Category Archives: Howto

Re-map keyboard keys

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Many computer keyboards have an Fn key. It allows adding a second function to an existing key. An example is the F11 key. In combination with the Fn key it acts as a Volume Down:

Fn + F11 = Volume Down

Some other keyboards have this the opposite way – F11 acts as a Volume Down by default and you have to press and hold Fn in order to get the normal F11 key functionality.

If you want to change the default behaviour and you are lucky enough all it takes is to make the change in the BIOS of the computer. More likely your computer have no such setting so you need to use a keyboard re-mapping software. One such program is SharpKeys.

Ubuntu on a stick – Installation

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This is the first in a series of blog posts that talk about running Ubuntu from a USB flash drive.

Ubuntu (/u:’bu:ntu:/ oo-BOON-too) is a Debian-based Linux operating system. For more information about the operating system itself, please check Ubuntu (operating system) on Wikipedia.

Now that you know what Ubuntu is you may still wonder why anyone would like to run it from a USB flash drive. How about having a free full feature GUI operating system that comes with tons of free tools and applications that you can carry with you and run on any computer that has a USB port without the need to install anything? And it will even run on this 10-year old computer in your basement and will recognize all your devices and will install all the necessary drivers automatically. Not convinced yet? Well, I respect your right to do whatever you want with your time – go check what your friends are doing on Facebook or waste couple of hours on Minecraft. If on the other hand you are curious or stubborn enough to keep reading I will show you how to install Ubuntu on USB flash drive in few easy steps.

I will be doing this from Windows. I have 8GB USB flash drive and part of it will be used to host Ubuntu and the rest will be used for sharing files. In order to achieve this I need to partition the USB drive first. In Windows I use EaseUS Partition Master. Download it from here.

Install and run EaseUS Partition Master with the USB plugged in. We are going to create 3 partitions.

Partition 1
Type: Logical
File System: FAT32
Size: 2GB
Label: STORAGE

Partition 2
Type: Primary
File System: FAT32
Size: 1GB
Label: UBUNTULIVE

Partition 3
Type: Primary
File System: EXT2
Size: 4.22GB (The rest of the space)
Label: casper-rw

Press the “Apply” button to re-partition the USB drive. You should see something similar:

p01

The first partition will be used for file sharing. It is FAT32 because this is the file system that most of the operating systems can read. You can use it under Windows and Linux. If you need more space you can make it bigger at the expense of the last partition (casper-rw).

The second partition is where we are going to install UBUNTU. 1GB is a perfect size. It has to be FAT32 and Primary. Make sure it is set to Active. Since Windows will only show one partition for a removable USB flash drive we need this partition setup as described in order to be accessible in Windows.

The third partition will be used to store any changes we make to Ubuntu – installing new applications, changing the desktop image, etc. EXT2 is a good choice for a file system when it comes to USB flash drive. EXT3 and EXT4 are newer and have some advantages but also come with excessive disk operations which is not desirable for a USB flash.

Now you need to download the Ubuntu ISO file. We want the desktop version. I am using the 64-bit but you should make sure your computer is 64-bit. Otherwise get the 32-bit version. At the time of writing this the latest available version is Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS.

The next step is to install UBUNTU on the USB. There are several tools to do that and I had different results in the past. One that work well for me is Universal USB Installer. Download it.

Run the installer and on the selections page select Ubuntu from the drop-down, browse to the location you saved the ISO file and select the USB Flash Drive from the drop-down. Also use the slider to specify the Persistent file size. Do not slide it all the way to the right because it will complain there is no enough space. Just put the slider in the middle – the size of the file is not important since we are not going to use it at all. We are doing it just to make the installer to update some configuration files that tell the system to persist the changes. We will be using the third partition we created to persist all the changes we are making to our system:

p02

Leave the installer to run and be patient. When it is ready you should see a message like this:

p03

Click the “Close” button to finish. Go to the USB in file explorer and delete a file called casper-rw. This is the file that would keep all the changes normally. Since we have a dedicated partition we do not need it and have to delete it.

The last step will be to hide the UBUNTU partition and instead make the STORAGE partition the active one. Run the EaseUS Partition Master and make the STORAGE partition Primary and set it to Active:

p04

As a result you will see a new drive labeled STORAGE in windows explorer which you can use to for storing files – music, pictures, etc.

Now it is time to boot from the USB. Depending on the computer you have you might have to change the boot order in your BIOS or if it supports a boot menu you can select the USB drive directly from there. Once the GUI loads try to change the desktop background and reboot again. You should see the new background you selected which confirms that the changes we make to the system are persisted between restarting the computer.

This is it! Hopefully it works for you. If you have any problems, please go back and make sure you followed all the steps. If you still have questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Keep in mind that in general Ubuntu will run much slower from a USB flash drive than from a regular hard-drive. What the USB gives us is a system we can take with us and run on another computer. If you have a dedicated computer on which you would like to run Ubuntu it is much better to install it on your hard-drive. A good information on how to run Ubuntu alongside Windows can be found here:

WindowsDualBoot

[How-To] Transmission & FreeNAS Shared Mount Points

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There is a great tutorial on how to set up FreeNAS with Transmission on the FreeNAS forums:

[How-To] Transmission & FreeNAS Shared Mount Points

You don’t currently have permission to access this folder

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Recently I had to rescue a data from NTFS partition for somebody. It was a totally messed up laptop that could not boot the OS. It comes with a hidden partition from which you can restore the system and in theory to preserve the existing user data.

I did not want to take any risks though. Instead I removed the disk and put it in a USB 3.0 enclosure and connected it to my laptop in hope I can copy the data. Although I was able to see the folder structure and open some folders there were many I could not access. I was getting pop-up saying “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder.”

Luckily I was able to find a solution on Clint Boessen’s Blog.

There are 3 settings in the Local Security Policy related to the problem:

User Account Control: Admin Approval Mode for the Built-in Administrator account - Disabled
User Account Control: Behaviour of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode - Elevate without prompting
User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode - Disabled

The correct settings are in bold.

In my case the first two had the correct settings already but I had to change the last one which solved the problem – I was able to copy the data to a backup location.

Samsung ATIV Book 6 – Windows 8.1 Drivers

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I finally got a new laptop with US-only keyboard. It is a big deal for many people living in Canada because 95% of the laptops sold in the retailer shops have bilingual keyboards.

I bought a nice Samsung ATIV Book 6 from http://www.adorama.com/ via Amazon. Adorama ship to Canada (thank god!).

The computer comes pre-installed with Windows 8. Since Windows 8.1 is available I decided to give it a try. I wanted to do a fresh install vs. upgrade. Since the laptop does not have an optical drive you need to burn the Windows 8.1 ISO file to USB drive and boot the installation from there. I also used the opportunity to upgrade the standard hard drive to SSD following this video (although it is for a different model).

Everything went smooth and I got a freshly installed Windows 8.1. The next step was to make sure I have all the latest drivers. I went to the Samsung’s web site, provided my laptop’s model just to find that there were no drivers available for download:

samsung

It took me some time to figure it out. If you click the “Use Our Interactive Tool To Fix Common Problems.” and try to “fix” a specific problem eventually you will see a link that allows you to download “SW Update”:

samsung2

Here is a link to SW Update as of the moment.

Install it, type in your laptop’s model, choose the version of the Windows and it will show you the list of available drivers. You can choose to download them or you can install them – individually or all at once:

samsung3

I am hoping this might help someone and save them time.

————————————————————————-
EDIT: Just found this: Update to the new Windows. If you click “Firmware and Drivers” it will download the SW Update. It is newer version (2.1.21.0) vs. the link above (2.1.6.45)

Google Chrome looks blurry in Windows 8.1

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Recently I bought a new laptop with screen resolution of 1920 x 1080. It has Windows 8.1 on it. At some point I noticed that Google Chrome looked a bit blurry – both the browser UI and the web page displayed. I thought the problem was with the display driver but even after installing the latest version the problem was not fixed.

It turns out the browser was doing “display scaling” because o the high display resolution. It is a setting that you can change. Right-click the Google Chrome icon and select Options:

Google Chrome Properties 1

Google Chrome Properties 2

By default the “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” is not checked. If you check it the blurriness will go away.

Here is a screen-shot of a blurry screen:

before

This is a screen-shot with the check-box checked:

after

Both images have the same resolution 1016 x 368 pixels. Because the first screen-shot uses scaling things look bigger and blurrier. Less information is displayed. The second picture shows much more content but it looks smaller and sharper. If the font is hard to read you can always use the browser zoom in functionality (Ctrl +) to make the text bigger.

How To Install Windows 8 or 8.1 From a USB Device

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If you have a laptop or ultra-book with no DVD drive and wondering how to install Windows on it read this article which helped me:

How To Install Windows 8 or 8.1 From a USB Device

The best Karaoke system ever

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Everyone knows what Karaoke is. For these who don’t this is the definition from Wikipedia:

Karaoke is a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music (a music video) using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol, changing color, or music video images, to guide the singer.

There are different types of karaoke systems – some are stand-alone hardware devices like this one for example:

karaoke machine

karaoke machine

You can see it has a microphone attached to it, built-in speaker, small display that shows you the lyrics of the song and of course a CD tray where you place the music disk.

Well, it works but has several drawbacks:

  • the speaker is not powerful enough for a bigger room
  • the display is small and hard to read unless you are close enough
  • you need special disks called VCD which is hard to find especially if you are looking for the latest hit of your favourite singer

There are other systems that you connect to your DVD (to play the VCD) and to your TV to show the lyrics.

Another option is to connect your computer to the TV and install something like Karafun player. The program is free but you need again karaoke CD or you can subscribe (not free) to their library or 12 000 songs.

I was willing to give it a try but had difficulty making the microphone work properly and get the signal from it mixed with the song. I was using a regular laptop. The microphone was connected using a stereo jack and I run a cable from the headphones output to my AV receiver and the video output of the laptop was connected directly to the TV. It was not working.

I kept reading and found out I needed a hardware mixer to get the signal from the microphone and the soundtrack mixed before sending this to the amplifier (AV receiver). I kept looking and found this device:

minimix800

MINI MIX800

It allows you to connect two microphones and mix them with external audio (connected at the back of the device). In addition it has Voice Canceller – effectively eliminates vocals from any stereo source while retaining most music elements. Also has Integrated digital echo/reverb processor for ultimate vocal enhancement.

My set-up now includes this device with two microphones connected to it. The headphone output from my laptop is connected to the stereo line input at the back of the device. The output is connected to my AV receiver which has 5.1 speakers attached. The video from the laptop is connected to the TV.

Now I can play a video on YouTube and sing. Usually I have the speaker volume of the computer at 50% and the microphone volume at %75. The voice canceller will not eliminate the vocals completely but will suppress it enough to give me an advantage and in the same time allowing me to hear the original vocal to help me stay in sync.

You probably are wondering “What about the lyrics?”. There is an easy solution for this too – all you need is to use Google Chrome to access YouTube and to install Zazoo extension:

youtube - zazoo

Now compare this on a 40-inch LCD TV to the small display with only subtitles. I like this look better 🙂

FreeNAS – Setting up ZFS

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I always was curious about ZFS but haven’t played with it until very recently. I thought it was too complicated and I was afraid it will use up too much space because of the snapshots capability.

Few days ago I installed the latest beta of FreeNAS 8 on a USB stick (here how it is done) and decided to give a try to ZFS finally.

I use an old laptop and 120GB USB hard-drive. The goal is to create the file system (ZFS) and some Windows (CIFS) shares on top of it that will be available for data storage on my local network.

I will start with creating a group (HomeUsers) and user (john). These will be used later when setting the shares owner. The next two screen-shots show just that:

The newly created group is associated with the user (through the Members button).:

The next step is to create the file system on the USB hard-disk. From the left navigation expand Storage -> Volumes and click on Volume Manager. This will show a pop-up where you type the volume name, select the disk (in this case ada0), the file system type (ZFS) and click Add Volume button:

This will also automatically create a ZFS Scrub for the volume. ZFS has a repair tool called “scrub” which examines and repairs Silent Corruption and other problems. The default interval between consecutive runs is 35 days.

With the new ZFS volume in place you can create either ZFS Volume or ZFS Dataset.

A zvol (ZFS volume) is a feature of ZFS that creates a device block over ZFS. This allows you to use a zvol as an iSCSI device extent for example.

In contrast ZFS datasets allow for more granularity when configuring which users have access to which data. A dataset is similar to a folder in that you can set permissions; it is also similar to a filesystem in that you can set quotas and compression.

NOTE: if your goal is to share an entire ZFS volume, you don’t have to create datasets. If you wish to divide up a ZFS volume’s data into different shares, create a dataset for each share.

The next screen-shot shows creation of a dataset named Backup:

Let’s set the permissions for the new dataset from Storage -> View Volumes -> Change Permissions:

The next thing will be to set up a periodic snapshot for the ZFS volume. The lifetime will be 2 weeks, it will run between 9:00 and 18:00 every hour from Monday to Friday:

Having a periodic snapshots is like having a time machine – you can go back and restore the data to a previous state. This is illustrated in the next article