Upgrade ext3 to ext4

I was interested in upgrading my laptop's hard drive to ext4 from ext3.  Ext4 offers some features over ext3, and I figured that since I upraded to Kubuntu 9.10, I might as well upgrade the file system.

This blog post describes the steps needed to upgrade from ext3, without formatting the hard drive.

Unfortunately, I didn't unmount it before running through the steps, and I didn't pay attention to the fsck warning.  My partition did get corrupt, and I decided to reformat and do a clean install.  (At least I am able to create an ext4 partition, and it is nice to do a clean install every once in a while.)

Luckily, I was able to restore all of my data, since I have been backing up my files on Linux with JungleDisk.  Also, I am able to restore my Windows VMWare image, since it is backed up to my Windows Home Server.

Skype video with Ubuntu 9.10

I had to reinstall Kubuntu, for a reason that I will write about later, so I needed to reinstall skype.  When I downloaded and tried  the 2.1 beta, I wasn't able to get video to work.

I was able to use the instructions on this page to get video working.  You need to launch skype with the following command line:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv41/vl1compat.so skype