How healthy is your hard drive?

Checking the SMART information on your hard drive

It looks like Ubuntu 9.10 comes with some handy tools for checking the health of your hard drive.

• Palimpsest – GUI tool
• devkit-disks – CLI tool

Check out this blog on linux.com for screenshots of Palimpsest.  Although, beware, launchpad currently shows a bug related to the error that shows up in the screenshots.

If you happen to get what you think is a false positive for SMART value 5 “Reallocated Sector Count”, check it with the command line tool devkit-disks by running:

sudo devkit-disks --show-info /dev/sda

Changing the /dev/sda to match whatever disk you want to check against.  If you’re not sure what /dev device to look at, you can run

sudo fdisk -l

To get information on all the hard drives in your system.

digital shredding

As a general disclaimer: Use this information at your own risk, and don’t blame me if you screw everything up.

I posted recently in wipe your… about secure document deletion.  Until today, I hadn’t tried any of the methods mentioned in that post for securely deleting individual files.  So, since I needed to securely delete some files, I finally gave it a go.  I used shred to delete some files.

Save online videos to your hard drive (using the tools you already have)

Linux Journal had a tech tip on how to save an online video to your hard drive: Tech Tip: Save an Online Video with your Browser (no extensions needed)

This totally works. However, I found a simpler solution than their method. So far, every Flash video I play ends up in /tmp as an extention-less file that begins with “Flash”. Try running

ls /tmp | grep Flash

If you get just one return, then you can run

find /tmp -name "Flash*" -exec cp '{}' flash.flv ';'

This will find anything in /tmp that starts with “Flash” and copy it to your home folder as “flash.flv”. Of course, you still have to wait until the video finishes buffering before running the find command.

Convert any video file to DVD

Previously I posted, pointing to a tutorial on converting AVI files to DVD. The tutorial below builds on that one, using different tools for the conversion of the input file to an MPG format.  Please be aware that the DVD created by following these steps will not have a menu.

Get your goodies for Karmic

Get ubuntu-restricted-extras and a lot more.  Check out the Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Post Installation Guide.

What’s in a name? Whatever you want to put there.

Bulk rename files – from the GUI or the command line

When I started usng Xubuntu last year, I was really impressed with the Thunar file manager’s plug-in for renaming multiple files.  In fact, when I switched over to using Gnome, I made sure to install Thunar to keep that amazing functionality.  I use it all the time for cleaning up directories of media: pictures from digital cameras, music files, videos.  You can use it for folders as well as files.

Use chntpw to reset a lost Windows password

Check out the following articles for how to use a Linux tool called chntpw (which being translated means: change NT password) to delete a Windows password.

• Changing NT passwords with Linux and CHNTPW
• Change Windows Password from Ubuntu/Ubuntu Live CD

I have used a live-cd that I found here to delete passwords before.  Basically, it boots up a minimal Linux instance and uses the chntpw to delete the passwords.  This tool has the added benefit of automatically finding the location of the SAM file.  The guides above, however, have the benefit of working from any live-cd that has an internet connection (so you can use apt-get to install chntpw).

Karmic Koala released today

Get it via torrent.

Find (or locate – or grep) what you’re looking for

The other day, a co-worker was in my office, and we needed to search for a spreadsheet on the server shared drive. I (shamefully) had to boot up my VirtualBox instance of XP in order to use the gui search function in it. All the while I kept thinking, “A real nerd would know how to do this at the command prompt.”

So today I did some research. I had already heard of the tools find and locate.  And I have been using grep in different situations (like to limit results from other commands).  But I never really knew how to use these tools to find exactly what I was looking for.  Fortunately (and this is one of the best parts about using Linux) many nerds have gone before me and documented what they know.  So a simple Google search is often all it takes to step up my Linux game.

Dollar signs don’t always indicate money

I found a great explanation of using regex with OO.o’s search and replace feature in Writer: Searching and replacing paragraph returns (carriage returns), tabs, and other special characters in OpenOffice Writer.