After booting from freshly minted 11.10 CD, installing OS with updates, rebooting back into the GUI, all flawless… Only thing missing was my RAID array. So I installed mdadm; a trivial matter… again everything was fine.. Went for another reboot; after getting the ‘loading operating system’ message (which I believe to be the GRUB bootloader) I got a blank screen… nothing…

Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to force the system to hard reset; after getting to the same point I was greeted with the initramfs CLI; telling me that one of the elements in the RAID array was degraded… brilliant… Typed ‘exit’ to circumvent doing anything nefarious with the initramfs commands, i got back into Ubuntu; checked the disk utility and there was my RAID array. Now slightly baffled I decided to check the integrity of the array… some 23 hours later it all came back checked, synced and verified; no errors.

Now even more puzzled than when I started I proceeded to hit ubuntuforums.org (an invaluable resource IMHO!); standard searches didn’t turn anything useful up, and my post regarding this didn’t really get any interest. I then stumbled upon this gem of a post; after wading through the responses I found a comment from ‘dangriffin’; seems that on large disk arrays; the integrity checks are done before all the disks are detected!

His solution is a very simple one; open a terminal:

In there, look for the following function:

and change it to:

then do a:

Reboot and you should be all set! Seems that adding ‘udevadm settle’ to the function makes the initramfs wait until all the drives are spun up and detected before trying to check their integrity. Lets hope this one gets put in for Ubuntu 12!

TIP 2: I was also getting issues with mdadm –detail; it was reporting a warning like ‘mdadm: only give one device per ARRAY line’; turns out this is another bug! When you create a RAID array it gives it the default name of ‘RAID Array’… this actually screws up the mdadm.conf file; to fix this warning do the following:

look for any reference to the name ‘RAID Array’ (I had two references in there); simply remove the space between the name so it becomes ‘RAIDArray’, Ctrl+X to save and Roberts your father’s brother!

Bomski

Sat on my couch messing with my new Samsung Galaxy S… I have to say i’m blown away by it… So simple to use, very intuitive…

Base installation was a doddle; the netbook already had Windows 7 on it; Jolicloud’s installer merely installs it alongside the native OS and modifies the boot .ini file to give you the option to fire up Jolicloud or Windows 7.

Once installed (and created a login for Jolicloud), you’re away!. Below is a screenshot of the main interface:

With much of today’s ‘app’ based society, Jolicloud is no different; it has access to hundreds of apps, all optimised for speed. Simply browse the categories for what you need and add to your collection. I personally feel it should come with Firefox by default (probably due to my web dev status) but it’s so easy to add things, i hardly noticed.

There’s provision for lots of online storage, as well as localised access to disk (kind of defeats the point of cloud computing though). I’m sure there’s absolutely tons of features that i’ve not even played with yet, but given the simplicity and usability of Jolicloud, i’m sure its going to be a contender for ‘Cloud Crown’. Next up: Google Chrome OS…

If you’ve got a Netbook, why the fudge aren’t you using Jolicloud?? Give it a whirl today!

As of current testing none of my plugins (web developer, YSlow etc) are compatible, but i’m sure that will change!

Let me know your thoughts!

This may seem very contrite, but the ability to test your emails on-the-fly almost guarantees an uplift in your readership!

Thanks to Rebeca at Communicator Corp; Glad to see that they are pushing this platform forward!

Asking one of the developers we found that removing the following metatag from the code (meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html;  charset=ISO-8859-1) also removed the problem… After a bit of digging we replaced the metatag and found that swapping the document encoding between UTF-8 to ANSI could essentially turn on and off the problem… The developer in question suggested that Visual SourceSafe (where the file came from) may have corrupted the document at a binary level, so a replication of the file eliminated the problem…

Ze plot thickens….

I managed to wanlge my way into the Quark launch event of their new product ‘Quark Interactive Designer’; think of it like a cross between flash and PowerPoint, but is far more simplistic to use. It also integrates heavily with QuarkXPress, and seemed to generate a huge amount of interest.

 I came back from the event sporting loads of goodies (Google sweets for one!) and also a subscription to MacUser (thanks to the rather attractive rep for the magazine that sold me a subscription!) and all in all it was a rather sucessful trip! i look forward to the next event!

I’m off to London on Thursday to visit Mac Expo… yay! The UK’s leading exhibition and conference for the Mac community opens its doors open to both creative professionals and the public the show is the annual celebration of everything Mac and iPod.

Personally i can’t wait!!!!