I'm upgrading my external hard drive from 1.5 TB to 2.0 TB. Not a big jump, no, but it's a good opportunity to throw the 1.5 TB in the closet for backup/storage.

My 1.5 TB external was hooked up to my Dell Mini 9 netbook and used as a media server as I found it far too small (dimensions-wise) to be used for programming or school. Since the old external was already attached, I threw on the new external, formatted it to ext4 using gparted and started transferring the data.

Here's the command I used:
sudo rsync -avrz /media/external/ /media/external_/

D'oh! Can anyone catch what I did?

My Dell Mini 9, equipped with a less-than-powerful Intel Atom N270 was gobbled up by the command, almost making the netbook unusable.

You see, I'm used to using the tar command tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz which extracts an archive of files.

For tar, '-z' means

-z, --gzip, --gunzip --ungzip

meaning that the file is compressed with gzip.

For rsync however, '-z' means

-z, --compress compress file data during the transfer

Yikes! My little Intel Atom N270 was trying to compress all my files before transferring them! Not good nor efficient for local transfer.

If you're transferring MB or GB of data over a network (and have the time and CPU power to compress files), then by all means, use the '-z' with rsync. But don't use the '-z' flag when copying data from one local hard drive to another, especially when using a netbook. That's reserved for people by the name of Brett Alton.

So i switched the transfer over to my new latop, sporting a Core i5 430m, transferring 1.5 TB of data without sweating

Here is the suggested command to use (changing the path names of course):
sudo rsync -av /media/external/ /media/external_/

Good luck!

In a previous post, I learned how to compile driver support for my girlfriend's Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. This is less than satisfactory for some, so I was pointed to Martin Owens Wacom drivers in his PPA.

Run the following in the terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/wacom-plus
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wacom-dkms xf86-input-wacom

Then reboot.

Don’t forget to register your tablet at the Wacom website, because you can specify Linux as your operating system. We might get even better support if a lot of people do this.

Good luck!

I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch for my girlfriend's birthday so she can transition her artwork from pen to vector.

Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

I plugged the device in hoping it would be plug & play but unfortunately it wasn't. I found a post by Frank Groeneveld which compiles newer Wacom support, critical for the product to work in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

As of this writing, his post is more than four months old and two newer releases of the driver have been posted, so I decided to update his script and post it for others.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev libxi-dev x11proto-input-dev xserver-xorg-dev tk8.4-dev tcl8.4-dev libncurses5-dev; wget http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/linuxwacom/linuxwacom/0.8.8-8/linuxwacom-0.8.8-8.tar.bz2; tar -xf linuxwacom-0.8.8-8.tar.bz2; cd linuxwacom-*; ./configure --enable-wacom; make; sudo cp wacom.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/tablet/; sudo rmmod wacom; sudo modprobe wacom; echo "modprobe" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

You should be able to copy and paste the code above and it will install necessary software needed to compile the new driver, download and compile the new driver and enable the driver automatically for use immediately and after reboot.

I tested this script on my ASUS K72JR and my girlfriend's HP Pavilion 6000. If successful, your Wacom tablet should be able accept pen, touch (or combined if available) input.

As Frank states, "don’t forget to register your tablet at the Wacom website, because you can specify Linux as your operating system. We might get even better support if a lot of people do this."

Good luck!