Derek’s Musings

Let’s pretend your Linux system won’t boot. Let’s also pretend that you need some piece (or pieces) of data off of that partition.

Not too hard, right?

Well, you’d be right, unless you factor in that it’s an encrpyted LVM partion. Yeah…

1. Boot into Knoppix 5.3.1 (or other live distribution that supports LVM and LUKS)
2. In (or “at”, if you chose to skip X) a terminal:

   sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/ABC_BLOCK_DEVICE

   sudo lvm

   > vgscan

   > vgchange -a y XYZ_LVM_VOLGROUP

   > exit

   sudo mkdir /mnt/fubar

   ls /dev/mapper

   sudo mount /dev/mapper/123_LVM_LOGVOL /mnt/fubar

Assuming all goes smoothly, you can now access the encrypted LVM volume at “/mnt/fubar”.

While I didn’t receive a response from Yahoo! regarding the inability to view the Yahoo! home page in certain Web browsers, the issue does seem to be resolved.

Thanks Yahoo!.

• In Preferences | Sound change all Sound Playback fields to ALSA:
• In Preferences | Sessions uncheck PulseAudio Session Management:
• In Preferences | Sessions select Add and enter “killall pulseaudio” in the Name and Command fields; select OK:

Noticing a constant CPU spike in svchost.exe?

Well you might have run into a common problem with Windows Update.

1. Stop the Automatic Updates service
2. Delete (or rename) the %Windows%\SoftwareDistribution directory.
3. Restart (either the service or Windows altogether).

With any bit of luck your problems will be gone.

So…yeah. Yahoo! joins the ranks of Web sites which like to block certain Web browsers simply because they’re too lazy to implement the real solution: doing nothing at all.

The letter I sent to Yahoo!:

I can’t view the Yahoo! home page because it detects that I’m not using one of the “major” Web browsers: “To see all the new Yahoo! home page has to offer, please upgrade to a more recent browser.”

You should not block browsers simply because they’re not tested. Epiphany, the browser I’m currently using, is based off of Gecko, the same layout engine used in Firefox, which -is- supported on this site. Plenty of other, very usable browsers, are also blocked.

Please reconsider this. The Web is meant to be open, not needlessly neutered.

[Signature Truncated]

We’ll see what they have to say, if anything.