Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The standard installation of Ubuntu 11.10 doesn’t provide a graphical tool to edit user groups. For this you need:
$ sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools
$ users-admin

I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome on different machines over the past year or so. In an effort to consolidate, I’ve been running Chrome rather than Firefox lately and a few issues have come up. On my laptop, installing an extension hangs after clicking the “Install” button. The text of the button changes to “Checking…” and stays that way. The fix seems to be to add a directory in your home called Downloads.

The HTPC mysteriously failed this week. After selecting a load in Grub, it complained it couldn’t read init files. I tried loading the Ubuntu live on USB, but that wouldn’t load. Then on boot-up it would say “error: hd0 out of disk.” At first, I thought this was a problem with the USB load, but that worked on another computer. I changed the SATA mode in BIOS from AHCI to IDE and then the USB would load. It seems the USB wouldn’t load in AHCI mode and the “out of disk” error was coming from the hard disk, as without the USB drive inserted, that’s what I started seeing. Now it’s looking like a hard disk failure.

After Ubuntu booted from the USB drive, I opened a terminal and ran sudo fsck /dev/sda1. It found a bunch of errors, which I told it to fix.

On reboot, “error: sd0 out of disk.” Reloading from USB again, I ran the disk utility and looked at the SMART data for the drive. It showed 48 bad sectors, which is no big deal. The other parameters looked OK, so I ran the extensive self-test. As it was running, I noticed the read error count was 720,900! I think this disk needs to get replaced.

We got Ooma about a month ago. I connected it to one telephone to try it out before porting our phone number. Since all went well, I started the port last week. It was completed today. After we got an email telling us the port was done, the telephone connected to Ooma had our old landline number on it and worked fine. The rest of the house connected to FiOS could still dial out, but, of course, could not receive calls.

To hook up the rest of the house, I had to disconnect the house service from FiOS. This was done at the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box, which is mounted to the outside of my house next to the electric meter:

To open it, I removed one screw on the right side and opened the two snaps. They were clearly labeled. Inside the ONT, the phone line (the blue and white wires) were connected to a plastic jack that kinda looks like a phone jack:

To open it, I pulled the bottom tab (where the blue and white wires go in) toward me. It pops out maybe 40 degrees. This freed the blue and white wires, which I pulled out and labeled “do not connect”. I also labeled the wires “left” and “right” in case I ever need to put them back. That was it for FiOS.

To get the rest of the house on Ooma, I disconnected the test telephone from the Ooma Telo and replaced it with an RJ-11 splitter. I plugged the telephone I just disconnected into one half of the splitter and connected the wall jack that used to be connected to FiOS into the other half. That was it!