Category — Linux

I am a Hindu, so what? I take every opportunity to celebrate. So I went with my dad to one of these eateries that exemplifies the “Today pleasure, tomorrow diarrhoea” category. Well I don’t actually have diarrhoea now but what happened in the morning was … well figure it out.

Later that day my dad came into my room to have a look at what I was doing. I was working on “timepass”, a web application that plans to do many things I am not too sure of (http://launchpad.net/timepass). He showed me an external drive and told me that the he was not allowed to access directories one level below the root directory of the device. He plugged it into his laptop (a gleaming Dell Inspiron) and showed me. I was stumped, FAT32 drives and no permissions ? I remember that something similar had occurred once upon a time with my iPod as well. I decided to work on this. I had two possible ideas about what could go wrong:

1. Drivelocks (we can’t do much apart from call the vendor of the drive and pray that he gives the password to us)

2. Filesystem needs repair. This could be done easily using the command “dosfsck -a <device>”.

I asked my dad about the drive. It was a Toshiba make and was the HD in his previous Compaq laptop. After this I knew what was wrong, drivelocks. I don’t know if drivelocks can be repaired with dosfsck and I decided to give it a try. I plugged it into my laptop (runs Debian remember) and it got mounted. I could even navigate as per my wish!

This leads us to conclude one thing: “Linux doesn’t give a damn about drivelocks”!

I offered my dad to do a direct dump using the dd command. I had a 200 gig maxtor and after a period of more than 15 minutes, the copying was done. I get to keep the new drive and my dad gets the previous drive. He had quite important stuff in there. Most of them pertaining to his work (designs and blah blah).

I don’t know what impact this blog has in the IT world but if Toshiba reads this, they are going to <censored> bricks.

After that I got to look at software my dad uses to design stuff. There was Staad Pro, Tekla Structures XSteel and something called DTH. He was talking about productivity as I saw him swiftly create figures that made no sense to me (he is building a port so I am not expected to have any idea about it).

I am submitting all my essays tomorrow. Man, it really gives me the jitters. There is something about this admissions process that makes me feel like “someone cares”. Is it true? Does someone care if you are a geek at 16. Does someone care if your mouth waters if you look at Apple’s 10 TB storage rack ? Does someone care if you broke both your bones and almost lost your life, prepared for the class 10 boards without going to school for a major part of the year and carried the injury to class 11?

The answer is: yes. Someone cares. Someone really important cares. I am going to click on the “Submit” button tomorrow and I feel priviliged to do so. I really cannot believe that a college from which Claude Shannon graduated is going to read my application, a college where Google finds its roots is going to read my application, or a college where Raj Reddy sits, is going to read my application. It is just too elite to think of. All I can do is thank those who have made this possible, dad, mom etc.

I am getting too emotional now and my blog posts suck if I get too emotional. I will write again later.

Well, I was browsing around in /etc/init.d and I found this:

shriphani@psp-laptop:/etc/init.d$ ls -ltotal 368

\-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1386 Sep 13  2006 README

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1850 Jan 14  2006 acpid

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5884 Feb 26  2007 alsa

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8710 Jan 12  2007 alsa-utils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4886 Jun 18 01:42 apache2

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  969 Jan  3  2006 atd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4318 Mar 17  2007 avahi-daemon

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1109 Oct 27  2005 binfmt-support

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2803 Oct 18  2006 bittorrent

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5089 Sep 20  2006 bootclean

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2146 Sep 13  2006 bootlogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1915 Sep 20  2006 bootmisc.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2930 Sep 14  2006 checkfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9548 Sep 23  2006 checkroot.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6110 Sep  5  2006 console-screen.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1693 Oct 21 18:35 cpufrequtils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1761 Oct 13  2006 cron

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1977 Feb  2  2007 cupsys

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2760 Dec 13  2006 dbus

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1753 Oct  8  2006 dirmngr

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5984 Oct 23  2006 discover

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1196 Sep  3  2006 festival

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1833 Dec 15  2006 gdm

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5823 Jul 31 02:09 glibc.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1360 Jan 14  2007 halt

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1287 Sep 13  2006 hostname.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3886 Feb 21  2007 hwclock.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2518 Sep 15  2006 ifupdown

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1046 Sep 15  2006 ifupdown-clean

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5119 Sep 21 21:39 kdm

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3484 Oct 16  2006 keymap.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  944 Sep 13  2006 killprocs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1375 May 25  2006 klogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  417 Aug  9  2006 libdevmapper1.02

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1060 Jan 29  2007 lisa

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  421 Mar  5  2007 lm-sensors

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1054 Sep  7  2006 makedev

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1793 Nov 14  2006 module-init-tools

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  617 Jan 15  2006 mountall-bootclean.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1718 Sep 13  2006 mountall.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2206 Oct  3  2006 mountdevsubfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2394 Sep 25  2006 mountkernfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  615 Jan 15  2006 mountnfs-bootclean.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2299 Nov 26  2006 mountnfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3668 Nov 26  2006 mtab.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2550 Jan  6  2007 networking

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6644 May 16  2007 nfs-common

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2324 Feb 26  2007 openbsd-inetd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6499 Oct 22  2006 pcmcia

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2350 Nov 27  2006 pcmciautils

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1525 Dec 22  2006 portmap

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  375 Mar 18  2007 pppd-dns

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  997 Sep 13  2006 procps.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8045 Nov 28  2006 rc

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  798 Sep 28  2006 rc.local

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  117 Dec  2  2005 rcS

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  655 Sep 22  2006 reboot

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  994 Sep 13  2006 rmnologin

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Jul 31 17:09 rsync

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  695 Mar  7  2007 screen-cleanup

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1376 Nov 28  2006 sendsigs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  585 Sep 13  2006 single

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4187 Sep 13  2006 skeleton

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  520 Sep 13  2006 stop-bootlogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  730 Oct  2  2006 stop-bootlogd-single

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  541 Apr  7  2006 sudo

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2037 May 25  2006 sysklogd

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8178 Dec 19  2006 udev

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1252 Mar 28  2006 udev-mtab

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3175 Nov 25  2006 umountfs

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2128 Nov 26  2006 umountnfs.sh

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1122 Sep 30  2006 umountroot

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1815 Sep 13  2006 urandom

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1626 Oct  5  2006 wpa-ifupdown

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1805 Feb 13  2007 x11-common

shriphani@psp-laptop:/etc/init.d$

My current OS was installed on my laptop this November and here one can see that the timestamps date as back as 2005. This means that those files haven’t been tinkered with since 2005 by the developers ?

I was talking to Mr. Saifi Khan of TWINCLING some time back. He told me about a discussion he was engaged in with some geeks from Yahoo! (TM). Seemingly Web 3.0 would be released. I shook my head. Web 2.0 was such a pretentious name for trash. Mr. Saifi then told me that Web3.0 was UI + Wisdom. Then my cellphone’s (well, my mother’s) battery got dischared. I then began formulating ideas based on what I was told on the phone.

I was browsing MIT’s EECS Research Page (I am inclined towards CSE now, but who knows) and I saw something called Semantic Web by Prof. Tim Berners Lee. Semantic Web has the wisdom to operate on data. Here is what he has to say about semantic web:

using the WWW infrastructure to create a global, decentralized, weblike mesh of machine-processable knowledge. Please see my general page for information about other subjects.

The Semantic Web can be described as doing for Knowledge Representation what the Hypertext WWW did for hypertext. It part of the completion of the original dream of the Web. URIs and HTTP create a universal addressable space of information, allowing things to be given globally unique and dereferencable names. By relaxing traditional constraints of global consistency, we allow the system to grow to a global scale, maintaining local consistency.

I might mention that Prof. Tim Berners Lee’s “work” called Design Issues seems to be a good source for information on the dynamics of the World Wide Web. I actually want to work on this (if I do get the chance to that is). I am really busy nowadays. I will write again later.

I finished my GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation) task a few days back. I was writing the docs for different unix platforms and it was nice to have a person from caltech monitoring my progress. I won’t say it was fun filled because it was not. I literally had to struggle to get those commands sorted out. I actually decided while writing the docs that I wouldn’t put in “./configure”, “make” and “make install”. I decided to put in useful links to help people prepare binaries for their own system. I will be getting the all important T-Shirt from them soon (hopefully). I do want to participate in a few more tasks. I actually picked a task a little too late and was left with the choice of talking on django or some other thing or writing docs. I went for the latter as both iLugH and TWINCLING won’t be meeting any time soon.

Now, I was thinking about the stickers for mukt.in yesterday. I didn’t know a lot about sticker design myself so I had to figure out something. I made myself a list of points to be kept in mind while designing a sticker. They are:

1. Imagine the object that the sticker will be stuck on. In our case, it might be cellphones (Superkiddo stuck a gnome sticker on his cellphone at mukt.in 1), laptops (I stuck two stickers on mine) and desktops (I don’t know who did this as there was only one desktop over there).

2. Pick a color that will go well on any laptop out there. My laptop is an acer travelmate with a brushed metallic finish on the keypad. A white background with a very professional font on it should look fine. A silver background seem too regular to me as the Intel inside crap or the “designed for windows xp” nonsense (it is on my toilet tank now) stickers come with silver backgrounds.

I got an idea about a firefox extension yesterday. I could make an extension that checks a website for change in content (The GHOP task page) and reports the new task through a popup. I will finish soon (hopefully)

rxKaffee, a dear friend on IRC gave me a free shell account on his new ubuntu server. Thanks rxKaffee.

Now the bad news, Argo (the server I worked on when I was at NIPL) has been permanently shut. I do remember the first time I dabbled with django on it. Made the User Request Management System on it and whatnot. Seemingly Sam Watkins (the owner of NIPL) is no longer able to generate funds for it. I am now free to provide the request management system to users. Probably it will be of use to someone somewhere. I will be putting it up today. I guess that this was inevitable considering the huge number of requests and the relatively low funds that came to the NIPL project.

Well, I will write again.

I just returned from iLugHyderabad’s meeting. It was fun. I met a lot of interesting folks who had dabbled with the new release of Fedora. It is not like I am tempted to try out fedora but it was fun meeting the Fedora enthusiast Rahul Sundaram. Let me recollect what happened during the meet.

The venue for the meet was the astronomy building at Osmania University. The building was being renovated and I managed to whiten my navy blue coloured jacket by plainly brushing against the walls of the building. There was no electricity in the building too. We were discussing about moving to a different room when a professor who was there to attend the talk (teaches at Osmania and has been using Linux for 12 years !!) used an extension cord that somehow could span the length of two floors. The basic infrastructure needed to conduct the event was now complete. We waited for a few more people to arrive but not many turned up. Seemingly many students had exams the very next day and chose to stay back at home/hostel to study. I began discussing about Django newforms with Theju (I met him at mukt.in . He was one of those who did a project on server side validation at the google summer of code. I will take part in this when I go to college for sure. They give out some excellent projects and help in improving one’s coding skills.). Seemingly in December, django’s creators will launch newforms (or is it newforms admin?). Theju promised to teach me how to hack up the admin interface that comes with django.

Someone at the meet with long hair had a lot of troubles with Fedora 8. Seemingly his laptop wouldn’t boot into fedora and grub would get stuck at the “Loading Grub, Stage1.5″ stage. I also remember that I had some troubles with the new linux kernel way back when I used feisty. I placed a bug report here.

After that the talk began. Rahul explained about his association with linux since the days of Red Hat Linux. So automatically becomes part of the elite FOSS gang in Hyderabad.

Rahul turned out to be a jovial speaker and his speech was littered with comic examples dating back to his stint as the “font guy”, “the support guy” for Fedora and Red Hat Linux. Seemingly on one occasion, he was called up by a Fedora user from Greece who claimed that Greek didn’t look good in the Bitstream fonts but looked better in DejaVu Sans. Rahul’s reaction was “Which one is what and what looks better?”. We all had a hearty laugh at this. At the end of the meet, we all had an “introduce yourself” kind of session and there was this guy who worked at google and was all smiles. I just adore google employees. They seem to be in love with what they do and genuinely are “good” at what they do. Krish (mukt.in organizer). So we began talking. I voiced my anger at google’s choice to make us write applications using android in java and to provide an eclipse plugin to top it all. Now eclipse is a PITA. My experience with it lasted 30 minutes. 10 minutes it took to start, 10 minutes to install the pydev plugin and another 10 to close. Rahul then came in with his comment, “Some time back, your computer was considered very robust if it could run quake at 50 fps. Nowadays, if you can run eclipse at 50 fps, your box is top of the line.”. He earned another round of applause. That is the true FOSS spirit.

I did attend a Ruby on Rails session as well sometime back at TWINCLING. Mr. A.P. Rajshekhar gave a talk on ROR and it was one of the best sessions on web development (I attended one at mukt.in. It was conducted by Thyagu) that I had attended. In a span of two hours, Mr. Rajshekhar covered a lot about Ruby, MVC and also showed us a working application by the name talewiki. Mr. Rajshekhar is also writing a book on ROR and he plans to use talewiki to teach ROR. I promise you Mr. Rajshekhar that I will be the first to purchase your book.

Krish and I are coming up with a web application of our own. I will talk about it later as we are yet to come up with a working model.

I have to still figure out how to generate thumbnails for my firefox extension. I have discovered that nautilus uses a thumbnailer that picks a particular frame of a video, the first page of a file and so on. I think I will freeze the development of filerfox and do something else with firefox. I have to scout for them though.

Anyway, See you later.

Well the topic says it all. I have switched to debian gnu/linux and my engineering skills were tested. I faced troubles at almost every stage after installation. Let me describe the process.

I got myself a debian cd, put it in the cd - drive, restarted my laptop and after hitting the enter key about 10 times, debian was installed. I was greeted by a not-so-good-looking screen (clearlooks theme + gnome icon theme). I fired up iceweasel (debian’s patched version of firefox (they are not allowed to call it firefox)). Within 5 minutes, my fan begins spinning. I realise that I am just running a web browser and reading a BOFH story. I check the output of cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature. The output is 72 Degrees C. I am stunned. I close all applications and leave my laptop alone. Five minutes later, my laptop’s fan is still spinning. I realize that something is surely wrong. I devise a plan. My first stop is to check how the fan’s trip points. Trip points are basically the temperatures at which the behaviour or the system or the fan changes. I checked the output of “cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points”. The output was:

critical (S5):           100 C
passive:                 92 C: tc1=2 tc2=3 tsp=100 devices=0xc124657c
active[0]:               73 C: devices=0xc12525a4
active[1]:               66 C: devices=0xc1252694

So there you go. My fan would begin spinning when the cpu temperature hits 66 C. I decide to change the values a bit. I decide that it would be better if I set the values at boot-time and I add the following line to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

echo 90:0:62:52:50 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points

Upon booting, I check the trip points and I get:

critical (S5):           90 C
passive:                 62 C: tc1=2 tc2=3 tsp=100 devices=0xc124657c
active[0]:               52 C: devices=0xc12525a4
active[1]:               50 C: devices=0xc1252694

It works! But just a few seconds later, the fan begins to spin. I check the temp again and: 63 C. “!@$@!#”. What the bloody hell. The temperature kept shooting up and stayed put at 70 C. I shut my laptop down and open it up and armed with a cotton swab, I aim to clean up the buge amount of dust on the fan. Bad luck, there isn’t any significant amount of dust there to cause a huge problem. I then realise that this route won’t lead to a solution as well. I finally reboot my laptop with the aim of planning my next move. I run:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

The output ensues and line 7 catches my eye:

cpu MHz:                                            1600

Bingo ! My genius brain figures out that cpu scaling is disabled. My cpu was running at 1600 MHz irrespective of the apps running. I know quite a bit about scaling as I had once asked people on IRC for help on overclocking my cpu. I was pointed to a tutorial about scaling then. I installed cpufrequtils and did:

modprobe acpi-cpufreq
/etc/init.d/cpufrequtils restart

Thats all.
There is one issue however. While booting, debian complains that the OnDemand CPU failed. I was a bit irritated by this. But it was easy to figure out the solution. Plainly add modprobe acpi-cpufreq to /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils.
Thats all!

So, here we are at this very important juncture in life. Probably three months from now, I shall be clicking “Send” on each of my college applications. But first an update on what I have been doing. I am trying to write clean code and create a backup script. It seems to be coming on nicely. I have to just include the command line options and it should be in working condition. Apart from that I have switched to xfce which seems to be a terrific alternative to KDE (ahem for my museum piece). I don’t know why but I happen to dislike KDE. It is such a resource intensive envrionment and comes with unnecessary bells and whistles like bouncing icons and whatnot. XFCE is ok.

I still love fluxbox. By the way I came across a wonderful book called “Geometrical constructions with compasses only” by A. Kostovskii ( I don’t know why the author put two “i”s in there).

The Mascheroni theory states that, “All construction problems solvable by a ruler and a pair of compasses can be solved by a pair of compasses alone. ”

I had a look at some sample problems in the book. Most were of the variety that I had done already such as drawing line segments n times the length of the given line segment and so on. I skimmed through and got to the part that I hadn’t come across before.

Inverse. Let us say we have a circle with centre O and radius “r”. If we fix a point P somewhere in the plane of the circle, then point P’ is the inverse of point P if |OP|.|OP’| = r ^ 2. The circle in question is called the circle of inversion.

I then had a look at some of the problems that came at the end of the section on the inverse of a point. One question involved proving a theorem that went:

“The inverse of a line with respect to a circle is a circle.” Let us see how this can be solved. I felt that this was very simple. I fixed a point P on the line, dropped a perpendicular from the centre of the circle on the line and marked the point of intersection as Q. I then plotted the inverse points of those two points. Considering that Q is the foot of the perpendicular from the centre, we can safely assume that the angle OP’Q’ is equal to angle OQP = 90 degrees as OP’Q’ and OQP are similar triangles. As P is moved along the line, P’ moves along the circle as the angle OP’Q’ will always be 90 degrees.

The next question involved plotting the inverse of a point P with respect to a circle with centre O using only a compass. I used the idea of similarity as quoted in the previous paragraph. If P’ is the inverse of P, OP/OQ (Q being a point on the circle) = OQ/OP’. Finished. OP’ x OP = OQ ^2. So if we draw a circle with centre P such that it cuts the circle at points D1 and D2, With D1 as centre and OD1 as the radius, draw an arc and cut this arc with another one obtained by carrying out the above procedure with point D2. Tada, inverse obtained.

I then had a look at some sample problems solved by Mascheroni himself !!

One feature I have observed about the constructions done by Mascheroni are very elegant. For example have a look at this question:

“Plot the centre of a given circle.”

I rattled my brains and came up with the age old solution of getting two normals to intersect. I simply could not avoid using the ruler. One would of course attribute this to the fact that my experience with the inverse of a point or a curve is limited but I feel that if ideas don’t strike when the material learned is fresh in the mind, when will they strike?  I hate looking the solutions to problems but I was forced to look at the solution to this one. Here goes:

Take a point on the circle. We’ll call this point “O”. With O as the centre and taking any arbitrary radius “r”, draw an arc cutting the given circle at A and B. With OA as radius, draw an arc and cut this arc with another one drawn with B as centre and OB as radius. We should be getting point O’. If we draw a circle with centre O’ and radius OO’ such that it cuts the first drawn circle at D and D’, the points of intersection of arcs with centres D and D’ and radii OD and OD’ respectively give us point O” which is the centre of the given circle.

The proof seemed fairly simple as soon as I read the solution. Since A and B were lying on the same circle, A was the inversion of B and vice versa. Hence the circle is the inversion of line AB. So elegant.

I don’t know when I will reach the capability of Mascheroni, V. A. Uspensky and other mathematicians whose works I have been exposed to. I just hope that that day comes soon.

Today, an unsuspecting user arrived at #computers on IRC with a complaint about a dead disk. Linux to the rescue was what we said immediately ! We made the individual download Ubuntu (sshhh…). Two hours later the download was fixed and we were working on the problem.

Point 1: The drive was behaving oddly. We demanded that ubuntu be booted into and /dev/sda be mounted. How?

sudo mkdir /media/ext_dev ; sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda /media/ext_dev

Didn’t work.
We then asked him to use the command:

dmesg | grep /dev/sda

He says its spat out a lot of errors. I was thinking, fs error for sure. The command I told him to use:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda

Four vital hours later, (must be one large drive , done).
It worked !

Phew, now I can get back to reading the posts on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage

My iPod began behaving oddly today. I plugged it in and tried to copy an entire album to /Music/Evanescence. To all those wondering, let me tell you that rockbox offers you to listen to music placed anywhere on the iPod’s filesystem. That way I don’t need to stick to the default iPod way of organising my music.
Upon clicking “Paste” in the Nautilus window where my iPod’s root directory was open, I got:

You don't have permission to write to this device

What the bloody hell! My iPod is fat32 formatted. Since when did fat32 have permissions. I tried twice and thrice in vain. Had the thing just cracked up ?
I did, “dosfsck -a /dev/sdb1″ (sdb1 on my laptop, check for the right location on your laptop. I suggest you use “blkid”
After a few minutes, it was done. My iPod is back to normal now. I still don’t understand what went wrong. Was it because of rockbox, was it because of rockbox’s id3-tag lookup app, “tagcache” ? I don’t know. Anyway, now you guys know what to do if you face this problem.

I got my feisty cds this morning. I installed feisty immediately and considering that one of the ubuntu devs on #ubuntu told me that feisty’s way of handling storage devices had changed, I immediately did:

shriphani@psp-laptop:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda3
UUID=1a97343a-e3ed-48e2-9db4-ea67228fb1aa /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda2
UUID=68033b3d-f469-4a8b-8ade-c3a9984f5281 /boot           ext2    defaults        0       2
# /dev/sda1
UUID=01107bb3-77bb-41c3-b271-6019bfa8ebb3 /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/sda4
UUID=da271254-066a-46f4-b1a0-75ba2c4b494f none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

What’s this !!. a UUID describing a device ? I was a bit confused. I also saw that my IDE drive (I have an acer travelmate 4500 laptop) was being recognised as SCSI. I immediately went to #ubuntu on freenode to figure out what was wrong. I was then given the link to this.
Wow! Surely a lot of thought going into that. So we will be dealing with just one subsystem from now on in Ubuntu land.