My fellow Kellogg blogger, MBA Dutchie, posted up a DAK II summary that he spent a hell of a lot more time writing than I did. Wonderfully, he linked to a video summary of the weekend that the current students did (above).
The video:
Take a look at the video which I was shown by my pal Steve (who’s also on the way to Kellogg). This was a mainstream ad, featuring an inside joke about MBAs – which would sail right over the head of most people in the UK. More than anything, that illustrates how little brand value the MBA has in the UK (and possibly Europe) compared to the US.
Possibly the only useful article on the previous incarnation of this blog was this on, detailing how to pull GRUB back up under Ubuntu. This was written with reference to Ubuntu 4, which I was hooked on like a turbot.
There are many standard ways of reinstalling GRUB – most involve using a Linux rescue floppy (which noone creates) or a Linux Live CD, like Knoppix. Once you have yourself a prompt, you should be able to do this:
# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
… and that’s it. However, you’ll find that you grub will spit back at you “Filesystem type unknown, using whole disk†and you won’t be able to do anything else.
The best way of doing this in a normal distribution is to run:
# grub-install /dev/hda
… but that craps out in Ubuntu, giving you these lines:
/sbin/grub-install: line 429: /dev/null: Permission denied
/sbin/grub-install: line 431: /dev/null: Permission denied
Hungsquirrel puts us on the straight and narrow with this convolved but brilliant solution, slightly modified by me:
Remember to substitute the /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 for whatever the location of your root drive is. For example, if your booting from hd1,3 (physical drive 1, partition 3) then use /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part3. Most people will be booting from physical drive 0 somewhere. If you’re not sure where you’re booting from, the quickest way is to note it from the pre-partitioning setup screen in Ubuntu install.
When this reinstalls Grub, since it reads the menu.lst file directly from your root drive, your Grub menu will come back up exactly as you left it.
Credits:
Hungsquirrel post
A lot of Kellogg MBA students told me that there were a lot of recruiting events. They weren’t kidding – I’ve been invited to a BCG reception in London already. (I haven’t even freaking enrolled yet).
Ubuntu works amazingly well with this trusty old Dell model. There are, however, two pains in the ass – one for each cheek.
Firstly – the mouse freezes. Linux has a component called “powernowd” which throttles up and down the CPU depending on the requirement – you can see it working by adding the “CPU frequency scaling monitor” to the Gnome taskbar. You’ll notice the the mouse freezes occur when the CPU changes speed – how annoying! (I suspect the whole system freezes for a moment rather than just the mouse, but the mouse is what you’ll notice.) As far as I can tell, there’s no way to fix this functionality so it works and doesn’t freeze, so you’ll need to uninstall powernowd to get the computer working smoothly.
Secondly, if you have one of the wonderful high resolution displays (1400×1080), it won’t work correctly. It’s pretty easy to fix.
Add the Sync / Refresh lines into the Monitor section so it looks like this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-70
VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection
Then add the full resolution into each of the modes, so they all look like this:
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
That’s it – now save and reboot, and you should be working in full resolution. Hurrah!
Ubuntu Feisty, despite being wonderful in almost every way, doesn’t automatically detect and deal with the Dell 2005FPW 20″ widescreen monitor that a few of you may have. The solution is fairly simple.
This will get you into the configuration file which controls the display. We need to add a few lines which tell Ubuntu exactly how to handle this monitor.
Replace the Monitor section with this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DELL 2005FPW"
UseModes "16:10"
HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Change each of the “modes” sections to include the default resolution, which is 1680×1050.
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 4
Finally, add the modeline itself to tell Ubuntu how to handle the monitor. This goes right at the end.
Section "Modes"
Identifier "16:10"
ModeLine "1680x1050" 146.2 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1087 -hsync -vsync
EndSection
That’s it – now save and reboot, and you should be working in full resolution. Hurrah!
As seems to be a common theme, I was getting a 403 error when trying to change the name of this blog. The solution was in this thread – it was the mod_security module of Apache getting in the way, and adding these lines to Apache:
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
… disabled mod_security for my domain, and let me change the blog name. Personally, I removed them afterwards – I like having mod_security enabled.
This is fairly typical of how Kellogg DAK II was. At a little fair for all of the college clubs this group of guys pops out of nowhere and starts singing to us. WTF?
I’ve recently come back from the DAK II event for admitted students to Kellogg. It was just freaking awesome. I think I realise now why I got into some schools and not others – the canny buggers in Adcom just knew where I’d feel comfortable.
I intially applied to Kellogg because I had a lovely chat with someone from admissions at a Forte event in London (yes, the one that’s supposed to be for women.)
Here are the most awesome books I used to prep me for my MBA application. I’ve left out the dross – I heartily recommend these.