Have you ever seen a bunch of ^M characters in a text file? This odd character at the end of a line can also be represented as a Ctrl+M or <CTRL>M. You don’t know what it is, and you want it to go away.

Today, I’ll help you understand what that odd ^M character is, why it is in some of your documents, and how to get rid of them.

All About the Newline

In text documents, lines are separated by what is called a newline (also known as a line break or end of line). Different operating systems have different character codes that represent this newline.

For example:

• DOS-based systems, including Windows, as well as a number of other, older non-Unix OSes use a carriage return (CR) character followed by a line feed (LF) character.
• Commodore and the old Apple OSes before OS X used a CR character. Since OS X+ is based partly on BSD, which is in turn based on Unix, the new Apple OSes use the Unix newline method described below.
• Unix and its derivatives (Linux, BSD, and others) all use the single LF character to represent a newline.

So what does all of this mean to you? It means that text documents that come from a Windows system won’t always play nice in Linux. The converse is true however. If you create a text file in Linux, many programs will fail to recognize the single LF as a newline and will render the document without any line breaks.

dos2unix and unix2dos to the Rescue

Fortunately, there are a couple of very easy to use programs that make dealing with this file format mess much easier. They are dos2unix and unix2dos.

These programs basically do exactly what their name implies: dos2unix takes a file and converts all DOS-style newlines to Unix-style newlines. unix2dos takes a file and converts all Unix-style newlines to DOS-stlye newlines.

I put Ubuntu and CentOS in the title because I’m going to give instructions for installing these programs on each of these distros. Why just these two? They are the two that I work with most often and are representative of the lion’s share of what people are using these days. If you need help with a different distro, please let me know in a comment.

Installing dos2unix and unix2dos in Ubuntu

There aren’t any dos2unix or unix2dos packages that can be found in Synaptic; howver, there is a packages that will install them for you. Simply open up Synaptic and install the tofrodos package. If you are like me and prefer to do this from the command line, you can run the following command:

That’s all there is to it. Not only will dos2unix and unix2dos install, but alias programs fromdos and todos will be installed as well. These additional programs work in the same manner, so it’s purely a matter of preference which ones you use.

Installing dos2unix and unix2dos in CentOS

I really thought that I had to install these in CentOS, but amazingly, the programs are already installed by default. I tested this in a Virtual Machine fresh install, and the programs were there on the first boot.

So, CentOS users, you’re already good to go.

Using dos2unix

Fortunately, using these programs couldn’t be easier.

Let’s say that you are in a Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) viewing text files. Maybe you just downloaded a new WordPress plugin and you are reading the readme.txt file. It doesn’t really matter. However, there is a problem. The readme.txt file has a bunch of ^M characters at the end of each line, and it’s really distracting.

Simply exit out of the editor you are currently in, since the file will be modified, and run the following command:

If there are multiple files, you can specify each one with a space separating each. For example:

The program doesn’t produce any output. Simply reopen your text file and look at all the beautiful non-existant ^M’s.

Using unix2dos

The unix2dos program has the exact same syntax as dos2unix. However, I thought it might be helpful to describe a situation in which you might need to use it.

You’re working on a project. You’ve just sent out your batch of files, and another member on the project complains that you are being a jerk and remove all the newlines in your text files. This other member is most likely using a Windows application that doesn’t understand the Unix newline format. Rather than getting into a format war, it’s typically better and quicker to simply convert your text files to a DOS/Windows format.

If you have a folder full of files that all need to be converted, simply run:

Now you can send these new files to your project group and hopefully avoid any more unproductive drama.

File Formats in Vi

If you happen to use Vi, you can change Vi back and forth between DOS and Unix modes for newlines with a simple command. “:set ff=dos” sets the editor to use DOS newline encoding and will save the file in a DOS-encoded format. “:set ff=unix” sets the editor use Unix newlines and will save the file in a Unix format.

Note that changing the format to dos from unix will always work as expected. This is because any file that contains just LF characters for new lines will be converted to CRLF while lines that already end in CRLF will be left as is.

If your Vi config defaults to a unix format and you open a DOS file, you will see the ^M characters. You can either use the dos2unix conversion utility first or change Vi first to the dos format and then to unix.

If you’d like Vi to default to DOS or Unix formating each time you start a new Vi session, you can add the setting to your ~/.vimrc file. In that file, either add “set ff=dos” or “set ff=unix” depending on your needs. Note the lack of the colon, :, in the .vimrc entries.

For more information on the ff or fileformat setting in Vi, check out the official documentation.

Closing Thoughts

Maybe one day we won’t have to worry about these types of things. For now however, it’s good to know the tools that make these problems easily manageable.

BTW, Happy Daylight Savings Day everyone. I hope you enjoyed the loss of an hour of sleep.

Since I have officially been using Ubuntu on my office laptop for more than a solid month without once booting into Windows, it’s time to mothball the Windows partition in order to give Linux more room to breathe.

I seriously considered removing Windows entirely as I don’t believe that I’ll have any legitimate need for it in the future. However, I think that I can get the Windows partition down to a manageable size  and then forget about it.

Introduction

My office laptop is a Dell Studio 17. It shipped with Windows Vista pre-installed. After many frustrations with Vista BSoDing once a day on average, I finally decided to switch over to Linux as my main work OS. I decided on Ubuntu as a good distro to cut my teeth on since I had never run Linux as my desktop solution other than just playing around with Live Distros.

I installed Ubuntu alongside Windows by giving Ubuntu its own partition. Ever since then, things have been peachy.

Now that I no longer use Windows, I started thinking up plans for how I could use the space. I decided that I wanted to be able to install multiple Linux distros so that I can try out different ones. I also wanted to do the shared /home partition so that these different distros could be used productively with very little setup beyond installing.

There are a couple of hurdles between me and this desired setup however: The Windows partition takes up the majority of the drive. The /home folder is on the / partition and not on its own.

So, before I can start installing all the distros I want to try out, I need to fix up my partitions. That brings me to my first step.

Preparing Windows for Long-Term Storage

In order to streamline Windows while still keeping it functional, I need to load it up for the first time in a month.

Removing Data Files

I hooked up an external hard drive and migrated all the data files to this drive. This included all the files in my User folder (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Videos, etc).

I then went through all my application folders to check for any unique data files I might want to save. These were also moved over to the external drive.

Removing Unneeded Programs

The first thing I did was to remove all the programs that I wouldn’t have any use for. I only intend to use Windows in a pinch situation, so I only left programs that help me connect to servers and work with files. I also left all the pre-installed Dell stuff which I have no use for but decided should stay.

Doing this removed many gigs of disk usage.

Removing Unneeded Files/Folders

At this point, I systematically went through the entire C:, removing folders and files that were no longer needed. Some of these were remnants from removed applications that left files and folders behind. Some of the unneeded files were just random junk that weren’t worth moving to the external hard drive.

An easy way to determine whether it is worth going through a folder to remove items is to right-click it and select Properties. This brings up a window that will show how much space all the files and folders contained in that folder take up. If the folder takes less than a 100MB, move on to the next folder. Otherwise, dig into the folder and see what you can delete.

An important thing to keep in mind as you’re doing this is you want to keep Windows usable, so don’t go crazy and try to delete things in the Windows folder.

Putting Windows on a Diet

There are many files that Windows has all over the place that can be cleaned up.

Load up Explorer (Win+E), right-click your Windows drive (C:), and click Properties. Click “Disk Cleanup”. Check all the boxes and click OK. Note that if you select the hibernation file when you do the cleanup, not only with the hibernation file (which is the same size as your RAM) be removed but hibernation will also be disabled. This removed about 5GB of data from my drive.

This next step is optional. I reduced my page file (virtual memory) usage since the pagefile.sys file was taking 4GB of space. You can get to this by going to Start > Control Panel > System, clicking the Advanced tab, clicking the Performance “Settings…” button, selecting the Advanced tab, clicked “Change…”, and made modifications in the resulting dialog. Yes, it is so incredibly easy to get to this panel. I had made changes to this before, but it’s so hard to find, that I had to use Google to “remind” me how to get to it. Windows was set to automatically size my page file, so I removed the automatic option and limited the size to 512MB. After restarting, this cleared up an additional 3.5GB of storage.

Finishing Up

In order to make the process of resizing the partition as effective as possible, I then ran defrag on the drive to compact all the files on the drive. You can do this by loading up Explorer (Win+E), right-click your Windows drive (C:), select Properties, select the Tools tab, click “Defragment Now…”, and click “Degragement Now…” on the window that loads.

When I started, I had a 92GB partition which had 60GB used. I wanted to get down to the 10GB range so that I could reduce the partition to 15GB. I didn’t get down to 10GB, but I did get down to 14GB. I’m sure that I could have forced the size down to 10GB, but I wanted to keep things usable, and a 20GB partition with 14GB isn’t that large.

Resizing the Windows Partition

To resize the partition, I’m going to use GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor. I installed GParted on Ubuntu, but it refused to resize the partition. I booted the Linux Mint LiveCD, and its GParted didn’t have a problem with the NTFS partition, so I ended up using it instead.

I loaded up GParted by going to Menu > Administration > Partition Editor. When it loaded, I right-clicked my Windows partition, selected “Resize/Move”, dragged the right slider handle to the left enough to leave a 20GB partition, and clicked “Resize/Move”. After I double-checked what I had told GParted to do, I clicked the “Apply” button at the top of the window.

The resize process took around 25 minutes to complete, so I had plenty of time to load up Firefox and work on this post.

After I did the resize, I rebooted to see if Windows still works. The first boot produced an automatic system repair that took about 45 minutes to finish. After another reboot, the “we need to scan your drive” thing happened. Yet another reboot later, Windows loaded up just fine.

Moving /home to Its Own Partition

Now it’s time for the fun part. This is a delicate process, so if you intend to do this, make sure you follow each step carefully.

I needed to be able to modify all the partitions, so I want to use a LiveCD so that all the partitions are unmounted and available to use in GParted. I had a Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” disk handy, so I booted it up.

Since we need to create a partition, it’s time to load up GParted again.

Expanding the Extended Partition

Here are my partitions currently:

• 150MB Dell partition
• 10GB Dell recovery partition
• 20GB Windows partition
• 92GB unallocated space
• Extended partition
  • 90GB Ubuntu partition
  • 15GB unallocated space
  • 5GB swap

The first level of partitions are called primary partitions. The max number of primary partitions is four. Since I already have four (the extended partition counts as one), I need to move that new block of unallocated space into the extended partition to use it.

Looking at GParted, my extended partition is locked. This is because even LiveCDs will make use of available swap partitions. I right-click the swap partition and select “swapoff” which frees up both the swap partition and the extended partition for modification.

I right-clicked the extended partition, selected “Resize/Move”, dragged the left handle all the way to the left in order to add the unallocated space, and clicked the “Resize/Move” button. I then clicked the Apply button at the top of the GParted window, and let GParted do its thing.

Creating /home Partition

Now that I have my unallocated space inside the extended partition, we just need to set up a new partition with that space. I right-clicked the 92GB unallocated space, selected New, selected a Filesystem of “ext3″, and clicked the Add button. I then clicked Apply to have GParted create the partition.

After this process finished, I found that my new partition had a name of /dev/sda7. This is important to know in order to properly mount and use the new partition.

Note: I had previously looked at exactly how much space my /home folder took by running “sudo du -h –max-depth=0 /home” from Terminal. This gave me the information I needed to make sure that my new partition would be sufficiently large to hold my current /home folder. If the size of your /home folder is larger than the amount of available free space, use an external drive to remove some of the files first or resize other partitions to create enough space.

Mounting the New /home Partition

Before copying the current /home files to the new partition, I need access to it.

First, I create a place for the partition to mount by loading up Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and running:

sudo mkdir /mnt/home

And then mount the new partition by running the following command in Terminal:

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda7 /mnt/home

Note: I got the “/dev/sda7″ name from looking at the name of the newly created partition after GParted created it.

Now the new partition is accessible at /mnt/home.

Duplicating /home to /mnt/home

The following instructions are if you have only have one user on your system. If you have more than one user, see the next set of instructions.

Before I start adding files to the new location, I need to allow my user, chris, to add files to the new partition. I did this by running the following command:

sudo chown chris /mnt/home

Note: If you do this, you will need to change “chris” in the previous command to your own user name.

While Terminal is still up, I ran:

cd /home
find . -depth -print0 | cpio -–null –-sparse -pvd /mnt/home

Depending on how large your /home folder is, this could take a while. Go grab a sandwich and wait for this process to finish.

Skip ahead to “Replacing Old /home With the New /home” if you have just one user on your system.

Duplicating /home to /mnt/home With Multiple Users

Special care must be taken to ensure that the ownership of the copied files are set up properly if you have multiple user accounts in the /home directory.

Load up Terminal and run the following commands:

cd /home
find . -depth -print0 | sudo cpio -–null –-sparse -pvd /mnt/home

This will copy all the files from the /home directory to the new /mnt/home partition. This could take a while, so go do some errands or chores while you wait.

Once the copy is done, you will have a duplicate of all the data on your /home partition in /mnt/home; however, none of the owner or group rights will be correct. You will need to manually reset all the owner and group settings for all the files for each user.

For example, let’s say that I have two users: chris (/home/chris) and anna (/home/anna). I will need to run the following two commands :

sudo chown -R chris:chris /mnt/home/chris
sudo chown -R anna:anna /mnt/home/anna

Notice the bold portions of each command. These bold portions should be replaced with your own usernames. To clarify, you need to run the following command for each user:

sudo chown -R username:username /mnt/home/username

Time to actually shuffle the /home directories/partitions around.

Replacing Old /home With the New /home

First, unmount the new home partition:

sudo umount /mnt/home

We now need to move the existing /home directory to make room for the new mount point.

sudo mv /home /old_home

Now we need to create the new mount point and mount the new /home partition.

sudo mkdir /home
sudo mount /dev/sda7 /home

Note: The bold partition location will vary depending on your setup remember to use the partition location when you created the new partition with GParted.

If you didn’t receive any errors after running these commands, your setup worked. Go ahead and load up some applications, play some music, and generally just use your files. Make sure that everything works as expected.

If any problems have occurred, you can easily revert back to the old /home folder data:

sudo umount /home
sudo rmdir /home
sudo mv /old_home /home

If everything worked properly, you now have your new /home partition mounted and operating. Time to make the change permanent.

Adding New /home Partition to /etc/fstab

The /etc/fstab file contains setup information about your partitions. We’re going to add an entry to make sure that the /home partition is automatically mounted and used when the system loads. Since I can’t assume you know how to use the command line editors, I’ll have you open the file in Gedit, a Gnome editor.

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

This will load /etc/fstab for editing in Gedit with root privileges.

We need to go to the bottom of the file and add the following line:

/dev/sda7 /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

Note: Again, change the partition name to the one that matches your new partiton.

Now save the file and close Gedit. We can easily test if the new /etc/fstab entry is working by running the following:

sudo umount /home
sudo mount /home

If these commands ran without error and the /home directory is still functioning correctly, your system is good to go.

Finishing

Reboot your system a couple of times to ensure that everything is working correctly. Once you’ve confirmed that everything is working normally and have let the system run for at least an hour, it’s time to remove the old /home directory.

sudo rm -r /old_home

This will remove the /old_home directory and all of its contents.

Final Thoughts

The relative ease of this is a testament to the power of Linux. Not only was I able to completely reconfigure a very important directory that is integral to the operation of my distro, but I was able to do the most sensative part of it while actually running the OS being changed.

This nicely illustrates the power that Linux offers the user while also serving as a lesson to always be mindful of what you are doing while having root privileges. If you tell Linux to delete a very important file or directory and have root privileges when you do it, Linux will comply with no fuss. So, always be mindful of what you are doing when using the sudo command.

Now that I have /home as a separate partition, it’s a trivial matter to be able to share this partition with other distros.

I have a large number of computers. At my desk at home, I have two computers, Lumiere and Samus. I’ll often set up my office laptop, Rommie, on my desk as well.

I have a KVM hooked up between Lumiere and Samus, but I don’t use the video switching part as Lumiere has a dedicated 24″ LCD and Samus has a dedicated 24″ and 19″ LCDs. So, I use the KVM to do nothing more than switch the keyboard and mouse back and forth.

Things get more complicated with the addition of the laptop. Now I have another keyboard and a trackpad instead of another mouse. Thus, I’m always switching the KVM over between the two systems as well as moving my hand from the keyboard and mouse to the laptop and back again. There has to be a better way. Fortunately, there is.

Synergize Your Computers

Synergy is the solution for sharing a single keyboard and mouse with multiple computers. My three LCDs monitors and laptop form a diamond arrangement of four screens. With Synergy, I can quickly shift the focus from one machine to another simply by moving my mouse to a specific screen. When a system has mouse focus, it also receives input from the keyboard.

This alone makes Synergy an amazing tool, but that’s only the beginning. Synergy doesn’t care what operating system your computers have, so you can share your mouse and keyboard between multiple flavors of Linux, Windows, and Mac at the same time.

Synergy isn’t limited to just sharing the keyboard and mouse however. It can also share the clipboards. Copy something in Windows and paste it in Linux. Synergy can also sync all the systems’ screensavers so that a screen that has been idle doesn’t go to screensaver mode. If you have a password protecting access to your desktop when you go to disable the screensaver, Synergy can have that one login deactivate all the screensavers rather than just the one.

Since I’m running two Linux systems these days, Lumiere and Rommie, I wanted to test the middle-click function to paste highlighted text. I highlighted some text on Lumiere, moved the mouse to Rommie, and middle-clicked. Just as if it was the same system, the highlighted text was pasted on the other system. I thought this was great, so I decided to test it from Linux to Windows and Windows to Linux. Unfortunately, neither of these worked, which is to be expected since Windows has no support for this type of functionality.

Synergy also has a great ability to customize its functionality. I configured Synergy to send all media and volume key presses to Samus. This way I can play, pause, mute, and change volume no matter what system I’m controlling.

For an example of using it to control my machines, here’s a quick video I did. The entire time, I’m using the same keyboard and mouse to control each system.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvsLxYnV0JE

The Samus wallpaper I’m using is artwork done by Ivan Flores. I’ve had the privilege of meeting Ivan a number of times at different cons and have some great art to show for it.

Configuration

The key to this is the synergy.conf file. Here’s mine:

section: screens
        Lumiere:
        rommie:
        Samus:
end
section: links
        Lumiere:
                down(50,100) = rommie(1,50)
                right = Samus(43,100)
        rommie:
                up(0,50) = Lumiere(50,100)
                up(50,100) = Samus(0,50)
        Samus:
                left(43,100) = Lumiere
                down(0,50) = rommie(50,100)
end
section: options
        screenSaverSync = false
        keystroke(AudioPlay) = keystroke(AudioPlay,Samus)
        keystroke(AudioMute) = keystroke(AudioMute,Samus)
        keystroke(AudioDown) = keystroke(AudioDown,Samus)
        keystroke(AudioUp) = keystroke(AudioUp,Samus)
end

Notice how I’ve set up portions of the screen to switch from one screen to another. This is due to the diamond arrangement of my screens. I’ve also disabled the screen saver sync since I don’t use screensavers and wanted to ensure that no problems would occur.

Getting Synergized

So, how can you get Synergy for yourself?

Installing Synergy on my Ubuntu systems was extremely easy. I simply loaded up a terminal and ran:

This installed Synergy and the helpful QuickSynergy which makes setting up Synergy a breeze.

To install Synergy on my Windows Vista system, I downloaded and ran the installer from the Latest Releases. QuickSynergy isn’t needed for Windows since the Windows release comes with a GUI interface. In fact, there isn’t a Windows release of QuickSynergy.

I decided to use my primary home Ubuntu box, Lumiere, as my Synergy server. I ran QuickSynergy (Applications > Accessories > QuickSynergy). I then filled in Samus in the right spot and rommie on the bottom spot. These names match the hostname of each computer. In Ubuntu, you can find the hostname by running hostname in terminal.  In Windows, you can find the hostname by right-clicking Computer, clicking Properties, and looking at the “Computer name:” listing.

After setting this up on Lumiere, I clicked the “Start” button.

Next I went to each of the other two machines, loaded up Synergy/QuickSynergy, made sure that I was in “Use” mode, input the IP address for the server, and clicked “Start”. Everything looks good, but it could use some tweaking.

FYI: Here’s how you find a system’s network IP to use as the server IP. In Ubuntu, load terminal and run ifconfig. The listing “inet addr:” under eth0 will contain that system’s local area network IP. In Windows, click Start, click Run, type “cmd”, click “OK”, type ipconfig, press the Enter key, and look for a listing after “IPv4 Address”.

Once you’ve run QuickSynergy on the server, you can close it out and will find a file at ~/.quicksynergy/synergy.conf. This is the configuration file generated by QuickSynergy. I copied this file from ~/.quicksynergy/synergy.conf to ~/.synergy.conf. This way my settings file won’t be rewritten if I accidentally run QuickSynergy later.

After you make the necessary changes, you can run Synergy again by running the following in terminal:

This runs Synergy in the background. To stop Synergy in order to change a config, run the following in terminal:

Automatically Run Synergy

After I got Synergy configured the way I wanted, I made sure that it would automatically start each time I logged in. I did this by adding the command line to run Synergy to Sessions:

1. Click System > Preferences > Sessions
2. Click Add
3. Example settings:
   1. Name: “Synergy Server”
   2. Command: “synergys -f –config ~/.synergy.conf –daemon”
   3. Comment: “Start Synergy server on login.”
4. Click Add

In a similar fashion, a client on Ubuntu can be set to automatically run upon login.

1. Click System > Preferences > Sessions
2. Click Add
3. Example settings:
   1. Name: “Synergy Client”
   2. Command: “synergyc –daemon 192.168.1.4″
   3. Comment: “Start Synergy client on login.”
4. Click Add

Setting up Windows to autoload is quite easy as you can just use the “AutoStart…” button to configure how you want it to automatically run.

Now it’s just time to tailor your setup to match exactly what you are looking for. You can find setup options on the Synergy site.

Have fun.

image from New Life Service Co.

I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.

I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.

Triage

I really wish that I had taken pictures as the inside of Raine was disgusting. The picture on the post is actually a combination of before and after images from New Life Service Co who specializes in cleaning homes and salvageable items after fire, water, or storm damage. The image gets the point across about what I was facing though.

There are some natural enemies to electronics: cigarette/incense smoke, coffee, and soda. These things typically don’t instantly kill a computer, but they act as a cancer that slowly grows and over time can break a crucial system of the computer, causing the entire machine to fail. In essence, these things work together to kill the respiratory system of a computer, the fans that cool off the machine, this can cause massive heat buildup which eventually causes a component, such as a processor or graphics card, to overheat. At first, this overheating will cause the system to turn itself off, reboot, or freeze. It does this as either the component glitches out or the system proactively tries to protect itself from the heat buildup.

Basically, the sludge that is carried in smoke and the sludge that is created from dried coffee and soda creates the problem. The entirety of the inside, and good portions of the outside, were coated in a layer of this congealed slime it had combined over the years with dust to create a viscous tar. This tar was clogged between heatsink fins, had coated all the fan blades, had filled all the cracks where air flows through, and had even coated many of the fans’ shafts and magnets (causing the side intake fan to completely fail).

Raine had been in an environment with large amounts of cigarette smoke. My friend also indicated that coffee and soda could also have been involved. So, inside the case was a tragedy.

Now I know that the viruses and failed Windows install were the primary issues here, but it is like going to to the hospital because of a broken bone and they quickly discover a massive tumor. The broken bone is definitely a problem, but that tumor is a much bigger concern. So, before I was going to do anything to revive Windows, I needed to get that machine clean.

Getting Clean by Getting Dirty

Whenever I clean electronics, I usually do the same thing:

• Turn off, unplug, and remove any batteries from the electronics first. If it is a computer, turn the physical switch at the back of the power supply off (the ‘O’ down is off; the ‘|’ down is on) and remove the CMOS battery.
• Blow, vacuum, or wipe off as much loose dirt and dust as possible first.
• Break down the device into non-electrical components (casing, covers, screws, etc), electrical components (circuit boards, chips, cables, etc), and combination parts that can’t easily separated and then put back together (non-electrical parts that could be easily cleaned yet are mated via some kind of dark magic of manufacturing to one or more electrical components).
• Spray off the non-electrical components with water and clean with soap or other detergent as necessary. Where I do this depends on the size. Very large items get the yard and hose, medium sized items get the shower, and small items get the sink.I find the shower with the hand-held shower head to be the most useful for most situations. The hot water helps break up gummy substances, the mess goes down the drain, I don’t have to get muddy in the yard, and the drain strainer keeps small parts from disappearing down the drain.I know some people will also use their dishwasher to clean such parts. I’ve never tried it myself as I fear that the temperatures that some dishwaters can get up to is hot enough to melt certain plastics. So, I play it safe and don’t use the dishwasher method. If you do try it, share your experiences.
• I will then shake as much water off of each component as I can, dry it off with a combination of towels and paper towels, and then let them fully dry out for an hour or more before connecting anything back to it.
• The upholstery attachment for vacuum cleaners makes a very good hand-held device to wipe the loose crud off of electrical components. The bristles have enough stiffness to push dirt off but are soft enough to not damage any of the components. I lightly brush all of the electrical components off with this and set them aside for the next step.
• I will then get out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and pour some of the fluid into a small dish. Next I get some cotton swabs.I dip one end of the swab into the alcohol and let it soak up a small amount (don’t get the swab dripping wet, just damp). I then pick up one of the electrical components and gently clean any dirty areas. A gentle twisting action of the swab can help clean tough spots. I only do small areas at a time and then flip the swab over and dry off the dampened area with the dry end of the swab. Set each component aside for a few minutes to let any remaining alcohol evaporate before you try to reconnect it to anything.

This process is useful for all kinds of electronics and not just computers.

Typically, you can disassemble an entire computer with nothing more than a medium-sized Phillip’s head screwdriver. I recommend placing all the removed screws into a container. The first few times you disassemble an electronic device, you will want to use multiple containers, one each for each type of screw, and label them so you know exactly what screw goes to what part. A trick that I use whenever I know that I’ll have difficulty remembering what part or screw goes where is to quickly snap a picture with my camera.

Finishing the Job

After about six hours of hard work, I had cleaned off the entire case, the hard drive, portions of the motherboard, the heatsink, all the fans, the DVD burner, and all the cables. I had spare parts around, so I actually gave Raine a slightly upgraded processor, doubled the memory, added an additional drive (this came in handy when reinstalling Windows), upgraded the video card, and replaced the power supply with a nice, relatively new Thermaltake PSU. Unfortunately I didn’t have a spare 80mm case fan lying around (I know, I have spare CPUs, memory chips, graphics cards, etc but not a spare case fan? Shame). However, I usually scavenge good parts from broken components, so I did have an 80mm PSU fan from a failed PSU. The connector wasn’t the correct one, but I was able to snip up an old molex connector and splice it onto the fan. It isn’t the prettiest thing, but that fan really blew a lot of air at a reasonable amount of noise, so it worked out well.

I powered up the system, and everything worked. Actually, I did many, many reboots. I pulled up the motherboard manual on the Biostar website and made sure that all the jumper settings and cable installations were optimal. I had to completely reconfigure the BIOS since I had removed the CMOS battery. Anyways, I now had a newly refurbished Raine ready to get a shiny new OS.

I booted up the computer using a Linux Mint disk that I had handy. The idea was to boot into a Live OS environment, copy over the crucial files to another system to protect them from loss and then proceed with installing Windows again. Fortunately, this went extremely smoothly. Within about fifteen minutes, we had cherry picked specific folders to save to a safe location and had copied them there.

I had configured the new drive to be the primary drive as I wanted my friend to be able to pull off all the data he needed from the old drive before formatting it. I shut down Linux Mint and unplugged the power cable to the old drive. This wasn’t really necessary, but I wanted to make sure that the Windows installation wouldn’t in any way mess up the old data that we wanted to protect as much as possible. I then installed Windows onto the new drive, got Windows up and running, and installed all the necessary drivers.

I then powered down the system again, plugged the drive back in, and booted Windows once more. Now Raine is running smoothly, virus-free, and should have a longer lease on life.

So, even though I work at 8am, I was up past 2am working on the machine. I guess you can say that I’m a sucker for a computer in distress.

Tips

1. Every couple of months you should clean out your machine. Turn it off, unplug it, let it sit for a few minutes, take off the side panels, and then use a can of air duster (one that is meant for electronics) to spray out all the dust and other nasties. This will go a long way to keeping your machine running well for years to come.
2. Always make backups of important documents. You can get flash drives that can easily hold all of our documents for $10-20 these days. Every week, copy new and modified documents to this drive and put it in a safe place.
3. If your OS crashes, you can use one of the Live Distros of Linux to boot up your machine and copy important data to your flash drive. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are really good choices for this task. Finding information on a Windows drive when you are used to a user or My Documents folder can be confusing, so I will probably do a post on how to do this at some time.
4. The best way to keep your system virus free isn’t an anti-virus scanner. A scanner cannot offer you 100% protection, nothing does honestly, and can’t always fix problems when they do happy. The best way to protect your system and keep it running smoothly is to follow these simple guidelines:
   • Don’t ever install or run any programs that came to you in an email. Even if it appears to be from a friend. If a friend sends you a program to install/run, ask them to send you a link to where you can download yourself. Also, if it appears to be an image or document attachment, but your client warns you about executing it, don’t say “Yes” or “Okay.” Say no. That is a program pretending to be an image or document.
   • Don’t install every free program you find on the internet. Not all of these programs are bad. Just having too many programs installed can cause problems and slow down your computer. Your computer is only capable of doing so much, and loading 100 freeware apps that sit in your system tray is going to kill any system.Some of these programs were available for download simply because they wanted to be able to secretely install other programs without you knowing, so pick which programs you install carefully. Do a qiuck Google search for the name of the program and “spyware” or “virus” and see what other people are saying about it.
   • Go through and uninstall old programs that you no longer need.
5. If you are just a casual computer user or don’t have a specific need to run Windows, try running Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or one of the many other Linux distros some day. These desktop operating systems come with a ton of free software to do everything from making images to creating documents to browsing the web. It’s definitely not for everyone, but the odds of getting a virus or other nasty bit of software installed on your computer is extremely low with a Linux-based desktop as compared to a Windows-based one. Best of all, these operating systems are free and many can be run without installing them so you can easily try them.

Over the past few years, I have developed a very strong desire to dump Windows entirely from my day to day computing. I tire of the obscure errors that no one has answers for yet are easily reproducible, the way that Microsoft is enforcing its “genuine Windows” initiative in ways that irritate paying customers while only mildly bothering pirates, and how Windows always has a black box model of operation which always keeps me, the user, out of the loop on what my own computer is doing. The final insult: User Account Control. I disabled that within minutes. Talk about a useless feature. People who know what they are doing will always click yes because they know what they are doing. People who don’t know what they are doing (the ones that were the primary focus for this feature) will quickly learn to always click yes because clicking no may prevent them from doing what they want.

What’s the problem?

I upgraded to Vista the same week it was released and have been using it at home ever since. At first, I really liked Vista. Over time, I realized that there really wasn’t anything that I truly liked about Vista above XP and discovered that I used my Vista machines at home more or less the same way I used my XP Pro machine at the office. Vista had simply given me a shiny new veneer over what is, to me, functionally no different than XP.

Now, there is one nice feature that Vista has that XP doesn’t. I do like the new sound subsystem which allows for controlling different sound sources individually. However, even that feature isn’t significant enough to make me want Vista on my office machine.

Going down the list of features that Vista added / improved upon, they all boil down to one of a few categories for me: just eye candy, unwanted process that wastes resources and can’t be turned off, unwanted or unused application, yet another tool that tells me something broke yet has very little to offer me in terms of solutions.

For example, I hate how when I navigate to a folder with lots of files in it that the entire system slows a bit and I hear the harddrive being read furiously. All I want to do is see a list of files and folders, but Vista insists on scanning all the files in order to create fancy thumbnails for me. Even after disabling every setting that controls thumbnail generation, browsing around folders with large amounts of content is slow. When I want to delete a file, I can’t just delete it right after selecting it. I have to give Windows a few seconds or more so that it can completely scan the file to give me “helpful” information in the status bar. If I try to delete the file right away, Windows complains that the file is in use. Well, yeah… You’re using it. I didn’t try to open it, you did. Now I have to wait for you to be done with it so that I can do what I want.

Another thing that I can’t stand is how so many processes created by Windows are cloaked in the mysterious svchost.exe processes. Looking in my process list now, I have a total of twelve svchost.exe processes consuming anywhere from a few hundred kB of memory to more than 50 megs each. Every so often, one of those processes will take an amazingly large chunk of processing time. Can I kill it? I don’t know. I have no idea what that process is doing, whether I want it to do what it’s doing, or whether the system will crash if I do try to kill it. So I end up leaving it alone and hope that it doesn’t slow down my productivity while it does who knows what in the background. Would implementing some type of screen or menu that allows me to see exactly what Windows is doing in the background and give me the option to tell it to stop so I can have my computer back be so hard?

The big thing that set me off was the annual reinstallation (Vista was getting too hinky and was begging for a fresh install) that I was performing last night. I hoped for a quick hour or two of installation, but it took over six hours. I ended up having to remove half of my RAM, disconnect all the drives except the one being installed to, turn off a staggering number of BIOS options, put a jumper in my drive to limit it to SATA I speeds, and burn an offering to Microsoft.

What would I like to see from Windows?

If I were able to have a discussion directly with the heads of the Windows division of Microsoft, I would describe my problem with Windows as such: An operating system’s fundamental core purpose is management of memory and file structures, providing methods for the hardware to communicate effectively, and enabling a user to make use of that management system to execute code and modify file data (copy, move, rename, delete, etc). For all the features that Microsoft has been heaping on top of Windows, I seldom see any features that are a true improvement of the core operating system functions. Rather than improving the speed at which I can be productive, most of these features have only managed to slow my machine and my productivity down.

Case in point with the basic OS functionality: why is copying files today the exact same as it was in 3.1? I would love to see a copy dialog that allows for files to be dropped on it. Have you ever had some large files copying from one place to another and you want some other files to go to that same location? As it is right now, you have two options: 1) you can wait for the original copy job to finish and then start another one or 2) you can start another one at the same time. The problem is that the first option makes you, the user, wait for the operating system which is a waste of time whereas the second option starts burdening the process causing inefficient copy jobs that can over-tax the system if you build up too many. Why can’t I just drop more files onto that copy dialog and have those files added to the queue to go to the same location? That way I have queued up instructions for the operating system to optimize the efficiency of the job and have freed myself up to continue doing other things. To me, that’s innovation, new, and improved productivity.

Why haven’t I already dumped Windows?

I’ve been dedicated to dumping Windows for at least the past two years now, so why am I still with it? I suppose my reasons aren’t unlike many other peoples’:

• Familiarity – It’s not that I don’t like Windows. Windows technically isn’t bad, I just don’t think any version of Windows offers the best of what I want combined with what is available. However, I’m used to working with Windows. If I have a problem happen, I have a much better chance of knowing how to fix it quickly than I would with any other operating system. Thus, I’ve stuck with the evil I know rather than exploring my options.
• Utility – I have a lot of experience with Linux, and I know what it is capable of. I also know that there are some things that Linux just isn’t quite ready for (such as running most Windows games). While I don’t game much, there is still that little voice in my head reminding me that playing the games that I do like could easily become a chore on another operating system. This goes beyond just games as there are other software packages that just don’t work like I’m used to on Windows (such as codec packs and media players).
• Time – Properly adjusting to a new operating system takes time. Often those time expenses take place when you don’t want to spend time chasing down a problem due to needing to work on something or just not having any time for it at that moment. I think this is my biggest fear: will a server emergency or client problem come up while I’m in the middle of trying to figure out how to get my system working again?

The Solution?

Some of you may be thinking that I should jump on an Apple. I’m not going to white-wash it. I’ve never been a fan of the way Apple does stuff. I’m sure that they have a great product, I just don’t think that product is for me. The product that is for me is Linux.

I’ve been working with Linux servers for over six years now, and I absolutely love Linux. It has its problems, but they are relatively minor when compared to the constant frustrations that I’ve faced in the past with Windows. The biggest hurdle for me is going to be getting used to working with Linux as my primary operating system and working with the window managers of Linux.

Now it’s time to dig around DistroWatch again and start picking out which distros I’ll try first.