I'm happy to report that for the first time in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) SILC support in Pidgin will work without needing to recompile Pidgin. It's unfortunate that the process took so very long but at least it's finally done. I have tested the packages which have been backported to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and the SILC support seems to work well. I would certainly recommend people needing SILC support who are using Ubuntu 8.04 to try the backported packages instead of recompiling (though the recompiling task is a good learning experience).

I thought there was an easier way to do this but perhaps I have forgotten. I am a fan of Linux software RAID because of the fact you can transport the drives to other systems without having to worry about hardware RAID compatibility. Linux software RAID 1 also possesses good performance and reliability. However, sometimes you need to repair file system damage or create an image of the filesystem or perform other tasks needing the arrays to be accessible from either a Live CD or from another system. Here’s how I accomplished this recently.