New Method Test...

Quick test of my new method. Line work is hand inked, scanned to GIMP where it's cleaned up, traced and colour filled in InkScape, and finished in Xara. InkScape does a much better job of the vector conversion than Xara can (as well as filling in the colours), but for editing, Xara wins hands down. Tomorrow I'll post the (hopefully) finished version, which will be shaded...


...and here it is!

My Latest "Kenco" moment...

I just realized something really important regarding cartooning in Xara Xtreme. Why am I creating line art, when I should be using filled shapes? Not only do I not have to colour them in, but I choose the display hierarchy. If I create a wheel for instance as a filled shape, that can then be used both sides of a car picture that's not head on, provided the car is a filled shape too.

I can be really thick at times (slaps head). Never mind - hopefully, I'll post an example by the end of the week. By the way, a "kenco moment" is the same as a "eureka" moment, only coffee flavoured... :)

Luke and Leia - updated colours

Slightly updated colours - used Artrage for the painting, GIMP for adjustments. All I've got to do now is think of a caption or speech bubble...

Hi 'Yall

Very quick cartoon of some sort of "Trek" character -drawn using OpenCanvas.

SuSE FTP masquerading

For those in the know, enabling masquerading for certain machines & ports in SuSEfirewall2 is relatively straight forward (enable masquerading, allow the address(es) and port in the config file) but this doesn't work for ftp. The reason is because the FTP protocol doesn't just use one channel, but several, and these are decided on the fly. The firewall doesn't know this... but it can if you load 2 firewall modules called ip_conntrack_ftp & ip_nat_ftp modules. You enable these in the FW_LOAD_MODULES option. This will all work if it's a passive ftp connection - if it's active, you may have to enable a wider port range for the required addresses...

Luke & Leia - initial colours

These are the initial colours for a cartoon I'm working on now. I haven't come up with any captions yet - that's coming later! Hand inked, scanned into GIMP, colours in GIMP & OpenCanvas...

windows - inaccessible boot device

Just a quick note to myself. To fix...

1. chkdsk /r
2. fixboot
3. (optional) fixmbr
4. If none of the above do not work, if you have a backup, recover the system32 directory in windows root. Use RIPLinux or similar.
   

GRUB install problems...

I've been fighting recently with a virtual linux box, trying to get the size of the virtual hard disk reduced (and as you know, MS Virtual PC doesn't shrink Linux hard disks very well). My answer was to create a new vitual blank hard disk, repartition it, recover the data, restore GRUB, and I'd be away...

Trouble is, it wasn't that easy. Every time I tried to use GRUB to setup the MBR, I got various errors - the long ang short of it was that GRUB couldn't see the files on the partition, even though I'd chroot'ed, and could see them perfectly.

The solution to my problem was twofold. Firstly, I hadn't created the partition properly. GRUB only works with partitions that use a inode size of 128, so I had to create the ext3 partition with...

mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda2

The next stage (after I recovered the data) was to chroot to the mounted /dev/sda2, and run GRUB in interactive mode, to setup the MBR - but still no luck, no files could be found. The reason was twofold

1. The linux recovery system CD used had /dev/hda as the IDE disk, not /dev/sda, so I changed my linux recovery system CD to one that used the same devices as my virtual linux system.
2. The sys, proc and dev points mounted as chroot did not match my current rescue system, so I needed to do the following before chrooting...

mount -t ext3   /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount -t proc   proc      /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs  sys       /mnt/sys
mount -o bind   /dev      /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Once this was all done, I was able to run the GRUB interactive setup correctly. Interestingly, the inode size of 128 can also affect LILO too...

For more information, please look at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reinstalling_GRUB.