Episode 17: The Galileo Seven

While en route to deliver medical supplies, the Enterprise encounters a Quasar that they investigate. The commissioner on board the ship is mad, but Kirk states that he has standing orders to study such phenomena and sends Bones, Scotty, a yeoman and two no names on an away mission with Spock in command (on the Galileo 7 shuttlecraft).

Shortly after leaving, the shuttle craft hits an ion storm and crash lands on a planet in the middle of the quasar. Giants attack the crew, ultimately killing the no names. Spock irritates everyone by being too logical.

The Enterprise finds it difficult to search because of the ion storm, while the commissioner gets impatient. Kirk uses every last minute he has to find the away team, but to no avail. He eventually begins taking the Enterprise to drop off the meds.

In the mean time, Scotty drains the phasers into the Galileo 7 to give it enough fuel to lift off. A few giants hold it down, so they use more energy than they wanted to.

Once in orbit, their fuel is too low to maintain orbit. Spock suddenly makes an "emotional" decision to jettison their fuel and ignite it, rather than saving it for a safe landing. The Enterprise notices the message and safely picks up the remaining away team.

In the end, Spock insists that his decision to go with his gut was the only logical choice.

Episode 16: Shore Leave

McCoy, Sulu, and two others beam down to a beautiful earth-like planet to evaluate it for some much needed shore leave for the weary crew of the Enterprise. Bones says it doesn't seem real, like something from Alice in Wonderland (some of these stories really stand the test of time...). Minutes later, Bones sees the rabbit and Alice.

Spock tricks Kirk into ordering himself to take shore leave and Kirk sees Finnigan, a trixter from the academy. Sulu finds a gun and shoots it with a grin. The yeoman with Bones says she wants to be a princess, and a dress appears. In an erie way, Bones asks her to but it on.

Sulu fights a samurai, Bones is stabbed by a knight, the random crew members are shot at by WWII planes,
Spock beams down (it takes a while because of some transporter issue).

Spock realizes its the people's thoughts coming to life. The caretaker of the planet appears and says this is a type of amusement park (Spock actually calls it that, with reference to an old earth tradition, even though he knew nothing of poker in The Corbomite Manuever).

Bones appears with a sexy women in each arm and says he thought of a Cabernet on Rijal II. The yeoman seems miffed, and Bones shoes the women away.

Kirk tells Uhura to send the shore leave teams down. Eventually, back on the bridge, a much more relaxed Kirk, Bones, and yeoman appear. Spock says shore leave is illogical, and the captain laughs like Dr. Evil.

Broken Windows Installer

Found a good post that helped when a "Windows Installer" application did not get removed correctly from the Control Panel, and I could not install the new version:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/06/windows-installer-issue-when-programs.html

Bottom line was to run:

MsiExec.exe /I installer.msi REINSTALLMODE=voums REINSTALL=ALL

The article above also mentions the need to extract the files. I suppose that if you have a "setup.exe" file, there must be some method to extract the .msi file from it.

Installing nVidia Drivers in Ubuntu 11.10 - Then Reverting...

Everything after the horizontal rule went okay until I realized my nVidia card was so freakin' old that I had to use the oldest batch of legacy drivers (and couldn't get them to work).

Anyway, went back to my Matrox card that I *knew* worked... But the Unity desktop wouldn't display! I simply got a desktop with a Nautilus menu bar at the top.

After trying every tip I could find, I boiled the fix down to this:

sudo apt-get purge compiz unity ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install compiz unity ubuntu-desktop

Finally, the good ol' Unity launcher is back!

---

Got everything I needed from this page:
http://www.moonlitdog.com/nvidia_ubuntu

But, I liked the "nomodeset" option from that page to boot into the GUI with basic video when necessary:

1. At the Grub screen, hit 'e' to edit one of the lines
2. Add 'nomodeset' to the end of the 'linux' line, ex:
   linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-15-generic root=UUID=... ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 nomodeset

That's it!

Thanks for the quick, concise instructions, moonlitdog!

An Alternative to rsync

Just wanted to post a quick note before I forget how to do this. I recently came across lftp as a better alternative to rsync in some cases. It's full of options, but I used to quickly mirror several large directories between two remote sites.

I'll put some details in here at some point, but I wanted to jot this down before I forgot about it.

Ubuntu 11.10 Install with LVM

Having some problems with Fedora 16 that I didn't feel like dealing with, so I downloaded the Ubuntu

11.10 LiveCD. Booted up my netbook with the USB CDROM just fine and started the install.... Crap! It's not finding my LVMs! Well, it turns out, lvm2 isn't loaded on the regular LiveCD, I'd have to download the alternate CD, which means I'd have to burn a new CD and I'm cheap and don't want to do that... Here's how I got it to install:

1. Fortunately, wifi works perfectly, so I configured it to connect to my router (the installer guided me through this part)
2. Enter a terminal:
   

   sudo apt-get install lvm2
   modprobe dm-mod
   vgchange -a y

3. Choose to do a custom partition install, and boom! all my lv's where there! Fortunately, I left a Fedora 14 root lv so I could boot into Fedora 14 and use system-config-lvm to make an Ubuntu root lv... Don't use the lvm cli enough to remember what to do... ;)
4. The instructions I was using said: DO NOT PRESS Restart Now... But I didn't read that far ahead... Instead, I restarted and realized Ubuntu could not access my LVMs since lvm2 was not installed... Boot back into the LiveCD again, do step #2 above, then continue.
5. Mount the new root:
   

   sudo mkdir /mnt/root
   sudo mount /dev/mapper/vg_kelvin-lv_ubuntu_root /mnt/root
   sudo mount /dev/sda5 /dev/root/boot # assuming /dev/sda5 is your boot partition
   sudo chroot /mnt/root

6. Next, install lvm2 on your new root partition:
   

   apt-get -y install lvm2

7. Hopefully you'll see some info about it updating your initrd.img, which means lvm2 is being added to it.
8. Now reboot and hope for the best!