Last night I took the plunge into Hardy Heron. I was able to do the upgrade on my Toshiba laptop by issuing the command ' sudo update-manager -D'. This command checks to see if there is a development release. The update took a couple of hours to finish. Once it was done, I had the 2.6.24-16 kernel, firefox 3 [let the frustrations begin(more on that later)] and a whole bunch of little goodies that just make things so much better.

  I am trying very hard not to use windows but lately I was forced to. I am the proud owner of a laptop without a floppy drive, and no bios updatter for linux. I thought I would bite the bullet and install windows to update my bios. Not quite so easy.  My windows install cd did not recognize my hard drive and when I used the F6 option to install my SATA/RAID drivers from another source, windows could not see my usb drives iether.  I searched high and low and could not find a clear answer to my problem. I found several forum posts of people having the same problem as me and no solutions. Just a lot of people saying 'never mind'.

  I don't plan on blogging much about windows stuff but I am all about hacking and this is a hack/solution that I had to do to make something work. I will include a list of some of the struggles I had to go through later on in this article.

I have been playing with some better ways to execute my scripts that I use alot.

I have found a solution that works well for me and I hope you can make use of this too.  I have a couple of dozen scripts that I use and about half of them I use all of the time.  The first thing I did was made a bash script directory in my home folder.  I named it 'bash'.  Next I edited my home/<user>/.bashrc file and added these lines to the bottom of the file.

PATH=$PATH:~/bin    
export PATH

What this does is includes the directory you put here in the list of executables.

If you are anything like me, I can't live with just one terminal window open.

I have found a program called Terminator.

It has the capability to have many seperate terminals open in one window.

It is much easier than tabe from the default terminal application.

I have been playing with it for about a week now and I can't find anything that I dislike.

Here is a link to the website and a screenshot to go with it.

Terminator - Freshmeat

As I passed the time tonight I thought I should dust off the Nokia770 internet tablet. By adding various repositories I have heavily customized this little machine into a very nice hacking tool. Anything from kismet and aircrack to multimedia management. This thing can do just about anything.

I fired it up, sniffed the wireless networks in the neighborhood (kismet)(awesome).

Played with Canola for a while (Another great piece of software).

I checked my mail and remote desktopped into my wife's computer (windows xp) to run some antispyware and malware checkers. Then it was on to the terminal to ssh into my laptop and download some podcasts and do some updates. Great fun for the price.

As I browsed through some of the features, I remembered seeing the option to take a screenshot. So I did and thought I would pass them along to you.