folder as root I’d effectively locked myself out my machine as Ubuntu doesn’t like it when the user folder isn’t writeable by the user. The error message that popped up suggested I fix the problem in a failsafe session. This was news to me but after a quick and panicked google I found that you can drop into a terminal window by pressing Alt+Ctrl+F1.

Handy to know

As soon as I’d made up my mind to get an Eee PC 901 I had it in the back of my mind to get this done. However my first couple of attempts ran aground upon the pointy rocks of my general linux ignorance. But, to quote Homer Simpson: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up’, so I did.

Today however through sheer presistence and force of will I managed to get BackTrack 3 installed on a shiny new 4gb SD card with Eee Pc friendly graphics mode and persistent changes saved also.

I did a combination of these two guides

Install BT3 on USB with Persistent Changes

Install BT3 on USB with Eee PC Graphics Mode

If you want to set it up on your Eee PC 901, I’ll point out the differences I found with the Persistent Change guide.

The first difference is how the poster Umattu refers to his SD location (sdb, sdb1, sdb2), the Eee PC 901 comes with 2 internal drives and sdb refers to the second 12Gb one (on Linux). When you put a SD card in the slot it is identified as ’sdc’ so make sure you change any references in sdb to sdc when you are running through the guide.

I notice Umattu talks about getting the BT3 USB edition as a rar file, but I downloaded the USB in iso format (from here) so I opened it Archive Manager and copied the 2 directories over from there (Boot and BT3).

Follow the guide down to the section that begins

Using your favorite text editor we need to modify the syslinux.cfg file. Here I will use nano
Code:
nano syslinux.cfg

Here we take a little side track to add the Eee PC 901 graphics mode stuff.

Download the lzm file from here

Copy it into the /BT3/Optional folder

Now edit syslinux.cfg (I’m using gedit)

sudo gedit syslinux.cfg

And add this section at the top after the PROMPT, TIMEOUT, DEFAULT lines

Label EEE

MENU LABEL EEE Mode with Persistence

KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz

APPEND vga=785 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw changes=/dev/sda2 load=901_net_gfx

Now go into the second partition on the sd card and create a directory called ‘changes’.

Once you’ve done that you can pick up Umattu’s guide at the section beginning

Run the bootinst.sh script:

Code:

./bootinst.sh

Eh, voila – you should be rocking BT3 happily on your 901 with persistent changes.

N.B. Minor thing but I noticed it didn’t save the settings when I changed the keyboard to GB, but when I went into the config panel for the keyboard and removed all the other countries then applied the changes it saved them okay.

Howdy,

This blog is going to be a handy dumping group for all the web-dev stuff I learn, leaning heavily on Ruby, Rails and Jquery – a web development triumvirate that I’m a big fan of.  I’ve got a big project at work that is using all three and I’ll be learning as I go along but I’m very much in Get-It-Done mode at the moment which means that I’m pretty much hacking out a working system just now without worrying about ( or being aware of ) half the nice stuff that Ruby/Rails/Jquery provides.

I’m noticing that while I’m knocking together this app that there are a lot of areas of Rails in particular that I’m currently glossing over and I’m not too keen to complicate the job by adding in new automagical functionality without a clear idea of what it does or how it works. My plan is to explore these areas and write up small test projects that clearly show the how, why, where and what’s of a certain section that I’m unfamiliar with.

Hopefully this will build out to be a useful resource for people like myself, starting out in R/R/J and looking for some examples as well as being a handy brain dump for myself.

If anyone has any requests, questions, (most likely) have spotted some gross errors in my code or simply want to rant and shout then fire away.

Cheers