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Mint11 is now out of service and it's time to upgrade to a newer version. Mint14 is now already available but I want to upgrade to Mint13 lts which will give me a longer service period. Upgrading is a quite difficult because I have customize my system quite a lot and that's why I try to minimize the upgrades as much as possible. I have a 1TB disk which owns multiple LVM partitions and want to install Mint13 on a new LVM partition. That way I don't have to repartition my disk and create a new physical partion on my disk and I can switch between both Mint versions in the transition phase easily.  If somebody is interested in the advantages of an LVM just read this article.
 
Actually I followed this description. Ther is one minor difference: There you create a PV and LVs and don't use an existing LV. The differences are minor - you only have to skip all steps related to the creation of a PV and LV.
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AVM router allow to share the local storage from an USB stick or local USB disk  in the local network. The following page describes how to access the share from a Linux system.
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Regular expressions are very powerful if you have to find some text.  See below for links to pages where regular expressions are explained in detail and where you can text them very quickly.
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ftp is a very old but still commonly used file transfer protocol. There exist various tools on the commandline and even GUIs which allow to transfer files easily. On Linux it's even much more easy: You can mount the file system managed by a ftp server as a normal Linux disk. Now you can access the the files with all commonly available tools on Linux to handle disks and you don't need any special ftp tools any more. The following page describes how to configure a ftp server as disk.
 
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I've seen multipostings a lot of time in foren but most of the time the poster doesn't understand why he doesn't get any reply or flame replies.  In the following article I explain the reason for this and what's the difference between a multiposting and a crossposting.
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 If you have a Linux LAN server in your home network to provide printing and storage services you also can use this server to offer different operting systems to your clients with a PXE boot serevr. This can be liveCD images which can be started and used immediately or installation images so your clients can upgrade to the next distro release easily. Rescue live CDs are also useful if there are any client issues.

My PXE server runs openSuSE 11.4 and offers the installation image of openSuSE 11.4 (32 and 64 bit) and Mint LiveCDs of LXDE and LMDE. Furthermore  a biostest, rescue system and memorytest is available. The following pages describe in detail how to configure your serve. In addition all the relevant config files of my server are available for download.
This page way create in May 2007 initially an in May 2011 improved with much more details.
 

User Rating: 5 / 5

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LVM (Logical volume manager) is a software component, which aggregates disks and/or partitions as a physical partition (PV) in a volume group (VG) and allows to create on the fly logical volumes (Partitions) (LV) and to resize them on the fly.  Linux, Aix, OS2, Solarix, FreeBSD and other support LVM. Windows2000 and above has a similar concept but is not compatible with LVM. Linux distros like Debian, Mandrake, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware und openSuSE allow to install Linux on LVM managed disks but unfortunately per default there will be no LVM be used. Following pages describe in detail the capabilities and benefits of LVM and why every Linux user should also use LVM on his system.
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A nice one liner which lists which grub version is installed on which partition (Source)

In addtion there exists a nice PythonScript findgub from McDaniel. It displays much mor info than the one liner below. In general the one line is sufficient. 
 
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SSDs are available for some time now. I had to replace my good old desktop with a newer one because the motherboard started to fail intermittently. I decided to include a 120GB SSD in my new system and spent some time to find out what I have to do in order to increase the lifetime of my SSD. SSDs deliver data very fast on read. On write it takes longer and unfortunately the number of writes is limited. That's why the number or writes to the SSD should be reduced as far as it is possible. On the following pages I describe in detail which changes I did on my Linux Mint 13 and they should also apply on other Linux distributions.

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A screensaver is a useful tool but unfortunately it's annoying when there are active applicatoins like kaffeine or teamviewer and you have to move the mouse periodically just to deactivate the screensaver. Fortunately there exists a nice tool called caffeine. Just configure the applications you want to force to deactivate the screensaver and enjoy to view videose or to have remote sessions with shared screen without any screensaver interuption.
Unfortunatel it doesn't work any mor on Mint Maja with Mate. There fortunately exists a patch.
 
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From time to time everybody has to chroot into another operating system instance. Either to repair a system or to install Mint13 in a LVM . Unfortunately this happens very seldom. See following command sequence for reference:
 
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If you want to install Windows on a system which runs a Linux or you want to install a Linux on a box which runs Windows you have to be carefull. Otherwise you may not be able to start Windows or Linux any more. The next few pages contain instructions which you should follow in order to be able to boot both operating systems and which steps to execute if you want to delete one of the operating systems later on.

 
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From time to time I get a hanging mouse on my Lenvovo Thinkpad. My system runs a Debian Linux on Mint 13.  At this point in time /var/log/syslog has multiple lines of the following format:

Feb 16 13:06:24 majestix kernel: [30109.311850] psmouse serio4: TouchPad at isa0 060/serio4/input0 lost sync at byte 1

That's annoying and I searched in the net and finally found a workaround I describe below.