An IOmega ZIP drive

Anyone remembers the ZIP drives?

They were produced by the iomega company in the ’90. Basically it’s a high capacity floppy. I just had my hands on a ZIP drive from a Dell computer and a fresh, 250MB (yes, that’s it – 250MB floppy) ZIP disk. I can just say – it still works well with Windows 7 And I think I found a new hobby – old data storage devices

On the fresh ZIP disk there’s a readme file (last modification date: 20/07/1999). It’s quite interesting to see the content:

Getting the Most out of Your Zip Disks

Your Zip disks give you unlimited, high capacity, high
performance storage. With your Zip disks you can:

- Expand your computer storage quickly and easily, 250MB at
a time.

- Move your work easily to different locations and computers.

- Back up your hard disk or any other disk drive on your
system quickly and easily.

- Create a multimedia library.

- Store large scanned or downloaded files.

- Organize large amounts of information.

- Take work home or on the road with you.

- Use one disk per account, project, or client.

- Protect sensitive information.

- Archive old files and e-mail.

- Share large files with co-workers, clients, friends, and
service bureaus.

- Keep financial and business records safe and secure.

- Give your kids disks for school work and other stuff.

- Save absolutely anything you don’t want to throw away.

- Collect stuff from on-line services without filling up your
hard drive.

- Store and run all your games.

Make the most of your Zip drive. Use Zip disks to:

1. Extend your hard disk (hard disk upgrade alternative).
Are you constantly running out of hard disk space? Your Zip
drive and disks give you unlimited storage for all your
information. By placing files on Zip disks, you have ready
access to them without filling up your hard disk. Zip Tools
software will help you find any files you need, and Zip
drive’s hard-disk-like performance will let you access
information quickly.

2. Move information.
Do you need to move information between different work
locations? Between home and work? To and from clients?
Your Zip drive and disks offer complete mobility. Zip disks
fit in a shirt pocket; your Zip drive is easy to carry and
quick to set up. The Guest program allows you to use your
Zip drive temporarily almost anywhere.

3. Back up your hard disk.
Your Zip drive makes backups fast and simple. You don’t
need special backup software just copy critical files to a
Zip disk. Copying is lightning fast, and you end up with an
exact duplicate of your original files. If you need to
restore a file, simply copy it back to your hard drive, or
just access it directly from the Zip drive.

4. Create a multimedia library (images, sounds, and video).
Because of their high capacity, removability, and random
access, Zip disks are ideal for storage-hungry image, sound,
and video files. Clips can come from a variety of sources,
including scanners, CD-ROMs, and video input devices. You
can create and store multimedia presentations and
demonstrations, including video, that you can replay
directly from the Zip disk.

5. Archive your important records.
Do you need to keep files for a number of years? Archive
your valuable files on a Zip disk and store them in a safe
place. Whenever you need them, you can access them quickly.

6. Get organized.
If you work on lots of different projects or with many
different clients, try segmenting your work onto different
disks. You can organize your information by project,
client, date, or whatever. Zip disks give you the capacity
to get all associated files onto a single disk. Then,
switching between projects and customers is as simple as
inserting another Zip disk.

7. Secure sensitive files.
To keep sensitive or confidential information safe, store it
on a Zip disk and use your Zip Tools software to assign a
password that must be used in order to read from or write to
the disk. At work, you can protect sensitive information
such as personnel files, company directories, and product
plans and designs. At home, you can secure personal
information such as tax records, budgets, and computerized
checkbooks.

Find files edited today

I often need to do something with files I just downloaded from some website, let’s say pdfs. I set up my Firefox so that it automatically donwloads a pdf file into my ~/Downloads folder. To list the files downloaded today I can use find:

find . -mtime -1 \! -type d -exec ls -l {} \;

This will find all files in this directory (.) modified in the last day (-mtime -1) that aren’t directories (\! -type d) and execute the list function on them ls -l

To find only pdf files I just need to add -name option:

find . -name '*.pdf' -mtime -1 \! -type d -exec ls -l {} \;

If I’m satisfied with the files which have been found, instead of listing them I can move them to another folder:

find . -name '*.pdf' -mtime -1 \! -type d -exec mv {} /the/real/destination/ \;

OpenSuSE 12.1 upgrade…

The dangerous thought of making an upgrade of my OpenSuSE 11.3 install to the latest 12.1 release has returned to me recently. My system was working quite well, I had everything set up, there was nothing (or not much) lacking in my system. I suppose the only reason why I started to think about the upgrade is simply that I have too much real work to do, so I just had to add the system recovery to the list… In the tutorial it really looks simple, but from my experience – this simply never works that way. This upgrade job was no different from others I tried in the past – it screwed up the system to the level at which it was easier just to make a fresh install than try to recover.

Without much hesitation I downloaded a 64 bit KDE live CD (I’ve been using Gnome up to now, so why not try KDE? Learning a new environment will be a splendid distraction from all the serious stuff I should be working on…). I didn’t loose any data because I have /home on a separate partition. I recommend this setup to everyone – it’s a great time saver! No need to copy files there and back again! All user data just stays in it’s place, including custom configuration files of different programs. Just remember not to format the partition during new installation process. Simply define the mount point as /home.

So, after the installation (simple and straightforward – no surprises here) I started my discovery of KDE. I must say that I’m quite impressed. Obviously, the default applications, like the image viewer, are different than in Gnome, so I still need to focus not to type ‘eog’ when trying to view an image from the command line. Speaking of gwenview, this program is way more powerful than the good old eye of gnome, and still runs reasonably fast. Not without problems though: one still unresolved case is that every single time I run gwenview from the command line I’m getting:

gwenview(19742)/kdeui (kdelibs): Attempt to use QAction "edit_redo" with KXMLGUIFactory!
gwenview(19742)/kdeui (kdelibs): Attempt to use QAction "edit_undo" with KXMLGUIFactory!
gwenview(19742) Gwenview::DocumentPanelPrivate::setCurrentView: No index found for current view
QPixmap::operator=: Cannot assign to pixmap during painting
QPixmap::operator=: Cannot assign to pixmap during painting
QPixmap::operator=: Cannot assign to pixmap during painting

I really don’t have the time now to investigate this now, and it’s just annoying, rather harmless – at least I didn’t notice any serious problems. Unfortunately, that’s just an example from a longer list.

After a few days of usage the system started to be sluggish and very familiar to one I have left two years ago to start a happier Linux life… I got tired of all the Windowsish behavior and kicked out KDE from my disk. Still not willing to come back to Gnome, I installed XFCE.

This experience was a confirmation of my preference for simple and effective working environment rather than pretty and recourse-hungry.

Permissions problems

I often ignored file permissions in Linux, as something rather simple and useless for me as a not-so-advanced, more private user than an administrator – until yesterday.
The situation is as follows. I’m doing some calculations on a server, logged in as user1. I copy the results on my personal computer, work a bit on them and want to copy the results back to the server to work on them there.
The problem: my user name is different on my private workstation, let’s call it user2. As a result, since the owner of the files and folder at the server is user1, I could not simply use rsync to copy the files back to the server and work on them again there.
The solution, I thought, is simple – make user1 and user2 members of the same group and grand rw permissions to this group to all files and folder I need. Without thinking further I typed:
chmod 664 -R ./my-working-folder
Something went wrong, so without thinking much I changed to root and did the same… Never do that, unless you really know what you are doing! Why?
Because chmod 644 -R changed the permissions to -rw-rw-r-- – so adding write permission to the group – isn’t that what I wanted? No – the same permissions were attached to directories, and directories need to be executable to be able to cd into them. After what I did I could not enter my directory, even as root, and I was really surprised about that! Fortunately, the problem was quite simple to fix, and I did not have to wait for the administrator to restore my files from backups. It simply needed:
find ./my-working-folder -type f -exec chmod 0664 {} \; – this fixed the permissions on all files in my folder
find ./my-working-folder -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \; – and this took care of the directories.
Of course, I also needed to apply chmod 775 ./my-working-folder

The lesson – don’t mess with permissions, especially when you’re sleepy

Spell checking in VIM

VIM actually has a spell checker included! That’s very useful if you want to write a serious LaTeX document, for example.
To turn on spell checking:
:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us
To search for next misspelled word type ]s in command mode. Then z= to see the proposed spelling. That’s the basics. More here.

Remote desktop from Linux to Windows machine

Not so long ago I discovered that there’s a Windows remote desktop client on my Linux system I can use to connect to any windows machine. I just need to type:
rdesktop [computer-name-or-IP] -d [domain-name] -u [user-name] -f

The -f brings me to full screen mode directly.

Disk space usage estimation

There are two commands I’m using to check how much disk space I have left and how big are the files/folders I have. First of all:

df -h

This command reports the whole file system disk space usage. The option -h gives the numbers in human-readable format, that is gigabytes, megabytes,… It’s fast in execution and gives really useful information. For example right now I see on my laptop:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              30G   11G   18G  38% /
devtmpfs              1.8G  288K  1.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs                 1.8G  500K  1.8G   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3              77G   65G  8.1G  89% /home

So I only have 8.1G space left on my home partition.

If I want to check how much space does a single folder take I use the du command with my favorite options:

du -hc

This will print me (in human-readable format again) the disk usage of all the directories and sub-directories in the current folder, producing a grand total in the end (that’s what the -c option is doing).