disk space, the final frontier

HP PL DL360G3 running Samba 3.2.6 on OpenSuse 11.1 with 12 Samsung HE103UJ in RAID6+LVM on an HP MSA20 via Hp 642 SCSI RAID Controller.

fuse your workgroup on the aspire one with fusesmb instead of sambaing with cifs mount

If you really want to browse the Windows Network from your Aspire One Linpus Linux, there is actually a way better alternative to the clumsy

samba sudo mount -t cifs

You'll still need the terminal but you won't need to sudo or individually mount each share. You will see the entire Network Neighbourhood with browseable Wrokgroups, individual computers and their shares. Sweeet ain't it !?
So the answer is fuse, the fusesmb implementation to be more precise.
And it goes something like this.
Only one note, it's not

fuse /home/user/samba

but

fusesmb /home/user/samba

And in the File Browser you will have to manually type the path /home/user/samba
in the Path field at the top instead of the default My Disk:///
It must be working pretty decently as I haven't had any complaints yet. Now if anyone knows a way to get this to work on Leopard too please drop a comment here. I'll be forever greateful!

MySQL Workbench now on a Mac near you!

Well this happened a good while ago.
DBDesigner4 is my weapon of choice for well, database design. But is Win only so it's one of the fewer and fewer reasons of me running XP in VirtualBox. Actually the only other one is a VPN problem. So as you will see below, one down, only one more to go baby :D
Didn't like the turn Fabforce took when they dropped it and joined MySQL but hey, whatever works!
But they definitively got my love back when on April 1st of this year the Beta version for OSX was released :O
And

"for the moment (until we finally get to re-enable full OpenGL support) using the Mac version is the new benchmark of model rendering speed for MySQL Workbench projects."

Installed it, ran it, loved it!

get a linux netbook. change her world.

Well she's been wishing for one for such a long time now!
:)
And since she's into writing and literature we could easily look towards the Acer Aspire One.
Because all she really wants is to read PDFs, edit text documents, surf the web, stay in touch with friends and watch movies.
And mount Windows shares :P
So we decided on the a150-aw.
Well a little sudo mount in the terminal never hurt any writer. Naturally she also needed to figure out the IP of the Win box :) Well she did with a little help...
The really great news was that except for the need to watch movies all the items on the "must have" checklist were there and worked out of the box. Mplayer was there but we really like VLC. Open Office 2, Firefix 2 and the custom Mail and Messenger. Even Yahoo video works so that's more than expected as far as I'm concerned. Also the Fedora Skype package works very good so connectivity is there.
For avi playback we really needed VLC and after some fiddling and browsing around I installed the latest release and it worked flawlessly. No wireless problems either as The Little One does full screen avi playback from a samba mount via wireless without any glitches. You don't want to turn the volume to max because that will cause some annoying blips.
We even went so far as trying Compiz Fusion and that worked very nice too until we started a movie in VLC. Bad frame dropping. Probably caused by the window decorations and opacities that require a lot of cpu when applied to a video window. So I disabled the nice elasic snapping, alpha blending, fire burning and aqua dissolving windows and went back to the dull but so familiar Redmond theme.
From my point of view this was the definitive Linux test. Cause I really know the user and I knew from the start where the troubles could come from. So the experiment started with "look, you can try to use it for a week and if you hate it we'll install XP". And now, one week later she's still a happy worry free Linux user.
So this is going to be the year of Linux on the netbook!
But she doesn't like it when I open the terminal and I start typing stuff and he has no idea what I'm doing there!
So more after the firmware update :D