The commands given below will allow you to create a compressed image of a complete hard disk. Under normal circumstances I would boot from a Linux Live-CD prior to performing these tasks:

dd if=source_disk | gzip > /destination.gz

For example /dev/sda is the source disk and /mnt/usb/image.gz is the destination:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /mnt/usb/hd_image.gz

Then to restore the image:

gzip -dc /mnt/usb/hd_image.gz | dd of=/dev/sda

The format of these commands is very important and if used incorrectly will result in data loss, for which I take no responsibility.

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Well, Open University studies have started already with the first TMA for T224 due in a couple of weeks. Things have been pretty busy of late …

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Update (15/05/2010): The second TMA for T224 is due the end of the week … time is flying by at the moment …

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Update (29/05/2010): The second TMA for T224 is over, time to move onto Block Three (Embedded Systems).

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Update (18/07/2010): The third TMA for T224 is over, unfortunately I did not have time to start yet alone complete this module. It is now time to catch up on this and also complete the final block.

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Finally received my ECA result this morning, did better than I had expected (call me a pessimist if you like). Moving on towards T224 – Computers and Processors starting in February 2010. I wish all fellow T209ers all the best with their results and further studies.

TMA01 (Module 1 –  In touch and informed)  = 90%
TMA02 (Module 2 – Talking with computers) = 84%
TMA03 (Module 3 – Network management) = 96%
TMA04 (Module 4 – Cyborg) = 93%
TMA05 (Module 5 – Security) = 0% (Did not have sufficient time to complete this module)

CMA41 (Module 1)  = 81%
CMA42 (Module 3) = 85%
CMA43 (Module 5) = 0%  (Did not have sufficient time to complete this module)

ECA = 77% – Grade 2 PASS.

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Found some of my old Linux discs tonight … thought they deserved a mention… dating from 1997 & 1998.

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Had a good day Friday, after failing to get relevant information from the manufacturer (been requesting for what seems to be a lifetime). Finally manged to get the 2D barcode imager functional under Linux, what a feeling of accomplishment.

All other significant hardware is supported by the 2.6.30 Gentoo Kernel.  However the finger print reader, camera and HSDPA modem have not been tested as they are not required for the application the unit is going to be used for.

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Just a quick post to save some time when updating your Gentoo system (Portage 2.2_rc51) , please note this is just a starting point, feel free to extend these.

nano ~/.bashrc

if [ -e /etc/bashrc ] ; then
 source /etc/bashrc
fi
alias esync='emerge --sync'
alias eupdate='emerge -uavDN --nospinner --quiet --keep-going --with-bdeps=y world'

To update your system just call the following two commands:

esync
eupdate

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Just a quick note to inform you that the Hosting Provider for this Web Site changed last night. You may have experienced some outage of the site during this time, please accept our apologies for this.

I have been quite busy over the last couple of months and this is set to continue until Christmas. Hopefully I will get some spare time to post some articles soon.

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Usually when I need to merge avi files I use avimerge (part of the transcode package), however recently the output of this suffered some serious audio sync issues. So along comes mencoder (part of the mplayer package):

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy input_1.avi  input_2.avi -o output.avi

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