So a little while back, a co-worker brings in his dads (Ted) computer for me to look at for him. Turns out it is riddled with viruses and spyware and other crud. The worst of these seemed to be some sort of Zlob-Media Codec infections which mess with the start menu (removing just about all the menu items), puts VIRUS ALERT by your system clock, and just plain messes with the registry.

He had an older version of AVG on there, so I tried to do a scan with that, then downloaded the newest version as well as SpyBot Search & Destroy. I was able to pick off a few of viruses through AVG, but at this point it wasn’t 100% updated because I was not about to plug this thing in to my network and let it online. The aggravating thing with that was that SpyBot didn’t seem to want to run until I let it to do an update. Long story short, some of the stuff got detected and dealt with, but now the computer won’t boot up at all. I get some sort of Virtual Device Driver DLL initialization from command.com and that’s about it.

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So yesterday I had some issues accessing my site here, and my photo site. I was getting internal server errors, or finally after four-five minutes of trying, the page would load. These were the only sites of the number of sites I host that seemed to be having a problem…. which led me to believe it wasn’t really a sever issue per se.

After trading a couple emails with the folks at Dreamhost, they helped me track down what may have been the problem, my photos site was getting hit with an unusually high number of connections. Three IP addresses were responsible for nearly 3000 connections to my photo gallery yesterday. 74.6.8.100 had 389 connections, 65.55.212.161 had 720, and 64.1.215.162 had a whopping 1724!

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Ok, with the new laptop I’m thinking there are times I’ll be parked in the living room, but want to access my files on the desktop. I poked around a bit and had to piece together a couple of tips to get things setup right.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron uses Nautilus-share to handle the file sharing. So open a location and right-click on a folder you want to share… towards the bottom you should see “Sharing Options”. If you don’t, try this in the terminal…

sudo apt-get install nautilus-share

If it is already installed, you’ll get a message saying so. If not, you should be good to go… after you do the the following; in terminal run this -

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Then in the Global Settings section add the following line somewhere:

usershare owner only = False

Save, close gedit, and restart everything and you should be good to go. No say you want to share your Pictures folder, open your Home folder, right-click on Pictures and click that Sharing Options menu item.

If you want to just allow read access, only use the top check box “Share this folder”, give it a new name if you want. If you want to allow write access, there’s “Allow other people to write in this folder” check box. They will need a login on the computer doing the sharing to get at this though. If you want to allow just anyone access, there’s the “Guest access” option. You probably don’t want to combine that with write access, but that’s just me.

Anyways, after this… my windows laptop had no problems seeing the folders I shared.

So the other night I finally got around to doing a bit of “cleaning up” around the office. Actually, I’ve been tackling re-organizing the home office a bit for a few weeks as I’ve been transitioning to a new job - which is why I haven’t posted much lately as well (more on that another time).

The other night, it was time to tackle the computer itself. I recently purchased a second hard drive, a 500GB SATA that I picked up at Best Buy for just under $100 on sale. This will go along with the 350GB already in my Acer, and the 120GB external. I should be set for a lil while.

I also put the ATI TV Wonder card in the Acer, and I was going to put my LG LightScribe DVD burner in as a second drive… but while the ribbon cable on the current drive is standard, and has a second connector… all my power connections were for SATA type drives, not IDE. I guess I’ll have to look for an adapter. The hard drive came with one that would have converted the “old style” to use with the hard drive, but I need one for the other way around I guess. Or maybe I only need one optical drive… we’ll save that for later.

I didn’t want to just do an upgrade from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron, I had messed a couple things up just enough that I was hoping a fresh install would give me a chance to learn from my initial mistakes. That was part of why I bought a second drive, thinking I would do the new install on the new drive. Well, I still have a bit to learn about Linux and file partions… I need to force myself to sit down and read up about it.

No, I don’t need to know this to make things work. Actually, the install went pretty painlessly. The install program recognized my 7.10 install, and offered to put it on a separate partition, which I did. It has made migrating my data over very very easy. It basically repartitioned the drive so it now has a 112.4GB partition that is my old 7.10 install. Eventually, I will nuke it to reclaim the space, but now I know I can take my time in migrating everything over.

The partitioning is what took the longest, but the rest of the install was just as easy as it had been in 7.10. Now when I boot, it even gives me the option to boot to either 8.04 or 7.10.

Once the install was done, I started doing some poking around. There was a message about copying over my previous profile… and when I brought up Evolution, all my mail was there… almost. My IMAP settings for my five main accounts (yea.. five) were there, but my local folders were not. The contacts and other info was not either. However… a simple copy of certain files and folders from the .evolution folder on that 7.10 partition to the new one had me back in business.

Speaking of business… I had to upload some files for work. I LOVE Filezilla on Windows, and I’ll be honest - I was a bit disappointed with the Linux version. It’s just not as poslished or something. The window that list my folders/ftp sites does not remember the settings when I resize it… and the default opens so small it is hard to view the list of sites I manage. But performance wise, most of the same features I love about it are there, but some just act differently. Not a huge issues, just takes getting used to I guess. I decided to try a different FTP program since I had to reinstall anyways, and Kasablanca was on the list when I did a quick search under Add/Remove Applications. All I can say is… blech.

I spent about 15 minutes and couldn’t get it to connect to a server. Yes, I realize I was most likely doing something “wrong”, but I’m not a beginner, it shouldn’t have been that much of a hassle just to connect to a site. So I went back to Filezilla.

Now I need to get mp3 and a few other things up and running so I can listen to some of my favorite podcasts and such.

The Ubunutu Community Documentaton site has some easy to follow instructions for doing this. There’s a package to install via Add/Remove Applications, or one apt-get command to run, and bada-bing, bada-boom - you can now play most common multimedia formats, including MP3, DVD, Flash, Quicktime, WMA and WMV, including both standalone files and content embedded in web pages.

More on some movie stuff in a bit.

There is a lot of bantering going on, from smaller blogs on up to the biggies, about how Ubuntu is the becoming generic name for Linux in much the same way all facial tissues are Kleenix, and all those peel and stick bandages are a Band-Aid.

One blog,  recently opened up with the following…

Linux is small enough. Let’s face it, most computer users don’t even know about Linux, let alone know what Ubuntu is. However, among new Linux users, Ubuntu is quickly becoming synonymous with Linux. And that is a shame.

I would disagree with that statement, and the author was even nice enough to give me a reason why in his next statement.

Linux has a breadth and depth to it that is hard to fathom for new users.

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I use Firefox for my browser when ever humanly possible. I have installed on my Windows box at work and on my Windows based laptop. Of course it is on my Ubuntu boxes here at home. I even keep the portable version on my thumbdrive.

If you use Firefox, good for you. If you don’t… why not? You should be. And just another reason to do so is the add-ons available. I am not a power-user by any stretch, but there are some that I use that really do make my browsing life easier… and I’m going to share a couple with you now, and more over the coming days. (don’t want to overwhelm you after all.)

I am not going to get in to any real depth here, I just want to point out these things out and give you my basic impressions as to why I use it.

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