Scanning Windows from Ubuntu 10.10 LiveCD (ClamAV)
Recently I was working with someone who suspected that their laptop had a virus, and so wanted to do a virus scan. Needless to say, I recommended to them a couple of freely available virus scanners for Windows, but I also recommended that they boot up a LiveCD and run a virus scan from there. Being able to run off a LiveCD for a virus scan ensures that no techniques that the virus can employ on the host operating system to hide itself (such as a rootkit might do) will work. However, they had never used Linux before, and rather...
Remove a Word From Firefox's Dictionary
Typos often happen, even to the best of typists. Unfortunately these typos can be added to the spell check with a simple clicko as you attempt to correct your typo. Fortunately, its relatively easy to fix this mistake, even if it is a bit of a pain. You will have to edit a file called persdict.dat. This file is found in the folder for your Firefox profile, which in Linux is located in ~/.mozilla/firefox/messofletters.default/persdict.dat, replacing messofletters with the actual name of the directory in ~/.mozilla/firefox/ that ends with .default. Having opened up persdict.dat for editing, simply find and delete the...
My New Desktop
After quite some time of suffering with my desktop flirting with failure, the sales on Black Friday finally opened up an opportunity for me to upgrade to an i-series Intel CPU on my budget. My desktop now consists of a new motherboard, running an i3 CPU, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and a new power supply capable of driving all that new hardware. Of course this upgrade does have its downsides. In order to speed things along, so that I can get back to my preparations for my next semester at UAH, I installed a Linux system with which I wouldn’t...
Using a Ramdisk on /tmp
Just the other day, I wrote about using ramdisks. I briefly touched on mounting at boot with the fstab file. One possible use for this is mounting a ramdisk for the /tmp directory, which increases the read/write speeds for often used temporary files. After around a week of using this ramdisk, I’ve seen only small speed increases, and those are mainly in the play back of videos from the Internet. People running a slower hard drive, or a hard drive with a smaller cache may find that this tip has a more noticeable impact, but should keep in mind that...
Making and Mounting a RAM Disk
As fast as they are, sold state drives aren’t really my thing. Not that I don’t want one, but rather the cost of the drive simply isn’t worth the benefits. Of course, there are times when fast read/write times can be hugely beneficial. Take, for instance, video processing. The faster that the CPU can access a video, the faster the processing can be completed. In fact, its likely that copying the video onto a high speed hard drive where the CPU can get to it faster could reduce the total time despite the copy time. And that’s where a ramdisk...