"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Wednesday 30 December 2009

Switching to Xubuntu

In spite of my first impressions after some weeks of real use my desktop computer seems to be slowed down by the latest Ubuntu upgrade. The system is still functional but, while using some application, like Firefox, it starts loosing in fluidity. I so decided to try changing the desktop manager installing XFCE in place of Gnome.
Installation
Installing XFCE on Ubuntu is just a one-command matter:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Thursday 24 December 2009

Saturday 12 December 2009

Recovering accidentally deleted photos using Linux

I suppose it happened almost everybody to have some digital photo accidentally deleted from a memory card. It happened to me some days ago, after a power failure, I discovered the photos I was moving from the camera already had disappeared from the memory card but never had been saved on the hard disk.

The undelete process

The memory card, fortunately, did no suffer any damage during the power failure. Following instructions on this Ubuntu community documentation page I installed foremost:
sudo apt-get install foremost
then I executed it
sudo foremost -i /dev/sdc1 -o /recovery/foremost
/dev/sdc1” is the card reader device .
The program extracted all previously deleted in the output directory all neatly separated, by file type, in different folders.