Arch Linux and network profiles

Just as a small note to self. I have been setting up Arch Linux on a laptop and had trouble working with network profiles. So here's a reminder on what is needed (after supporting software like dialog and netcfg have been installed, and drivers for your wireless card are functioning):

1. Create the profiles in /etc/network.d/. Easiest process is to copy relevant examples from /etc/network.d/examples/ and modify as needed.
2. Add "net-profiles" to the DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf
3. Uncomment the NETWORKS line in /etc/rc.conf and set it to read "NETWORKS=(menu)"
4. Comment out the lines related to a fixed network in /etc/rc.conf, but keep HOSTNAME
   

Information is available in the Arch wiki, but I misread and thought that the daemon to add was "network-profiles". It took me a while to figure it out...

The !joys of Windows

Edit to my previous post. Being more than a little naive I posted before checking whether things would work or not. dd for windows actually finished, seemingly successfully, but alas, either I made a mistake regarding the proper command line or it just doesn't work under vista, because when I tried booting from this stick it did not work - and when I tried to check what the disk looked like with cfdisk (yes I rebooted into Arch...) it said there was something seriously wrong with the disk. So I did what I should have done from the start: I ran dd under Linux. And it was good! First it was about a billion times faster and second, it worked ;-). Simple:

dd if= of=/dev/sdb

Your device may be different of course...

Getting an image to a usb stick under Windows Vista is slooooow

Windows Vista might be fun!
I had to get my work laptop reinstalled due to various undefinable problems so as I had the option to go with Vista I thought it could be, well, interesting... So far it generally works as well as I expected. We have Vista Enterprise and due to my job I and my colleagues are admins on our computers so no big problems in terms of getting things done as I like - the rest of the company have well-locked down boxes - which is good for most of them!
Anyway, today I had the need to write an iso image (750MB) to a usb stick (Kingston 1GB). I could boot into my Arch Linux partition but as there are win32 tools for accomplishing this it would be unnecessary. The iso was bz2-compressed so I first needed to extract the image.
Tools needed:

• bzip2
• dd

I renamed the bzip2 executable to just "bzip2.exe" and in order to not having to mess with paths I dumped the executables in the same directory as the compressed file. Then, in a command line window I ran:

bzip2 -d

I then located the image among the extracted files and moved that to where bzip2 and dd executables were and ran:

dd if= of=\\.\g: --size --progress

Important! In order to find out which drive to use I first run

dd --list

as writing the image to the wrong drive could cause a lot of destruction!!! Be careful!
About the --size option - it's probably not necessary since I'm not reading from a usb stick, just writing to it, if I understand the dd documentation.
So, I'm still not sure if this will work in the end since the point of this post is that the process of writing to the stick takes frickin' ages! It ran for a while before I started writing this post and it is still running now that I am nearing the end. It might be the stick that's slow and I can't compare with win xp right now so I can't tell if that is any better, but HELLO! Vista is sure nice in terms of looks but it is definitely no performer, judging by other people's opinions on the wild web so I think it is mainly a Vista issue... If I had rebooted into Arch I think this would have been done by now. Sigh. 300MB now, just 45 minutes or so left...
Luckily I can do other important stuff in the mean time - like post this blog entry! Yay!

...from Mediahemmet