Set partition labels on linux.

My colleague Elardus complained that my flash drive didn't have volume labels set and I also wanted automounting to make a nice consistant mountpoint eg. /media/my_flash_drive.
I didn't think think it would be that hard, I really thought that a gui like gparted or qtparted would be able to do that, but was disappointed. So I had to do it from the commandline.

To set the label for ext2 or ext3 partitions:

sudo e2label /dev/sdb2 new_label

where /dev/sdb2 is the partition you want to label. (To get a list of mounted partitions you can do `df -ahT`)


For FAT partitions you first need to configure the drive:
you have to edit /etc/mtools.conf, make f: drive be /dev/sdb1

sudo mlabel f:new_label

Initially I got the following error.

Total number of sectors (256976) not a multiple of sectors per track (63)!
Add mtools_skip_check=1 to your .mtoolsrc file to skip this test

I just did what it asked and then it worked:

echo "mtools_skip_check=1" > ~/.mtoolsrc

I found my info on this page:
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-86378.html

Laptop tip of the day.

If you easily get cold feet,
I want to tell you something neat.
Put your toes on a transformer
it'll make your feet warmer.
AC to DC gives off some heat!



:)
ok I wrote it at 1:00 AM
(with my toes on the ... you guessed it)

European experience

My wife and I recently returned from a tour of Europe (2008-08-08..2008-08-24) and I just want to make you guys a little jealous.
We decided earlier this year that we should probably see a bit of the world before the kids arrived and I thought
Europe is a nice diverse, architecturally and historically rich place to go.
We had to organise it pretty quickly since my wife is sort of forced to be on leave in august (private school holidays),
which worked out to be a fairly quite time with regards to projects at work.

Without going into too much detail, we first flew to Dubai and after a 2 hour stop over,
we flew to London. There we stayed over one night and then embarked on our Trafalgar tour, which I must say
was extremely well organised, we had the best driver and tour director ever!
During our tour we slept over in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Ludwigshafen (Germany), Innsbruck (Austria),
Venice, Rome, Florence (Italy), Stans (Next to lake Luzern, Switserland), Paris (France :) .
We drove mostly by bus and had lots of interesting outings at the places we passed by.
After the tour we had two nights in London again, where we saw most tourist sights using the tourist buses.
Finally we had a night in Dubai where we also had a short Arabian Adventure, which was also extreamly well organised and very nice.

On this trip we did aeroplanes, big boats (ferries), medium boats, little boats (including gondolas), big buses, little buses, a train, a mono rail, a cog rail and cable cars (big and small),
we walked quite a lot too (I got some blisters even), but we didn't do any cars.
We saw lots of old and new buildings, a lot of country side and a lot of famous attractions.
The places we visited had way more water than what we are used to, a lot of towns have BIG rivers running through the middle.
We made great friends and met people from all over the word, where the most of the tour group was from Australia.

This was deffinitely a worthwhile and value for money experience, which I can highly reccomend (even though the pound and euro is so much stronger than the rand).

For some photos, checkout:
http://picasaweb.google.com/amanic/EuropeanExperience

From European Experience