Disk Defragmentation

Defragmenting your disks file-systems can be important for several reasons:

• Lots of fragments are slowing down your systems performance (especially true for any Windows systems).
• You may want to shrink a partition and therefore need to move all files to get all available space at the end of the partition.
  

I needed to shrink my NTFS partition, because I want to give more space to my Ubuntu one, but even if it claimed to have 26 GB free, I could only shrink about 300 MB.
Why?
Because NTFS uses a MFT table for allocating, which could be anywhere and unfortunately, it will be in most cases at the end of the partition.
And almost any defragmentation program is able to move it.

Since I found Perfect Disk. It is not free-ware, but its one month evaluation was enough to finally claim all free space to the end of the partition and get it shrunk with GParted.

Until then, I tested several programs (because Windows XP internal tool isn't the optimum), and I'll list them here.

Perfect Disk

Perfect Disk is simply perfect. It makes it job as one thinks it should. Can defrag your MFT, pagefile, hyberfile in offline mode, its defragmentation algorithms seem to be very clever, can choose each algorithm automatically adapted to the file-systems state, scheduled tasks, during screensaver, and the interface is clean and nice.

O&O Defrag

O&O Defrag is similar to Perfect Disk, but finally wasn't able to move the MFT, but has more algorithms than Perfect Disk. It seems to be more slower during defragmentation than the other one. Isn't free-ware too.

MyDefrag

MyDefrag is freeware, and has a very different concept to other tools. Internally, it uses scripts that define the algorithm, and even if there are several ones included already, you could write your own ones. Its interface is ugly, but includes screensaver mode. Can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows.

Auslogic Disk Defrag

Auslogic tools is a simple disk defrag tool, with a nice interface. Does its job better than Windows included one and is free-ware too. Can defrag a single file or folder and includes a scheduler.

Defraggler

Use Defraggler to defrag your entire hard drive, or individual files - unique in the industry. This compact and portable Windows application supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems. Lets you specify one or more files, folders, or the whole drive to defragment. Very simple and supports quick defrag.

WinContig

WinContig is an easy-to-use stand-alone defragmentation tool that doesn't create any installation directories or Registry entries on your computer. Its purpose is to quick defrag files without the need to defrag the whole disk. In addition, WinContig allows you to group files into profiles, and also it accepts a number of optional command-line switches that you can use to control how the program operates.

SysInternal Tools

SysInternals also has some tools for defragmentation working directly on single files which can help out in some cases.

Contig

Contig is a single-file defragmenter that attempts to make files contiguous on disk. Its perfect for quickly optimizing files that are continuously becoming fragmented, or that you want to ensure are in as few fragments as possible.

PageDefrag

PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).

Windows Vista

Finally, I had the opportunity to play around with Windows Vista Home Edition, which doesn't seem to have to much exit. And after struggling around, with an original (a friend convinced me to repair his broken PC), these are my conclusions:

1. To start, let me explain what happened: A Worm entered his system and damaged something in the part of the system which handles the user accounts. It was impossible to enter the system, because when entering the session screen, it already shut down.
   So much about all these protection mechanism they included into Vista: A simple Worm can damage your system badly.
2. The repair option, well, it wasn't an option, because it didn't work. It wasn't able to restore any of the three restore points it had created.
   Therefore, I had to do a fresh install.
3. After having reinstalled Vista from scratch, well, at least a good surprise is the fact that you don't have to assist during the whole installation process. Previous versions asks you all the time about details, in Vista they ask you all near to the end.
   Well, I still prefer the Ubuntu way, ask everything you need at the beginning, then let the installation go on and when you come back, you already have an operative system in your PC.
4. Okay graphics are nice, but no fancy 3D effects like with Compiz.
5. Advise about 75 updates, ... it took more than 3 hours to download and install all of them, with several reboots.
   Come on, with Ubuntu it takes not even 2 hours to download and install more than 1000 updates when updating from Intrepid to Jaunty, with one reboot.
   
6. Vista also fries your hard-disk, nothing changed from previous versions, your hard-disk is clicking a lot and operating all the time.
7. IE rebooted the whole system when trying to download software from Softonic.
   That IE crashes, okay, but why do you reset the whole system?????
8. I was not able to delete the previous Vista system, backed up in Windows.old folder. I had to start the PC with Ubuntu's LiveCD to be able to delete the whole folder.
   

After installing the necessary drivers and the Avast AntiVirus, I quickly shut off Windows Vista, packaged my friends PC and I'll never again use that operating system.
No software is perfect, but one you pay for, sorry Microsoft, I expect much more.

I'll stick to XP if I need to, and use Ubuntu for most of my tasks.

Install new fonts in your system

In a previous post, we learned how to convert Open Type fonts into True Type ones.
Now we'll learn how to store them in your system, so all text and graphics applications will find and use them.
Normally, you'll not un-/install fonts continuously on your system, so you would prefer (like me) a simple way, without the need to install additional software (like kfontview on KUbuntu, or the ones you can find for Windows).

On Ubuntu

All fonts can be stored in two locations:

1. In ~/.fonts
   Only you will see fonts copied here. You can copy fonts here with nautilus or from the shell:
   

   mkdir -p ~/.fonts         # make sure folder exists
   cp *.tff  ~/.fonts          # or whatever's the name of the fonts you want to copy
   fc-cache -f -v ~/.fonts   # reload the font cache to make new fonts visible



2. In /usr/share/fonts/truetype
   All users will see fonts copied here. You can copy fonts here with nautilus or from the shell:
   

   mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts    # create a sub-folder to be organized
   cp *.tff  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts   # or whatever's the name of the fonts you want to copy
   fc-cache -f -v       # reload the global font cache to make new fonts visible

No extra software is needed. But even so, we'll mention a useful tool that doesn't come in your default Ubuntu installation: Specimen Font Previewer, a simple tool to view and compare fonts installed on your system.
You can install it from the Applications menu or from the shell:

sudo aptitude install gnome-specimen

Note: In a previous post, I explained how to install certain Microsoft fonts on your Ubuntu system.

On Windows

Fonts are installed in only one location: %WINDIR%\Fonts
Just open this location with the explorer and copy any font files here. They'll be immediately available for all users.

Media Player Classic

Media Player Classic (MPC) is a compact media player for Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, light-weight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players.

In conjunction with the Combined Community Codec Pack (it's included here), it should be your first choice for playing any multimedia file on Windows and not that overblown WMPlayer included in that OS.

Quicktime Alternative

Very similar to Real Alternative, QuickTime Alternative is a trimmed down version of QuickTime that contains only the essential components needed for playing QuickTime content that is embedded in webpages.

Real Alternative

After having installed Combined Community Codec Pack on your fresh Windows System, you may stumple upon some real video files which don't play back (f.ex. Real Video 4.0 format isn't supported by ffdshow from that codec pack).

But there's still no reason to install the oficial Real Video package, which clutters your system with unnecessary stuff (that codec really sucks, go for x264 instead).


With Real Alternative you can play Real Media files without RealPlayer.
The pack can be used with any DirectShow-enabled media player, such as Media Player Classic, which is included as part of the package.
As you already will have installed the CCCP, you can just install the Lite version, which doesn't include Media Player Classic.

Disk Usage Analyser

You want to find out where all the space on your hard disk was going?

Well you could have a look from a Linux command line with du -H, but that's not very user friendly.

Much better to use a graphical tool for that purpose.

Ubuntu (Linux)

Baobab

Baobab has been included as a component of gnome-utils with the name 'Disk Usage Analyzer' and can be found as such in Ubuntu's Applications->Accessories menu.

Baobab can easily scan either the whole file system tree, or a specific user-requested directory branch (local or remote).

Filelight

Baobab's radial map view comes from Filelight which was developed mainly for the KDE environment. It's radial map is still more graphical than Baobad's one, so you may like to check it out instead. It can be installed directly from the Applications menu.

Windows

Scanner

Scanner uses a unique concentric pie chart (very similar to Filelight) to display the usage of your hard disk or other media. The chart shows all major files and folders from all directory levels at once.

First of all: If you really want to be safe when connecting to Internet ... use a Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

But if you're unlucky to use Windows, well then you should use a firewall software and whenever possible, use anything else then Windows integrated one.

Comodo Free Firewall

Finally, I found a decent replacement for Outpost which was my favourite for a very long time.

Comodo Free Firewall is not only a simple firewall, but has several intelligent protection mechanism to protect your machine against any kind of malware, it learns continuously which applications performs what kind of actions, so any alteration is detected. You can submit suspicious files to Comodo for analysis.
And it is completely free of charge, and fully functional.
This fact and that it consumes much less memory than Outpost makes this one my favourite.

Outpost Pro Firewall

Outpost Pro was my favourite firewall for a long time.
I liked especially its low impact in the systems performance, its excellent attack detection mechanisms, its possibility so see all data flows through any TCP/IP connection and its logging system. Apart from being a good firewall, it is a good tool for debugging internet connections. It also detects alterations of executables, but when monitoring dynamic library loads, the system impact is noticeable.

ZoneAlarm

For some time I used ZoneAlarm, but finally discarded this firewall of its bad impact on the systems performance.

AVG

AVG is another firewall which was free software, but I'm not sure anylonger about this.
It never convinced me, because you couldn't see what was going on under the hood. Maybe newer versions have evolved decently.

Network Brigdes

Network bridges are handy when used with virtual machines, for example using virtualization software like Virtualbox.

How can you create a network bridge?

Ubuntu

The following command line instructions create a bridge between the physical ethernet connector eth0 and a virtual host adapter vbox0 from Virtualbox:

sudo -i
apt-get install bridge-utils
ifconfig eth0 10.3.3.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
brctl addbr br0
ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc
brctl addif br0 eth0
dhclient br0
brctl addif br0 vbox0
ifconfig vbox0 10.3.3.2 up

These instructions create a bridge called br0 and sets a static IP on the vbox0 adapter.

Windows XP

On Windows XP (I haven't and will never try it on other Windows versions) things are much easier:
Just select the two network adapters (f.ex. a physical and a host adapter from Virtualbox) that you want to connect from the network explorer, and click with the right mouse button over on of them.
You'll find a menu entry like Create Bridge.
After a while, a new icon appears, representing the new bridge which is fully operative.
If you want to unlink the adapters again, just delete the bridge icon.

Wine

Wine is as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux.

Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine is a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unix.

Utilities for Wine

Wine-doors

Wine-doors is an application designed to make installing Windows software into Wine much easier. It is essentially a package management tool for Windows software on Linux systems, like Synaptic for Ubuntu.

winetricks

winetricks is a script to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries into your Wine setup to be able to run certain applications.

Tips & Tricks

By default, Wine uses Windows colour scheme for the applications GUIs.
But this doesn't fit very well with Ubuntus colours.

Wine-doors already gives you the possibility to install a set of colors that fit well with Ubuntus desktop look, but In the Ubuntu forums, there's a good guide about how to change the colour scheme by hand.

GRUB for DOS

GRUB4DOS is an universal boot loader based on GNU GRUB, it's the DOS extension of GRUB.
It enables dos users to run the configuration console directly in real mode.
It can boot off DOS/LINUX, or via Windows boot manager/syslinux/lilo, or from MBR/CD.
It also has builtin BIOS disk emulation, ATAPI CDROM driver, etc.

It's much more powerful than Linux Grub and you should read its tutorial here to learn about all its options.
It's impressive.

The project also contains an utility called WINGRUB, an GUI intends to help configuring and installing GRUB in the WINDOWS environment.
This is very useful whenever your Windows destroys GRUBs MBR and you don't want to restart your system from a Linux LiveCD for recovering. With WinGrub you can do this directly from Windows.

Remote Desktops

UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

UltraVNC runs under Windows operating systems (95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003...). Its embedded Java Viewer allows you to connect (and make File transfers) from a simple Web Browser on any Operating system supporting Java (Linux, Mac OS...) to an UltraVNC server.

You can connect directly from your Ubuntu desktop with tsclient (Applications --> Internet --> Terminal Server Client).
Previously, you have to ensure you have the VNC Client installed as well:

sudo apt-get install vnc-viewer

Then you can select VNC as connection protocol to connect to your Windows box from Linux.

Tip: Use the special F8 key

Most of the VNC clients have a special mapping for the F8 key. A menu will open and you can

• send the F8 key to the remote desktop
• send Ctlr-Alt-Del to the remote desktop
• change the preferences of the VNC client
• and other stuff depending on the client
  

View Office documents

There's OpenOffice so why should I bother to install the Microsoft Office Suite?

1. Some MS Office documents aren't displayed right with OpenOffice. There are few ones, but it still happens.
2. Documents with Macros often aren't handled.
3. You just don't want to start OpenOffice to see a PowerPoint that a friend has send you via email, because it isn't immediately.

Okay, these are some reasons, but I still don't want to install this huge Suite or I'm using Linux so this is no choice.

You don't have to.
There exist free tools from Microsoft which can display Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, without having installed the Office Suite.
Moreover, they work perfectly with Wine on Linux.

They are simple Viewers, you can't edit the documents, but printing works as well.

You can find them here:

• Word Viewer
• Powerpoint Viewer (on Ubuntu can be installed from the application menu)
  
• Excel Viewer
  

Mount .ISO image as CD/DVD drive

On Ubuntu or any other Linux

There's a console way or a GUI way.

Mount by hand

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 my.iso /mymountpoint

GUI way

The best tool is AcetoneISO, supporting almost all kind of disc images. Read more about this tool in this separate post.

Add Gmount-iso from the application menu or install it by issuing

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

.

Just select the .iso image you want to mount, select a folder where it should be available and that's it.
Unfortunately, it seems to support only .iso images.

If you need to create .iso files, look at this post.

Integration into Nautilus

Some people have created scripts that can be launched directly from Nautilus on the .iso file. You can also look here for instructions with screenshots.

On Windows

Several applications exists, all supporting several other image formats apart from .iso

Virtual CDRom Control

From Microsoft there is a very small tool (~ 60kb) which can mount .iso and some other formats.
Read the Readme.txt about it's install and usage instructions.

Daemon Tools

DAEMON Tools is an advanced application for Microsoft Windows which provides THE best optical media emulation in the industry.
It supports the biggest amount of protection modes and image formats.
But it's uninstallation was quite bad some time ago, not sure if it is better nowadays.

Alcohol 120%

Alcohol 120% can also create several virtual drives and permits to mount images directly from the right mouse menu.
But it's main purpose is burning images to CD/DVD, supporting several protection modes either.
I recommend this tool, but it's not freeware.

File Synchronization

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.


Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).

Other applications

Linux

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
In Ubuntu you can install from the application menu Grsync, a simple graphical interface for rsync.

Windows

SyncToy is a free PowerToy designed by Microsoft that provides an easy to use graphical user interface that can automate synchronizing files and folders. It is written using Microsoft's .NET framework.

P2P network down-/uploader

mldonkey is a multi-platform, multi-protocol client application.
It includes support for eDonkey2000, Overnet, BitTorrent, Gnutella and Fasttrack.

It can also be used as file downloader, like wget, FlashGet, GetRight.
So if you have a big file for download, just add it and mldonkey takes care of downloading, taking in account your download-limit.

mldonkey installs as a background daemon and does everything without your interaction.
Of course, you'll have to add something to download.
Therefore, we need to access mldonkey somehow, as it acts like a service without GUI.

There are several possibilities, sorted by the easiest to the more complex one:

1. Install and use a GUI client application. In Ubuntu there comes one called mldonkey-gui. There are others out there which can be found on the web page.
   They communicate with mldonkey-server on the socket 4001 by default.
2. Use the web interface provided by mldonkey-server.
   Just open your favourite webbrowser on http://localhost:4080.
3. On the web interface you can do almost everything, but if you need something special just open a shell and issue
   telnet localhost 4000.
   Here you can manage mldonkey-server with a huge set of commands (use longhelp to see all of them).

Okay, doesn't seem to be the most easiest usage.
That's right, but this application is really powerful and gives you access to all download schemas at once.

Some setup notes

• The Ubuntu package doesn't enable BitTorrent by default, so in the web interface just tick it in Options...Net...enable_bittorrent(true)
• Where are my downloaded files?
  On Ubuntu they are downloaded to /var/lib/mldonkey/incoming.
  You should change the settings of the shares to your own folders or just stick with it:
  • Create symbolic links in both incoming folders:
    

    sudo ln -s /home/yourname/incoming /var/lib/mldonkey/incoming/files/yourname
    sudo chown mldonkey.mldonkey /var/lib/mldonkey/incoming/files/yourname

    The same for incoming/directories.
  • In mldonkey enter yourself as new user:
    

    useradd yourname  mldonkey yourname

  From now on, when you enter mldonkey with your username, mldonkey will copy all your downloaded files to your ~/incoming folder.

Troubleshooting

Once my harddisk got full and somehow mldonkey got stuck in a very unstable state. It shut down, 'cause of missing download space, but thereafter it didn't wanted to start again. There were no explication in the log files, why it inmediately died after launched, even that I had cleaned up space again for downloads. At the end I had to remove some temporary files with this command and everything worked fine again:

sudo rm /var/lib/mldonkey/*.tmp

Other applications

I used lots of applications in the past from BitComet, Azureus, uTorrent and Lphant.
Especially, I liked lphant, because it is able to download from eDonkey and BitTorrent at once, but I wasn't able to get it run on Linux (it's based on .NET 2.0, so even with Mono and Wine it isn't possible).
In the P2P community, the most used application for BitTorrent is uTorrent, a very light-weight and easy to use program.

Switching to mldonkey

When switching from another eDonkey/eMule client in most of the cases you can import the partial downloaded files to mldonkey.
I successfully imported the data from lphant to mldonkey with the import_temp command.
But be careful, the partial downloaded data will be erased from the imported folder, so just in case make a backup first.
In the Wiki there are guides about importing data from BitTorrent clients, but this seems to be quite complicated. So maybe the easiest way is to copy your .torrent files into /var/lib/mldonkey/torrent/incoming and after a while they'll show up in the download list, but starting from 0%.

Visual Diff and Merge tools

Working with source controls systems implies to view differences between versions, merge changes.
Or you just want to see quickly a difference between two files or folders.

On Linux you could stick to good and old tool diff, but it's a command line tool and it gets very confusing when viewing differences between big files.


It's much better to use visual tools for these task, moreover they integrate well with source control tools like explained in one of my previous topics.

For Ubuntu there is meld.

For Windows I recommend WinMerge.

GUI for subversion

First of all, I recommend all programmers to hold their sources, even personal stuff, in a source control system.
It makes things much easier if you have to perform some roll-back of parts of your code, or even have to find out bug regressions.

With subversion its so easy to have your own subversion repository and one day I'll talk about this.

To handle subversion from command line isn't very simple, especially if you want to compare what changed, if you have to resolve merge conflicts or you just want to investigate which projects are located inside a repository.

There are several implementations of GUIs out there for subversion.

Update: My latest recommendation is subcommander!

On KUbuntu the one I recommend is kdesvn that can be installed directly from the applications menu.
It permits to browse existing repositories and perform all possible operations like checkin/outs, merges, diffs, change properties, etc.
A very nice feature is its integration with the dot utility for painting Revision Graphs. You'll have to install the GraphViz package: sudo apt-get install graphviz

integrates better into Ubuntu than kdesvn, is almost equal, but has some limitations when browsing repositories (you can't see the log for a certain tag, for example). I still recommend it when you use Ubuntu. Another advantage: It's multi-platform, and is available for Windows also.

On Windows there is a very powerful tool called TortoiseSVN. Unfortunately, it hasn't been ported to Linux yet.
Tortoise has some special features for integration with issue tracking systems like Jira, integration into VisualStudio, aso.

Other applications

Previously, I recommended RapidSVN, but it doesn't support repository administration, nor it doesn't support double-clicking a file to see its content (you first have to checkout to a working folder).
On Ubuntu you find also SVN Workbench, but this tool doesn't support browsing existing repositories.

VirtualBox

innotek (now SUN)s VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware (including Linux and Windows).
There exists an Open Source edition, but it is less powerful.


See my full article about this software, solutions for problems on Ubuntu systems etc.

Combined Community Codec Pack

Combined Community Codec Pack is a DirectShow filter pack for Windows systems.

It covers a huge amount of video codecs and filters, and as far as I know the only one that officially is supporting the Matroska format (I like this one especially).

It is also unofficially endorsed by On2, the makers of the VP series of codecs (VP3, VP6, VP7) as a reliable codec pack to use for decoding video.

Also recommended by a large number of anime fansubbing groups, this filter pack is a must to install into a fresh Windows copy.