Dist-upgrading Ubuntu with not enough free disk space

Some tips on upgrading Ubuntu with short disk space. I took the following "external storage" approach when I successfully upgraded my Ubuntu system from version 9.04 to 9.10, and 9.10 to 10.04 despite the initial shortage of disk space.

Changing executable permissions under Subversion

I manage my projects using Subversion. One day, I checked out my old project and found out that C source files are flagged with executable permissions. Provably, when I first checked them into the repository, they were accidentally with executable permissions. In my attempt to fix it, I changed them back to non-executables by chmod command and committed the files with other changes to the repository. However, when I updated the files on other computer, the source files are still with executable permissions!

Automating Drupal 6 installation by a Perl script

How can we efficiently deploy Drupal websites? Installing a Drupal website is rather straightforward. But it involves many small critical steps that always waste my time. One day, I came up to an idea that using a simple Perl script to (semi-)automate the procedures would save both time and accuracy resulting in higher productivity. Also, systematically generating new Drupal websites helps me manage them well later. In this post, I would like to share my approach to setting up new Drupal websites.

1. Overview

A Drupal installation roughly requires the following steps:

Configuring Japanese input in Emacs using Anthy

When writing Japanese under Ubuntu, I use Anthy (one of popular Japanese input systems) with IBus (Intelligent Input Bus for Linux / Unix OS) input method for all X applications but Emacs. Interestingly, there seems to be no IBus interfaces available to Emacs at this moment. For Emacs, I use Anthy through anthy.el interface, which seems to be the most common option when writing Japanese under Emacs. In this post, I summarize how to configure Japanese input with Anthy under Emacs.

Creating ISO files of CD/DVD media or directories

I would like to summarize how to create ISO files of CD/DVD media or directories.

Creating an ISO image of a CD/DVD disc

First, make sure that your disc is currently *not* mounted.

$ sudo umount /dev/cdrom

Then, create an ISO image disc.iso of the disc by dd command:

$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=disc.iso bs=1024

Creating an ISO image of a directory

Mounting / un-mounting ISO files from the command line

I would like to summarize how to probe an ISO file from the command line.

Mounting an ISO image file

Create a mount point directory isodir and mount hoge.iso file. The contents of hoge.iso is now accessible through the isodir.

$ mkdir isodir
$ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop hoge.iso isodir

Un-mounting an ISO image file

First, make sure that the isodir (and its internal files and irectories) is not being used. Then, issue the following command.

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