HOWTO create a Debian USB installation flash drive

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Adrianos Dadis

Hi all,

a few days ago I had to install Debian (my favourite GNU/Linux distribution) on a friend’s laptop. One way to do this is using a small USB flash drive.

The required steps to create a Debian USB installation flash drive are the following:

  1. Get the boot image (boot.img.gz file) of your architecture (e.g. i386) from installer-i386_boot.img.gz. You many need another architecture look stable_main_architecture.
  2. Insert your USB stick.
  3. (Optional) Unmount your USB stick if it is automatically mounted.
  4. Prepare USB stick (will erase data): 
    1. $> zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdX
  5. Unplug and plug the usb stick (or just mount the disk:
    1. $> mount /dev/sdX /var/mytest
  6. Download the Net Install ISO image (size ~160 MB) from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/#netinst-stable (select netinst image) or the Businesscard image (size ~40 MB) from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/#businesscard-stable (select businesscard image)
  7. Copy the downloaded ISO image to your USB stick:
    1. $> mount /dev/sdX /var/mytest
    2. $> cp <path/to/iso/image> /var/mytest
    3. $> umount /dev/sdX
  8. Ready 🙂

Now you can plugin this usb stick to the computer on which you would like to install Debian stable and set the BIOS to boot from USB stick.

Regards,
Adrianos Dadis.
—
Democracy Requires Free Software.

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Freedom is under attack (as always)

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Adrianos Dadis

As you all know Wikileaks, which this time represents freedom of speech, is under attack.

Many centres of power have coordinated their forces to stop Wikileaks. Acts like this has been happening from the begining of human history (as far we know).
Secrets give power, and many people love power.
Wikileaks tells a few secrets, and maybe it devitalizes a few centres of power. For them Wikileaks is an enemy.
But, for us (the common people) that we are much more powerful than those centres of power, Wikileaks is an ally.
Secrets can give power to small group of people to control all the other people.
Secrets had created kings and emperors, had destroyed ideas, democracy and many other common goods.

Wise is the supreme good.
The source of truth and the truth as knowledge are essential ingredients to reach wise.
If you believe that wise and knowledge must be a common good and a common aim, then help and protect everyone (or everything) that spread the truth and the knowledge.

Regards,
Adrianos Dadis.
—
Democracy Requires Free Software.

Links (help freedom):
– http://wikileaks.ch/Support.html
– Ellsberg’s open letter to Amazon
– Stop ACTA
– Boycott Amazon until it hosts wikileaks again
– Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary

Links (freedom is under attack):
– Lieberman Introduces Anti-WikiLeaks Legislation
– PayPal statement regarding WikiLeaks
– Tableau Software removed wikileaks visualizations
– http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/wikileaks
– Dogs are on hunt
– Wikileaks’ Visa payments suspended

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Eclipse “initializing java tooling” error

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Adrianos Dadis

Sometimes I get this annoying error (initializing java tooling) when I start Eclipse. Perhaps I need to restart Eclipse for 2-3 times in orders to work normally. Today I restarted 9 times, but nothing. I continuously get this error. So, I decide to find a standard workaround, as this problem seems to be an Eclipse bug.

When you get this error you cannot open any java file as you get this error. I normally use ‘Java EE’ perpsective with ‘Project Explorer’ View. My simple workaround is to open ‘Navigator’ View and open a ‘YourClass.java’ file using this view. This should work normally. Refresh the project and try to switch to ‘Project Explorer’ View and try to open another java file in the same project. Normally this will not work 🙂 Go back to ‘Navigator’ View (without closing the opened java file) and then exit Eclipse. Then start Eclipse and you will see the previous opened java file. Now go to ‘Project Explorer’ View and try to open another java file.
Now it works!!!!

I hope this will also work for you.
Maybe you have to use ‘Resource’ Perspective to works for you.

Regards,
Adrianos Dadis.
—
Democracy requires Free Software.

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wget returns “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden”

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Adrianos Dadis

Yesterday I log in to a friend’s GNU/Linux server and I wanted to test internet access.
I tried to do a search in google using wget as lynx was not installed. But I got a funny error.

melios@hostname:tmp$ wget http://www.google.com/search?q=world
–2010-10-22 22:04:22– http://www.google.com/search?q=world
Resolving http://www.google.com&#8230; 173.194.36.104
Connecting to http://www.google.com|173.194.36.104|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 403 Forbidden
2010-10-22 22:04:24 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Google did not respond to my client (wget), because it was not a browser!!!
So, I rerun wget with ‘-U’ parameter, which means “user agent”, to emulate Firefox and avoid this flaw.

melios@hostname:tmp$ wget -U firefox http://www.google.com/search?q=world
–2010-10-22 22:10:39– http://www.google.com/search?q=world
Resolving http://www.google.com&#8230; 173.194.36.104
Connecting to http://www.google.com|173.194.36.104|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: `search?q=world’
[ <=> ] 40,080 109K/s in 0.4s
2010-10-22 22:10:40 (109 KB/s) – `search?q=world’ saved [40080]

Funny error with simple solution 🙂

Regards,
Adrianos.
—
Democracy requires Free Software.

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JHUG October meeting summary

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Adrianos Dadis

Last Saturday I went to one of the meetings of Java Hellenic User Group (JHUG).
It was very interesting and I enjoy it very much.

I attended 3 presentations.

The first one was an idea for the packaging of java enterprise applications.
The title was Package by feature and not by layer. I liked that, because it was something that may help developers in the future, with some extensions.

The second was a real study of the IT department of a bank (I cannot write the name of the bank) and how they use open source projects. How much they have help them to build an adaptable architecture and how much they have learnt from this. Nice work guys, keep going !!!

The third one was by Dimitris Andreadis and the topic was What it takes to become an opensource developer.
I liked this very much for one main reason. The reason is that Dimitris has summarized 7 main principles that a developer must follow in order to become a real open source developer. The beautiful aspect is that none of these principles is directly related to software. To give you a better understanding, the principles are: Passion, Persistence, Focus, Innovation, Luck, Connections and one more. These principles are very general and anyone use them can easily become whatever she/he likes. Bravo to Dimitris.

The only argue we had with Dimitris was about, if someone needs “talent” or not to become an open source developer. As most people believe, talent can give you a major boost on your career or in your general life. I do not follow this belief. If we are to take personal success as a quantitative “product”, then talent accounts for less than 10% of the total sum of the total product.

I do not believe that Larry Wall, Richard M. Stallman or any other of the best programmers are the best because of their talent. We are all sure that they are very intelligent and they practice very hard, but talent is something else.
Can you define talent???

Regards,
Adrianos.
—
Democracy requires Free Software.

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