As you might already know, thanks to NTFS-3g, it’s already possible to write into NTFS partitions (they used to be read-only partitions). Until now, the easiest (and safest) way to exchange data with Windows (for those of us who have a dual boot system) was using a FAT partition for read-write exchange.

Following one (among the many) tutorials I’ve seen, it’s rather easy to mount NTFS windows partitions and read & write on them with no problem at all.

However, I have an external USB 500Gb hard drive I’d like to access both from Linux and Windows. So I formatted it to NTFS to read and write lot of info on it (mostly multimedia). On Windows I had no problem (NTFS is windows native). But in Linux (Kubuntu), by default, the drive was mounted using the old (read-only) NTFS driver.

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Posted by Boriel as Linux, Tips & tricks, Computer Science at 9.03 pm

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This tip will work (or should do) for any Debian-based distro, including Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

First of all, you have to install Firefox 2.0. At the moment of posting this, the Ubuntu package has not been released yet, so you should go to download a.gz file from here, although I got an optimized version, Swiftfox, for which there exists a Debian package (Ubuntu & Kubuntu compatible) you can download from here.

Once this file is downloaded, open a console and chdir to the directory where you stored the file, and type:

sudo dpkg -i swiftfox_2.0-1_pentium4.deb

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Posted by Boriel as Linux, Tips & tricks at 7.31 pm

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Do you feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of news you get from the internet? How to keep up to date without getting flooded?

If you want to be up to date with this blog (and many others) entries without having to visit them everyday then RSS is for you.

RSS is a sindication protocol. It’s basically an electronic news agency. This site has the RSS protocol already enabled. There are many news sindication applications. Among them, my favourite is, by far, Mozilla Firefox, with the InfoRSS extension.

Once installed the extension, restart Firefox, and the sindication bar will appear at the bottom. Click on the bar icon (as shown above) and, if the site (like this one) has the RSS protocol enabled, the option to aggregate the feed will appear on the pop up menu. Once you do it, you’ll be permanently up to date with the latest news, and you won’t need to visit the aggegated sited so often.

Posted by Boriel as Tips & tricks at 12.20 pm

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An acquaintance at work gave me this link, which details (video tutorial included) how to make your on paper-Palm. The poor man’s Palm. I certainly found it interesting, creative, and somewhat useful, so I tried to make my own (click on any photo to enlarge it).

…and that’s it! Have fun!

Posted by Boriel as Pictures, Tips & tricks at 5.57 pm

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