Computer Tips -Tech Info

Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.

Read the rest of this entry »

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

   Send article as PDF   

I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

   Send article as PDF   

I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you can tell, it’s been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought that I’ve still got running (due in part to the open browser tabs that I just can’t seem to let myself close….)

   Send article as PDF   

I’ve got a home project to run more network cable here lately and found techtoolsupply to be an interesting resource for network and other cabling supplies. I don’t recall who I ordered from last time, it’s been several years (and those big spools of cable last for years unless you do a LOT of cabling.) On other notes…. There are many very good do it yourself wiring resources from electrical like this link to network wiring. Many people think that wireless means that it’s just backwards to install network cabling. (I don’t know how many people told me “why don’t you just use wireless” when I mentioned that when we built I wanted to get cat5 cable installed.) Well – here goes – wired is 1)faster and 2) more secure – yes I’ve heard of WPA for wireless, but my wired lan is between 10 and 100 times faster than my current wireless (yes, I’m running 802.11b still and an upgrade to the wireless wouldn’t get it up to the same speed yet either. then my wired network would be 2-20 times faster. (Of course that’s best case – clear line of sight to the wireless access point.)

   Send article as PDF   

In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as “metapackages” which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it “needs”. For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package is just such a package – when choosing it, it installs everything necessary for the kubuntu desktop/customizations to install. So, I was hit with an idea while I was apt-getting 30-40 odd packages…. everytime I “provision” a new ubuntu system I have a list of packages that I want to make sure are installed, why don’t I just create a single metapackage and be done with it to make life simpler…. But how could I do this?

Read the rest of this entry »

Deleting TONS of comment spam that had slipped in unnoticed in the last couple months. I may have to generically disable pingbacks as well as comments. (Sad…) I hope I haven’t dumped legit comments in the purge, but…. really life is to short to spend too much time filtering it manually.

   Send article as PDF   

For quite a while I’ve used ghost4linux (g4l) for my disc cloning needs. What I REALLY like are the ability to do a network copy of the image to an ftp server and the built in dd_rescue to rescue data from a failing hard drive. Unfrotunately g4l does a bit by bit copy of a drive which means it can take a while and it copies the full drive capacity (say for instance 80GB) even if you only have 5GB worth of information. Now, it can be compressed and if you massage the drive by defraging/filling empty space with ones before you start you can squeeze the image down pretty small, but… sometimes that’s a big task (I remember leaving one box writing zeros to the drive overnight to prepare the empty space for a g4l cloning.) Anyway…. I’ve run across clonezilla recently and am VERY impressed – it’s basically a wrapper around partimage – it will only copy the data component of a disc’s contents if it recognizes the filesystem (most linux filesystem types ext2/3/reiser plus ntfs and fat… it seems like a couple others too.) If it doesn’t recognize the filesystem it drops back to bit by bit mode which is nice. The only other thing I would want from it is better documentation and dd_rescue capabilities. (And maybe a fuse module to be able to image to/from ftp servers.) It supports several network approaches (samba/ssh) for writing/reading images over a network.

Read the rest of this entry »