If you have tried used a Ubuntu Live CD recently, you might have noticed the USB disks don’t automatically mount. You may cry, you may call the cops, but there’s no way you will mount it GUI-style. You’ll need to use the terminal (gasp!).

1. Type fdisk -l and use it to find the right disc (sda, sdb…).
2. Once you’ve found the right disk, create a folder to mount it by typing this: mkdir mylovelymountfolder
3. Now mount it to your newly created folder: sudo mount /dev/??? mylovelymountfolder
4. Ta-da!

It’s simple, but it’s good to know when you just want to mount your stupid MP3 player to kill time while GParted is working its magic on your drives.

After a week of testing Windows 7 and almost no mishaps (don’t try zipping a 20GB file!), I decided Windows 7 was worthy of my attention. I slowly started moving my software, parameters and documents to the new platform and I don’t regret it. When going back to Vista to remove stuff, I couldn’t help but notice how much slower it was compared to the new OS.

It’s totally worth a switch!

On a side note, I couldn’t help but notice how inefficient software removal is in Windows. I got so used to simply unchecking checkboxes to remove applications I had forgot how ridiculously retarded it was in Microsoft’s OS. I know it’s stupid, but wouldn’t an operating system with an App Store-like filtering of applications be an awesome thing to see on a full OS? As long as there is a way to circumvent it (oh wait, multiverse…), people wouldn’t mind…

For people like me who never know which engine to set in the Firefox search bar, here is a nice little add-on that will let you put both in the same window. Sure, you could always use two search bars using an add-on, but Googlepedia makes it much easier and more ergonomic.

I love life!

I finally managed to get my greasy hands on a copy of Windows 7, all thanks to my fantastic school program. I installed it tonight after downloading it for hours at a time on my school’s network.

Installation

Installing Windows 7 could not be simpler. After 3 or 4 questions, it started installing itself. The whole thing took under 30 minutes with no incidents. After a quick and absolutely painless install, I was absolutely delighted to see all my hardware seemed to work right. I still tought there was a little too much stuff in the Start menu that should have been buried deeper. I don’t like seeing notepad and rarely used utilities in the same place, but that’s just me. Nonetheless, a flawless “two thumbs up” for the installation. I expected to have to find and download drivers, but it wasn’t the case. Nick is happy.

Update: Windows 7 erased my GRUB bootloader, which is a big no-no, but nothing new from from Microsoft. Some useful tutorials can be found on the internet to get this fixed.

First impressions

I gotta say I’m pleased to see a more responsive interface and the complete revamp of the taskbar is welcome. For once, it really feels like they put a lot of thinking into it. The new features will appeal both to newcomers and power users. It’s also good to see they’ve combined all of the warnings under a single icon in the notifications area. They’ve also changed the Windows selector in a very intelligent way. I love how the window buttons show all kinds of information. The only thing I would have to say is that the bar uses way too much screen space without justification. I don’t see why there is no way to make it thinner. It’s otherwise a very good step in the right direction.

A thing I’ve always hated about Windows is how retarded things are divided in the system. You always have to search for this or this panel. The new control panel, while much easier to read through, still doesn’t seem to fix that problem. There ARE some improvements in the division of tasks, but I’m still looking for something akin to the ridiculously simple Gnome preferences menu.

The new Windows Explorer didn’t improve much, sadly enough, but it’s not that bad. Microsoft’s engineers added a few subtle changes to get things done faster, but there’s no easy-to-use folder up button yet. Still a very useable application, but nothing to rave about.

The system itself feels much snappier, even on a laptop that played fine with Vista. I’m glad to finally see I don’t need a ridiculous amount of RAM and CPU when idle. That alone is a major selling point for me. It might just become the next gaming rig OS, skipping Vista for obvious reasons.

Conclusion

This time, we’ve got a winner! Windows 7 indeed looks like a fixed Windows Vista, and that’s how I like it. Many improvements were made to the interface to make it truly worth it, not to mention the improved performances. Don’t be shy, this time it’s worth it!

I spotted this video on Digg of a new L4D mod by flameknight7. This is the most wicked mod I’ve seen in a while (because you never say ‘ever’ on the internet).

Those of you looking to download it can find it right here. Since the traffic is high (the darned Digg effect), you might not be able to grab it right now, however.

Recently, you might also have been victim of the Fan Check phenomenon. This Facebook application creates a new photo in your album where all your most active friends are marked. While this is kind of a cool app, everyone marked on the photo get a notification everytime someone comments on the photo, on every photo they are marked.

Unlike other applications, these cannot be blocked/hidden because they hijack the Photos application. There is, however, a simple way to stop getting notifications. In this example, I used a Fan Check photo, but this trick also applies to other similar apps such as Friends Character.

1. Open the photos on which you are marked by clicking on it on your wall or in your notifications.

2. Scroll down under the photo where the names of those who are marked are.

3. Click “remove tag” right beside your name.

Extra steps:

If you want to walk the extra mile, you can also report the application. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/fancheck and scroll all the way down. Now, click “Report” in the bottom left corner of the page. Simply explain that Fan Check cannot be blocked from your wall and file it under “spam”.

As many of you might have noticed, Ubuntu’s support for bluetooth mice is a hit-or-miss kind of thing. To solve this, I used the Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 as it has both bluetooth and 2.4gHz wireless. This way I could still get around connectivity problems by switching to 2.4gHz mode. It’s was a shitty mouse, but I’ve been able to get it to work on bluetooth mode without doing anything special. I’m not 100% sure of what I’m saying, but it costs nothing to try.

First, you will notice pairing a Microsoft bluetooth mouse will not work. While Ubuntu might say it works, the blinking bluetooth discovery LED on the mouse will keep flashing. However, at next boot, the mouse works absolutely perfectly! That happened twice to me, and I think it might happen just about everytime if I don’t switch off bluetooth as soon as it fails to connect.

I’ll keep doing it and if it works everytime (which would mean it works even better than on Vista), then I’ll write a short guide about it.

Stick around!

UPDATE: Second boot, mouse works as expected. We got something!

UPDATE 2: After several successful boots, I can confirm these work. All you have to do is to pair them and reboot and they work just fine!

Never in the past would I have seen this coming. Back in the time when PS2 ports were all the rage, I could never have expected mice to be headache-inducing bundles of hate. I explain.

With my first laptop, I had bought a simple, wired logitech laser mouse. I had no budget for those awesome wireless mice and thus used my mighty 3-button mouse until I bought another laptop. Then, having mastered the art of saving tons of money with eBay, I got myself a wireless mouse. A MICROSOFT wireless mouse, mind you. It worked rather well, with some connectivity issues here and there, but nothing to go crazy about. I eventually broke it by my own fault and decided to upgrade to the all-too-awesome Microsoft Wireless Memory Mouse 8000. In a line: bluetooth and 2.4gHz wireless, 1GB memory on the dongle, charges on the dongle, 5 buttons. What a mistake.

First, I discovered you have to use IntelliPoint, the software that allows you to use your mouse. That’s right, you need nasty software for your mouse to work. IntelliPoint… doesn’t work that well. Scrolling wasn’t always working (that’s right, scrolling) and the mouse stopped working with the dongle. With only bluetooth left, my only choice was to use it, which wasn’t that much of a big deal. That’s until Windows Vista’s shitty bluetooth support charged in. The mouse would rarely – if ever – be recognized when I turned on my computer so I had to remove the device and repeat the pairing process every – goddamn – time. Charging didn’t work everytime neither, rendering the mouse absolutely worthless.

So, as soon as I lost my now-useless dongle, I tossed the mouse aside and bought myself the first mouse I had, from Logitech, thise time with artsy zebra stripes. The previous one is still serving my mother, 4 years later, and NEVER failed to connect. Mice is another thing I will stop buying from Microsoft, along with mobile devices, keyboards and software.

Looking for a simple way to clone your drive? Once again your Ubuntu Live CD has the tools you need to backup your hard drive safely and for free. It takes some time, but it works just as well as Norton Ghost, but it lets you use applications from the Live CD in the meantime.

In this tutorial, I used a Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD as it already has all the tools required and supports my wireless card out of the box, but as long as you can have Gparted, you will be fine.

Some things you should know:

• This command is safe when used safely, but make sure you understand it well before you do anything stupid.
• Running a file system check (fsck) is highly recommended.
• You might want to try this overnight, as it takes a lot of time and cannot be paused.*
• dd will make a byte by byte copy of your input location to your output location. Unless you output it to a file (like an ISO image), you will have to dedicate your entire output drive to the backup, as it will overwrite any file system previously there.
• Even if you already have a linux partition, use a Live CD it will result in errors in your backup. Altering files while they are being copied will create various problems.

Preparations:

1. Plug your external drive.

2. Boot on your Live CD and open GParted (System>Administration>Partition Editor).

3. Select your external hard drive from the drop-down menu in top right corner.

4. Once you are absolutely certain you’ve selected the right disk, erase every partition on your external hard drive. If you don’t want to dedicate a hard drive to a file, you can also output the command to a file (just like an iso image). In this case, this step is not necessary.

The quickest way to do this is to go to Device>Create partition table and select msdos

5. Find the name of your source and destination. This can be found, once again, using GParted. In the top right menu, find the drives you copy from and to. Make sure you don’t confuse the input source and output source or you are going to be in hot water!

The command

The dd command is a really simple and efficient command. Here’s how it works:

dd if=[input location] of=[output location] conv=sync,noerror

conv=sync,noerror will prevent problems from read errors. You don’t need it, but it sucks to see your backup halt 12 hours in because of a small error on your disk.

The input and output locations can be files, folders, partitions, media, anything. You can, for example, make an ISO image of a CD by setting the input as /dev/cdrom and the output as cdcopy.iso.

6. In our case, we will set the input to the drive to backup and the output to our external drive. Open a terminal and type your command using the locations from #5:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=sync,noerror

(make sure you have the right locations!!!)

7. To restore your backup, simply invert if and of.

*It took me 12 hours to copy a 250GB, 7200rpm laptop drive to a 5400rpm external drive. This is because the dd command copies the hard disk byte by byte.

The terminal in Gnome

To create an ISO image of a CD or DVD in Linux, you can use the dd command. Open up a terminal and type the following command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/toyouriso.iso

This will copy the contents of the folder specified by if to the file specified by of. This can also be used to backup your data from a drive to another too, but be careful, as using a blank disk in if will completely wipe the data of the space it is written to, unless you output it to file (like an ISO file).