I had a scary thing happen the other day: the windows xp entry on GRUB2′s boot screen went missing!  This happened shortly after the windows partition had been encrypted with a McAfee product.  Ubuntu didn’t remove the entry itself; it was actually only after I tried to make a change to the startup configuration using a program called Startup-manager (you may have it in System > Administration) that the windows entry was removed. It was bad enough that Ubuntu could no longer see any files on the windows partition (mounted as /windows), but now I had no way to boot into windows to retrieve files.

The fix

And of course, I had no freaking clue how to manually modify GRUB2′s startup screen.  But after some digging, I figured out how to do it.  This worked for me in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.  Hopefully it will save someone else’s day:

1. Figure out where windows is.  Is it /dev/sda1 (very likely)? /dev/sda2?  To do this:
   1. System > Administration > Disk Utility
   2. Click each partition and find the one which matches the size of your bootable windows parition and which, when selected, shows a partition type of HPFS/NTFS. Example:
      
   3. Note the location of the partition; it is the last line of the descriptors of the partition. In the screenshot above, mine is /dev/sda1.
2. Press ALT+F2
3. enter the command gksudo gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom
4. below the comments in this file, and below any other entries which may have been added by one thing or another, add the following:

   [/sourcecode]

   echo “Adding Windows XP on {LOCATION OF YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION}” >&2
   cat << EOF
   menuentry “Windows XP Professional (on {LOCATION OF YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION})” {
   insmod ntfs
   set root=(hd0,{JUST THE LAST NUMBER OF THE LOCATION OF YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION})
   drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
   chainloader +1
   }
   EOF[/shortcode]

5. Replace {LOCATION OF YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION} in the code above with the location of your windows partition.
6. Replace {JUST THE LAST NUMBER OF THE LOCATION OF YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION} with the last number of the location of your windows partition. E.g. /dev/sda1 would be 1.Your file will now look something like this:
   
7. Save the file and close the editor.
8. Press ALT + F2.
9. enter the command gksudo grub-mkconfig

That should be it.  When you reboot, you should see your windows as a bootable option again.

Morals

The moral of this tale is to avoid startup-manager for grub configuration changes unless you’ve not got funky partitions. Keep in mind that future versions of start-up manager may fix this issue; the version i’m using is 1.9.12-ubuntu1.

Credits

I would not have been able to troubleshoot this issue if it weren’t for the following gracious contributions to the global knowledgebase.

• Grub2 Introduction by ranch hand
• Grub2 @ Ubuntu Help Wiki by many people
• HOWTO: StartUp Manager & Kernel Display Options by drs305
• many others who posted about their 40_custom grub file configurations

1. System > Administration > Hardware Drivers
2. Make sure the latest recommended nvidia proprietary driver is activated (if not, do it and reboot)
3. System > Preferences > Display (it should ask if you want to use the proprietary config screen – select ‘Yes’)
4. Select X Server Configuration
5. Set the resolution to what you want and ‘Apply’, then quit the nvidia-settings screen.
6. System > Preferences > Display (when it asks this time, select ‘No’)
7. Click ‘Apply’
8. Click ‘Keep configuration’ (assuming everything looks OK)
9. Click Close

When you reboot, everything should be preserved.  I still notice a flicker on the boot-up screen when I think it tries to reset it to something else, but it should stay at the resolution you specified.

• jQuery & JQuery UI – javascript & js/css library, respectively
• jQuery plugins: SVG, jMP3, random code snippets from a lot of sites …
• GIMP – for my boitmap graphics
• InkScape – for vector graphics and SVG conceptualization
• gedit – GNOME Text Editor
• Firebug – Javascript debugging would be IMPOSSIBLE without this
• Firefox
• WordPress
• Ubuntu (currently the “Jaunty Jackalope” version) – my operating system
• Songbird – musical inspiration

@GEEK: Thanks for starting this discussion. The previous comment is the one that helped me get my post-commit hook working with VisualSVN Server on an XP box. I was writing a hook to update my web directory from the SVN repo on every commit.

@Other contributors: Thanks for adding your comments which lead me to the right solution to properly make my server trust istself!

Just to consolidate the steps:

1. Hit the repo in IE at whatever its address is; e.g. https://server:8443/path/to/svn/
2. It will tell you the cert is untrusted. Click view certificates.
3. click Install certificate…
4. hit Next
5. select Place all certificates in the following store
6. click Browse…
7. select Trusted Root Certificate Authorities
8. hit OK
9. hit Next
10. hit Finish
11. hit Yes, OK, OK, YES!
12. Start>Run>services.msc
13. restart VisualSVN server service Now your hooks on that machine should not have any issue updating from itself.

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int it, dW dies while trying to start up.  Great parlour trick!

My findings and solution are found in comments 17, 18, and 19 on the Error Tracker page at XHTMLed.com.

By day, I am the eLumen administrator at Tunxis Community College, and in working with eLumen I’ve run into all manner of snags – I assume that other colleges which are supporting their own eLumen server may be having the same issues, and I’d like for them to be able to benefit fro the solutions we’ve found, and vice versa.

The key discussion area on the forum, I think, is going to be the Mashups board. The Mashup board is the place to discuss bridging eLumen data with other data sources to produce new ways to navigate the data. The reporting mechanism baked into eLumen is pretty good for basic analysis, but to show the numbers in the context of other things, such as a student’s e-Portfolio work, or to deliver the numbers in an interactive web application where relationships are links to new views, would require the data to be brought into something else.

Anyway, enough about that here. No one reads this blog anyway. But I also want to say that I’m excited because phorum is AWESOME software for a forum site, and I’ve already made my own template (called orange on olive), which is featured – you guessed it – at the eLumen Community Forum.

The nice thing was that when I pasted Excel data into the textarea, it was tab-delimited with line breaks.  At that point, all I needed to do was some replacements and throw a table wrapper on it.

Here’s the code for the conversion function (sorry – i haven’t installed a php code parser yet to style this more nicely):

<?php
/**
* convert tab delimited file to html table
* @input string tab-delimited text
* found at http://james.revillini.com
* note: you are not required to keep the above copyright notice in this code.
*/
function tabs_to_table($input) {
//define replacement constants
define(‘TAB_REPLACEMENT’, ‘</td><td> ‘);
define(‘NEWLINE_REPLACEMENT’, ‘</td></tr><tr%s><td> ‘);
define(‘TABLE_BEGIN’, ‘<table><tr><td> ‘);
define(‘TABLE_END’, ‘</td><tr></table>’);</code>

//replace all tabs with end-cell, begin-cell
$input = preg_replace  (’/\t/’  , TAB_REPLACEMENT  , $input);

//split the list on linebreaks
$rows = preg_split  (’/\r\n/’  , $input);

//replace all linebreaks with end-row, begin-row (with or without altRow class)
$output = ”;
foreach ($rows as $index => $row) {
$output .= $row . sprintf(NEWLINE_REPLACEMENT, ($index%2?”:’ class=”alt”‘));
}

//build table
$input = TABLE_BEGIN . $output . TABLE_END;
return ($input);
}
?>

1. just tried to uninstall the mgmedia2 thing from your Joomla admin panel, or
2. are trying to install mgmedia2.

If you want to uninstal mgmedia2, make sure you go to Installers > Mambots and uninstall the mambot/plugin as well.

If you want to install mgmedia2, you missed a step and you still need to installed the component in Installers > Components. See readme.

I just wanted to put this out there in case anyone is struggling with it.