Yet Another Linux Blog

I’ve had my Ubuntu 6.10 torrent running since I saw the article on slashdot, but I just got around to burning a cd and installing it on a spare machine. I had only recently learned about the wonders of LVM, so I was very unpleasantly surprised to see that the LVM option was removed from the partitioning step. I only spent a minute in the “manual partitioning” dialogue, but there seemed to be no obvious way to tell the installer to use LVM.

In Ubuntu 6.06, you merely had to select “use LVM” at the partitioning step, and the installer would automatically create a volume group for you, etc. I’ll have to look into how to work around this new “feature” in 6.10.

That’s the simple recipe for modifying your disk space.

I decided to play around a little bit with LVM. Here’s what I did: a clean install of Ubuntu Dapper (server), choosing “use whole disk and LVM”. This created a ~230MB boot partition and an LVM volume group on the rest of the disk, with two LVs, one ~1.5GB for swap and the rest of my 80GB disk for the root partition. Each of the three was formatted with ext3.

Then I added a second 80GB disk to the machine. I didn’t write any partition table to it, merely running “pvcreate /dev/hdb”, then “vgextend Ubuntu /dev/hdb”. This now give me a ~158GB volume group with the swap and root LVs. Next, I wanted to resize the root LV from ~72GB to 2GB since my total Ubuntu install is only ~540MB so far. That’s easy to do with lvresize, but I have to be careful and resize the filesystem first. The program for that is in the e2fsprogs package and is called resize2fs. However, when I run “sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root 2G”, I get the error:

/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root is mounted; can’t resize a mounted filesystem!

It’s too bad that it can’t do it while the fs is mounted. So it is time to reboot from the CD, and run the command that way. The liveCD mounts it as /dev/Ubuntu/root, so merely change that. After running the command from the liveCD, I rebooted into the machine. df -h shows the fs is now only 2GB. It’s time to do “sudo lvresize –size 2G /dev/Ubuntu/root”

alex@ubuntutest:~$ sudo pvscan
PV /dev/hda6 VG Ubuntu lvm2 [74.29 GB / 70.82 GB free]
PV /dev/hdb VG Ubuntu lvm2 [74.53 GB / 74.53 GB free]
Total: 2 [148.82 GB] / in use: 2 [148.82 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]
alex@ubuntutest:~$ sudo vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “Ubuntu” using metadata type lvm2
alex@ubuntutest:~$ sudo lvscan
ACTIVE ‘/dev/Ubuntu/root’ [2.00 GB] inherit
ACTIVE ‘/dev/Ubuntu/swap_1′ [1.47 GB] inherit


I’ve been spending more time dealing with mail recently, and I really don’t want to. Thus the search for the “best” (for me) mail client or, technically, Mail User Agent (MUA). I want it to be fast, I want to be able to read lots of mail quickly, rearrange it, and use GPG when I need to. GMail rocks, but there’s no way to integrate GPG into it, and I suspect that there never will be.

mutt - I spent about a week using mutt. First of all, I was lazy and didn’t want to learn all the keybindings. I only learned the ones that allowed me to switch folders and reply to mails. Second of all, it doesn’t handle HTML mails very well. It needs an external viewer for anything that isn’t plaintext. Configuring the external viewers was also not something I was into. On the plus side, I can get/send mail from anywhere that has an SSH client, and GPG support is included.

Thunderbird + Enigmail - this is what I switched to after mutt. My main complaints are that Thunderbird is simply slow. Getting mails, displaying mails, etc, it just feels slightly sluggish. Enigmail is nice. The main downsides here are a) sluggishness and b) no good default keybindings. Threaded view also isn’t used by default. While I’m sure I could configure Thunderbird to do everything exactly how I want it, it’s easier to type “apt-get install sylpheed”.

Sylpheed - I switched to this client the other day after reading an excellent post about it here: Sylpheed Saved My Life. I came across this post after searching Google with the phrase “why is procmail so damn complicated?” (without quotes) because I joined a couple of new mailing lists and wanted to filter their messages. My coworker’s .procmailrc does this, but deciphering it is not trivial, to say the least. Why do I need to understand procmail if I can just get my mail client to filter and arrange mails for me?

GMail - This is still the client I use for all my personal mail. It’s reliable, simple and powerful. I don’t have to worry about administering the mail server. I don’t have to worry about message sizes. I don’t have to worry about deleting messages. GMail is awesome, except that you have to trust Google with the content of all your mails…