Geeky things
Ubuntu upgrades
I've now updated all my home machines to Kubuntu Dapper. The trickiest one was my server, because I didn't want to wipe out any partition, so I did a new install in a Qemu virtual machine, tar'd it up, scp'd it over, untar'd it into a /ubuntu dir, edited the etc/fstab and boot/grub/menu.lst (different root= line for the kernel's root fs), then rebooted into knoppix, and mv'd the original contents of / into /orig, and the contents of /ubuntu into /. I then chroot'd into the new / and re-ran grub, just to be sure. Reboot again, and I have a new kubuntu system, and all my data's still there. Later I also found and edited /etc/iftab so that my eth0 and eth1 cards would be called eth0 and eth1 again (it had reserved eth0 for the virtual NIC in Qemu).
Wireless network upgrades
I upgraded my wireless access point to OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC5 (from RC4), and changed over to using WPA rather than WEP. WPA doesn't work quite so easily in linux - it doesn't seem to come up straight away on bootup always, sometimes requiring a 'sudo /etc/networking restart', but it works ok once up. For the first time now, I've seen someone else's wireless network when doing a scan from my house - "Cat Sanctuary" is within range.
NFSv4
After improving my network security, I also set up NFS version 4. Now my media PC can see all the music on my server too. I still haven't quite worked out how the ID mapper works, but I'm currently only using it for the (read only) music share. I'll share my home dir to one of my machines rw, and my user ids match on that one anyway.
I'm listening to some music right now, in the living room, with some cool opengl visualizations on the TV. I must hack last.fm support into mythmusic...
Knoppix
I made my own knoppix variant for the first time. It's a standard knoppix CD, but defaults to UK settings. A trivial change, but it solves my main irritation with the regular one, because I always forget the lang=uk on bootup, and have to go configure the keyboard map once I'm in.
It was quite easy:
mkdir ktmp
sudo mount -o loop orig/KNOPPIX_V5.0.1CD-2006-06-01-EN.iso ktmp/
mkdir ktmp2
cp -a ktmp/* ktmp2/
sudo umount ktmp
sudo sed -e 's/lang=us/lang=uk/g' -i ktmp2/boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg
cd ktmp2/
sudo mkisofs -pad -l -r -J -v -V "KNOPPIX" -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot
-info-table -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c boot/isolinux/boot.cat -hide-rr-mov
ed -o ~/knoppix501uk.iso /home/marble/ktmp2
And to test it:
qemu -kernel-kqemu -cdrom ~/knoppix501uk.iso -boot d
Open sourceness
I should soon have CVS write access for my first open source project (other than ones I wrote to start with, that is). I'm quite pleased about this. I'll be taking over as maintainer of a drupal module - just waiting for the CVS dude to set my account up.