What I am up to these days

I have not been able to post a lot these days as I am all tensed about applying to colleges and so on, it is indeed a very stressful process. I have shortlisted a few but I think it is better I don’t shoot only for the top few and also look at tier 2 colleges with decent research prospects.

Now I am an individual who is eager to play with things. After the LUG meet I decided to make my own file manager extension for firefox that would enable me to easily pick the pictures that I would like to upload. I have made a basic UI for it and I will soon come up with a working version of it in about a week.

Apart from that I got to play with BSD again courtesy a generous gift from Deependra Shekawat ( a great friend who is a freenode regular ). He sent me the PCBSD installation cd. Let me recollect the process.

I put the cd in and up came a very good-looking screen that enabled me to cruise through the process and I kept encountering worthless pics that claim its capability to play all my music and edit all my files and whatnot. Typical “BSD on the desktop is finally here” kind of presentation. After a few minutes the installation finished and I was staring at KDE (oh how those jumping icons irritate me). Surprisingly everything works including my wireless. Even the distracting LED (ACER’s innovative design. They place the radio kill switch under the touchpad so that I can always hit it and see the Network Manager applet tell me that no wireless networks exist). I decide to experiment. The .pbi method of installing things irritates me further.

I recollect that a very dear friend who uses freebsd had told me about the complaints bsd threw when a device was not unmpunted correctly. I plug my external drive in and yank it out immediately. I plug it in again and type `mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/external_disk` at the shell and get some stupid error report. I investigate further.

Tune2fs seems to be a good utility to look at ext3 fs parameters (my external drive is ext3 formatted, I know it is not smart but who cares). I notice this :

Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file

Bingo! So all I need to do is remove the ‘needs_recovery’ “feature” (stupid I know).

Being the MIT appreciator I pick debugfs which according to its manpage is written by someone from MIT (woohoo!!). So here goes:

[root@psp-laptop /root]# debugfs
debugfs: open -w -f /dev/da0s1
debugfs: features
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
debugfs: features -needs_recovery
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype sparse_super large_file
debugfs: quit

So there we are. I would however recommend that one runs e2fsck on the drive. That will also remove the troublesome “feature”.

Work, work and more work. I need to draft those essays now.

I will write again later