Truecrypt, a great application to encrypt file partitions and entire devices. A new version had been released. This version covers the following improvements and new features. From the website:

New Features:

• The I/O pipeline now uses read-ahead buffering, which improves read performance especially on solid-state drives, typically by 30-50%.  (Windows)

Improvements, Bug Fixes, and Security Enhancements:

• The boot loader now supports motherboards with BIOSes that reserve large amounts of base memory (typically for on board RAID controllers). Note: In order to be able to take advantage of this improvement under Windows Vista, you will have to install Service Pack 1 or higher first. Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista resolved an issue causing a shortage of free base memory during system boot.  (Windows Vista/XP/2008/2003)
• Mounting using the ‘Auto-Mount Devices‘ feature may take significantly less time as partitions containing unencrypted files systems are now skipped.  (Windows)
• When volumes that are mounted as read-only or removable are saved as favorite volumes. They are mounted as read-only and/or removable when ‘Mount Favorite Volumes‘ is used.
• When a multiple-pass wipe algorithm is selected when performing in-place encryption of a non-system volume, the header areas will be wiped before the encrypted headers are written to the disk. Note: On an existing volume, you can perform such an operation by changing its password and/or key files.  (Windows)
• Many other minor improvements, bug fixes and security enhancements.  (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)

Keeping personal and corporate files saved is important.  Truecrypt is a great way to protect these files.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should do it now. Truecrypt is compatible with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

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Unetbootin Install Linux Distro’s On A Flash Drive With Out Hassle

After burning a million CD’s I decided to search for a better solution.  I found Unetbootin. Unetbootin will automatically download and install Linux iso’s to your USB flash drive.  I’m always looking for applications that make my life easier.  Unetbootin saves me the time of having to burn every distro I want to try to disk.  Let’s face it, we are still in an economic crisis and saving money is a good thing.

Installation

There are two ways to install Unetbootin.  You can install it out of the repositories using Synaptic or adept.  But this will to allow you to install the latest version of Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04.  For that you have to install the version you can download from their website.  For the website version there is no install necessary.  The download is a executable file.  Download the file and make it executable make sure you are in the directory you downloaded it to:
In terminal:

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/unetbootin-linux*

Or the point and click way:
Right click on unetbootin-linux-323 and select properties. Click the Permissions tab mark the box in front of Is executable. Now you are able to click on the binary. A password prompt will pop-up put in your sudo password. Unetbootin will start and you are ready to make bootable flash drives.

Features

You can select a distribution to put on the flash drive as said, this will download and install the distro to the flash drive.  Select an iso that you have already downloaded and install that to the flash drive.  Or make a custom Kernel install with your own Initrd and options.  Select the drive (it also can install distros to the hardrive) and click OK.  Unetbootin will now download the iso, then install it to the flash drive.

Conclusion

Unetbootin is a great application. The only thing I wish it had out of the box, is support for multiple distro’s.  It does have a boot manager so it should not be to difficult to support.  I might be able to figure out how to do this.  If so I’ll write another blog post about it.

If you liked what you read or it helped you in any way. Please help keep this website available and donate.

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If you are following me on Twitter then you already know.  My wife decide when the upgrade from 8.04 to 9.04 when the pop-up showed up on her laptop to upgrade right away.  This was on Thursday the day that 9.04 was released.  This should not have been a problem.  However this blog post wouldn’t be here, if it would have worked.

What Went Wrong

I can only speculate, but I believe that the Canocial server were overloaded with everyone doing updates.  As a result of this, one of the update servers became unreachable.  Resulting in an incomplete upgrade.  The following error came up after the laptop restarted:

gave up waiting for root device. common problems
-boot args (cat/ proc/cmdline)
-check rootdelay=(did the system wait lon enough?)
-check root=did the system wait for the right device?)
-missing modules(cat /proc/modules;

ls/dev)
Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/be80cf42-e6f2-466c-bb73-7d664956a334 does not exist dropping to a shell

The laptop would not start up Kubuntu.  No matter which solution (there are a few out there) I tried.

The Solution

Well not really so much of a solution, but it fixed the problem.  The only way to fix it was to reinstall Jaunty Jackalope.  Luckily we have a separate home partition thus saving all the important personal files and settings.  The clean install went just fine.  After fixing the fstab to point to the home partition, a few problems surfaced.  Often when upgrading the settings stored in the home folder change as well. Also when pointing to the old setting in the home partition some problems with Kontact and the desktop icons as well as some other apps needed to be fixed.

After fixing those, then reinstalling all apps that had disappeared and installing the correct video drivers to get compiz to work right (we all love the eyecandy lol).  It is again working fine.

For more info about Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 read these articles I’ve written for Bright Hub:

Canonical Releases Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

What’s New In Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Has this blog helped you in any way?  Then please Donate some dollars to help out with the hosting costs. Thanks.

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I changed that with this article on Bright Hub it goes into how to back up with the GUI in detail.  After reading that you will be able to back-up any Kubuntu system using the GUI.

As always it has plenty of screen shots to illustrate ease of use.

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The choice for Ktorrent was really not that hard looking at the great features that Ktorrent has.  Of which the bandwidth scheduler is probably the coolest.  This allows me to schedule the seeding part to the hours that the network is not being used.

For more information please read my article on Bright Hub by clicking the link below.

Ktorrent: The Easiest Torrent Client For Linux

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Why Twitter or Mitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool used by people to post “tweets” of what they are doing at the moment. Some even use it to report to the world about current news events. World disasters, such as the May 2008 earthquake that hit China, have reached Twitter first, before the news media was on the scene to report to the people.

What Is Mitter?

Mitter is a desktop tool that allows you to read and post tweets on your Twitter account. It resides in the task bar for easy access. The Mitter icon will change from a “m” to an “m with a star” when new tweets are posted.

Mitter is written in the Python programing language, PyHildon (similar to PyGTK), so Mitter can be used on both Gnome and KDE.

Read More

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When putting a photo gallery online with 30 or more images, it sometimes becomes a real drag to scale down one by one.  When I was using Photoshop, I used the automate process to create a macro. However in GIMP, Script-fu is used and is an excellent way for batch editing, but it doesn’t have macro function. Script-fu as name suggests, uses a script for batch editing.

Script-fu was developed to allow a command line access to GIMP. In this case how ever we will be using the user interface version.

I need to find a script to perform the task’s I wanted. Found it on the gimptalk forum.  Yes I could have written a script my self but why waste the time.

There is a downloadable script that doesn’t adjust width and height like I wanted. I wanted to scale the images from 100% to 50%.

Scroll down there you will find the following script:

(define (script-fu-batch-scale-ratio globexp ratio)
  (define (resize-img n f)
   (let* ((fname (car f))
          (img (car (gimp-file-load 1 fname fname))))
       (let* (
             (drawable   (car (gimp-image-active-drawable img)))
             (cur-width  (car (gimp-image-width img)))
             (cur-height (car (gimp-image-height img)))
          (new-width  (* ratio cur-width))
          (new-height (* ratio cur-height))
             (new_ratio      (min (/ new-width cur-width) (/ new-height cur-height)))
             (width      (* new_ratio cur-width))
             (height     (* new_ratio cur-height))
          )

         (gimp-image-undo-disable img)
         (gimp-image-scale img width height)
         (gimp-file-save 1 img (car (gimp-image-get-active-drawable img)) fname fname)
         (gimp-image-delete img)
      )
    )
    (if (= n 1) 1 (resize-img (- n 1) (cdr f)))
  )
  (let* ((files (file-glob globexp 0)))
     (resize-img (car files) (car (cdr files))))
)

(script-fu-register "script-fu-batch-scale-ratio"
          _"Batch Image Scale By Ratio"
          "Hey!"
          "Nicholas Herring and Richard Hirner (http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Script-fu-Batch-Resi-e-9440-1.html) & ADP (http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/misc/tools/script_fu/ex_10.html), hello_earth"
          "2008, Nicholas Herring based on a script by Richard Hirner"
          "March 26, 2008"
          ""
          SF-STRING "Full path with wildcards" "C:\\Test\\*.jpg"
          SF-VALUE "Scaling ratio (min 0.01, max 1)" "0.50")
(script-fu-menu-register "script-fu-batch-scale-ratio"
          "/Xtns/Misc")

Copy the code and create a new text file. Then paste the code save it and close:

cd ~/Desktop && nano batch_rescale.scm

Or you can point and click. Go to the desktop and right click and select create new then text file name the file batch_rescale.scm, now copy, save and close.

To make sure our new script will be picked up and loaded by GIMP, it needs to be copied to the script directory in the configuration folder for GIMP.

cd ~/Desktop && cp batch_rescale.scm ~/.gimp-2.4/scripts/

Or the point and click way in Konqueror:

Right click the file on the desktop and copy. Open Konqueror click home holder then click on view. Then click on show hidden files, you will be able to scroll down to .gimp-2.4 folder and click on it. Scroll to the scripts folder and click on it, paste the file in there.  Now close Konqueror.

With D3lphin:

Right click on file on the Desktop and copy. Open D3lphin and click view. Select show hidden files, scroll down to .gimp-2.4 folder then click on it. Scroll to the scripts folder and paste file in there. Now close D3lphin.

Now that the script has been copied, how do we use it?

Let’s make sure we understand this script replaces the image or photo. If you are like me and like to keep the originals, then copy the folder with the images you want to scale down and use the script on the copy.

Here’s an image of the files I’m going to scale:

As you can see most of these photos are over 2MB.

Lets scale them down and see what we and up with.

Open GIMP.

Go to the “xtns”:

Select misc then click “batch image scale by ratio”.

A window will open, change the directory to the location of your images, in my case:

/home/madberry/Pictures/20080928/*.JPG

Note I used a “*” as a wild card so all  images in the directory will be scaled down.
Script in action:

Here’s the result, smaller files that will load up quickly in any web browser.

Because we are using a ratio to scale images we don’t have to worry about the photo being a landscape or portrait.

Simple and easy way to scale down images.

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Why choose Krusader?

If you are like me and use a current version of Kubuntu (here is what I use), then you might find that D3lphin, which is now said to be the standard file browser, is insufficient in providing the more advanced file-browsing options. For one thing, it doesn’t have tabbing, which I use alot. It also doesn’t have a very good built-in search for files. D3lphin uses Strigi, and I haven’t been able to get any good search results from Strigi.

The following link will take you to a website I just started writing to check it out.

Read More

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Let’s say you wanna install a package but you don’t know for sure if it’s in the repository’s.  Then you can use this Terminal command to do so:

We’ll search for firefox as an example.

apt-cache search firefox

As you can see this displays a list of all packages related to Firefox.

Now let’s install Firefox:

Here we have to use sudo or apt won’t work and tell you:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

so let’s install:

sudo apt-get install firefox

Put your password in and answer yes to any questions.
And start using Firefox.

You could start Firefox from the Terminal( for debugging purposes) like this:

firefox

Or maybe you don’t want the debugging info add a space an &

firefox &

You can find Firefox under the start menu start->internet->Firefox
That’s it for this “Mini How To”.

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I found this great little app. called Remastersys, that I use for backing up or as I call it making a snapshot of our systems.

It was written by Tony Brijeski aka Fragadelic. And he wrote it as a backup utility for Klikit-Linux(powered by Kubuntu) and Ubuntu.  I was looking for something that would make backing up my Kubuntu installs(we have 5 computers all running Kubuntu) easy.

Tony wanted a simple way to create a distributable copy of a Ubuntu or derivative installation.  This is done by making a live CD or DVD. I’ve made several backups already using Remastersys and i must say I love it.

I use it as a command line app. but for clickers there is a GUI available.

I like using Terminal to do stuff in Kubuntu so that’s the way where going to install this first.  The clickers will find the install instructions further down.

We need to start by adding the Remastersys repository to the sources list of apt(I use nano but you may use any text editor available):

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following lines to the bottom of this file:

# Remastersys
deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

After this save the file.  To save the file with nano click ctrl+x then y and hit enter.

Now lets install Remastersys:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y remastersys

Then you’re all set to start using Remastersys.

Click by Click install.

Click the Kubuntu button.  Go to “System” and click “Adept Manager – Manage Packages”.  Adept Manager will now open click on “Adept” in the dropdown menu now click on “Manage Reposetories” click the second tab called “Third Party Software” then click “Add” then add the following line:

deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

Click Ok click close a window will pop-up telling you “The information about available software is out-of-date” click “Reload”(I’m assuming that the computer is connected to the internet). No type Remastersys in the search box.  Then right click on Remastersys and select “Request Install” click on “Apply Changes”.  Adept will now install Remastersys after Adept is done close it.  Scroll down or click here to go to the part on how to use Remastersys.

Now we can start backing up the system.

We can first make some changes to the configuration file I’ll provide mine so you can steal it and make the changes you want to it.

In terminal type:

sudo nano /etc/remastersys.conf

Here is the contents of mine.

#Remastersys Global Configuration File

# This is the temporary working directory and won't be included on the cd/dvd
WORKDIR="/home/remastersys"

# Here you can add any other files or directories to be excluded from the live filesystem
# Separate each entry with a space
EXCLUDES=""

# Here you can change the livecd/dvd username
LIVEUSER="madberry"

# Here you can change the name of the livecd/dvd label
LIVECDLABEL="Backup $(date +%Y%m%d)"

# Here you can change the name of the ISO file that is created
CUSTOMISO="$(date +%Y%m%d)_$1_$(hostname).iso"

# Here you can set whether you want to use ISOLINUX or GRUB(must be all capitals) for the livecd boot method
CDBOOTTYPE="ISOLINUX"

Let’s explain:

I’ve changed LIVECDLABEL and CUSTOMISO to include the date.In the ISO name I also have the host name as I Remastersys more then one system and store the backups on a server.

Close the file (ctrl+x type y hit enter).

Now we can start backing up systems.  There are 2 ways of making a backup

sudo remastersys dist

Which will create a live distributable CD or DVD.  If you want to do this then make sure you haven’t installed any proprietary drivers because the systems that the CD/DVD might be used on will probably not have that hardware in it.

And:

sudo remastersys backup

Which will also copy over your userfiles out of /home/username.
After you create the Live CD or DVD and have tested it to make sure everything work you have the option to clean up all of Remastersys’s files by running:

sudo remastersys clean

there are a couple more options just run:

remastersys --help

And see for yourself.

GUI Lovers here is your “how to”.

Point you mouse to the Kubuntu button and click you will find Remastersys under “System” click it and this is what you will see:

Most of this will need little explaining if you read through my entire post.

That’s it the first post is done leave comments if you have any questions or remarks.

Laterzzzzzzzzzzzzz,
[mad]Berry

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