MS Smoke and Mirrors over Live Email storage

Microsoft deliberately won't tell you what the size limit of your Live mailbox is. They sort of imply it's unlimited. This is a smoke and mirrors game in which they can shift the goalposts any time they like and is similar to how they very quietly announced they were chopping OneDrive storage from 15 GB to 5 GB. They have in fact twice chopped OneDrive from a large amount (it was 25 GB at one time) to a smaller amount, and obviously twice gone from a small amount to a large amount.

The reason we were given for OneDrive being chopped was that they had had a period of unlimited storage and a small number of people abused it, so now they had to chop everyone to 5 GB. There was no explanation why they couldn't go back to 15 GB. Well, I just opened a new Gmail account and moved everything to Drive.

Going back to Live Mail, as soon as you hit some sort of limit, you'll keep getting these emails saying your Outlook account is growing too fast. Even if it's growing really slowly. I don't actually know what the limit is except that I keep getting these messages, and there is no actual way to know how much space my emails have used. I am actually getting to the point of being annoyed by the messages, and have now started moving mail off the Outlook.com server to another Gmail account. Maybe I will start redirecting new mails to that account as well.

It looks like this capacity limit for Live could be as low as 2 GB - compared to the 15 GB mailbox that Google gives you it is not much, and there isn't a lot going for MS's cloud services now that OneDrive only stores 5 GB.

Kodi Media Player on Xubuntu

Last time I was looking at putting Kodibuntu onto a low spec computer (in this case a AMD E350 as I have a couple of those and they are not much use for anything else). I duly did install the Kodibuntu image but there was no sound on the computer when it was set up. These types of issues are unfortunately quite common with Lubuntu, upon which Kodibuntu is based. So I went back to the drawing board and installed Xubuntu and then Kodi on top of it. It works very well for media playback on that computer and isn't resource limited with that.

So right now I have five computers. In the bedroom I have the main PC and the media PC, both on Xubuntu, then there is a third computer (one of the AMD E350s) with Windows 8.1 that is there for the scanner and cameras mainly. In the lounge is the computer I use for general stuff, and then the other AMD E350 - both computers run Xubuntu as well. The two media player computers are both running Kodi which works very well. 

One of the niceties of a proper media centre is that it isn't limited to playing back files. With the libdvdcss2 library you can play back DVDs, and with the plugins supplied, YouTube videos can be played. So I have been playing a lot of Youtube stuff on the lounge media computer and it is good that Kodi is really easy to use. Both media players have Logitech cordless keyboards with built in trackpads and all my Logitech keyboards have keys to control media playback and volume. 

The next task is to bring together the media library on the media PC in the bedroom, so that all the cds and dvd clips are all organised on it, so that I can then copy the library to the lounge media computer. At the moment I don't have all of the DVDs I ripped recently and I suspect some of them are stored on the 2nd disk in the lounge media computer which was previously the Win81 PC and DVD ripper.

The long term plan is there would be one less computer in the living room, there would be no desk as now with a PC hanging off the bottom of it. Instead the small chassis (Antec) AMD350 would be parked in behind a big screen TV and would be used with that system to play stuff back. There is still a lot of Kodi I have not explored like the other types of media it can handle (mostly pictures) and heaps of addons for different video websites. I believe modules can also be installed for PVR type stuff but I have no intention of using these.

Linux So Far

As one would be aware, about six months ago I took my first tentative steps towards the Linux platform. Since then I have been using Linux extensively on as many of my computers as I can. I did so in the full knowledge there is something of a religious zeolotry associated with this platform, almost like the Apple zeolotry but for different reasons. Whilst wishing to stay above that kind of fanatacism I still have to admit that I have developed a fierce loyalty for the Linux platform in that six months. Every day there is some new opportunity or experience or learning to be had in conjunction with this platform. Running VNC is the latest great accomplishment as I have spent the last few days exhaustively VNCing to my 24 GB computer from the low spec computer in another part of the house and it has been a brilliant working experience with only occasional hiccups in terms of being able to do a lot of stuff from a computer that is innately incapable of handling it. The browser issue, well switching to Firefox Developer as my primary browser at home hasn't been the issue that I thought it would be, the issues I saw back in July when I last tried it haven't actually been there at all this time.

It took me several goes to find a distro that worked well for all the different computers. They could have all run different distros but now they are all running Xubuntu, which I think gives the best use of resources on both low spec and high spec computers, and also has a very pleasing visual impact for the most part. The fact many applications I already use have been available for Linux for a long time has limited the need for me to keep computers that run Windows down to just one actual computer and one virtual machine on a regular basis. There is a question mark over the AMD E350 computer running Xubuntu which has not been as good a performer as I expected and tends to max out on the CPU relatively quickly. A thought is the AMD video driver supplied in Ubuntu may be an issue but I have yet to investigate further as being able to VNC to another computer in the house has been a useful workaround. Both Firefox and Chrome max out the CPU playing fullscreen Youtube clips with Remmina being the only other substantial sysem load, but there is virtually nothing between the browsers as far as performance goes. However it is notable that CPU is at 100% while the amount of RAM being used is less than 500 MB, so I don't really know where the bottleneck is, and it will be interesting to compare the other AMD E350 that is running Windows 8.1 to see what its performance is like.

So far - very good.

The comparison with the AMD E350 running Win 8.1 turned out to have similar performance issues. Well, the boards were cheap (the CPU is onboard) and were originally bought to use as essentially thin client terminals so they were never expected to have a lot of power. Still, it is disappointing that an old DQ35JO Intel board with 8 GB still is a long way from maxing out CPU as quickly as these do, and that it was essentially a waste of money upping both the ones I have to 8 GB. I have now replaced the AMD E350 in the lounge with that selfsame DQ35JO on a number of bases, including that it can take one of my $50 Nvidia NV210 cards and therefore run both screens in digital - it has VGA, HDMI and DVI connectors and can use any two - for the sharpest picture. Plan at the moment is to pick up the DG41RQ from work and swap it for something else low spec, bring it home and use it as the shed pc in place of that DQ35JO. Would be interesting to see how that AMD E350 goes as a multimedia computer running Kodibuntu and I will have a play with that as soon as I work out which chassis to put the board into.

Browsers that work on Xubuntu

When I started using Xubuntu it came with Firefox, but I preferred Chrome and Opera. Since then, Opera's sync servers have been hacked, causing me to make less use of it and stop syncing data altogether. Chrome has been very good on Windows for me in the past, but seems to have a lot of issues in the Linux edition. Primarily these revolve around the Flash plugin, which often stops or freezes. I find that some tabs quite often put up messages to this affect. At other times without these messages, tabs will simply crash for no obvious reason. It does not take very long before this starts to happen on even the computer with 24 GB of RAM; it can be in as little as 12 tabs when this is happening.

So first of all I tried Chromium, which behaved in exactly the same way, and then I started to test Firefox Aurora. Now not so long ago I tried out Aurora because Opera was giving me some headaches. Well I am not totally sure if Aurora is the best option but I know that it can perform well with a massive number of tabs open. At the moment it is showing no signs of breaking down like Chrome has been. I don't remember what the other issues were with it more recently that stopped me from wanting to use it for personal stuff. However I am having another go with it because Chrome is not satisfactory at the present time.

I don't know what is going on with Chrome but I do know I have seen its issues across several of my computers so it is not specific to any one computer, and as mentioned above, having a lot of RAM for it to work in (and it does use a lot, in any case) does not solve the problem. For now, I am therefore working with Firefox Aurora (FFDE) to see if it can do better.

More Remote Access with VNC Servers and Clients

Last time I wrote about remote access it was to talk about RDP clients for Linux. Now it is time to have a look at using VNC, which is better supported as a server for Linux than RDP. Ubuntu comes with what is called "Desktop Sharing" which can also be installed as the vino package. This is a straightforward and easy to set up VNC server for your computer. I am only using it on my home network, not over the Internet - if you need to do the latter you should set it up to work over SSH. I have never set up any remote access to my home network over the Internet and don't plan to do so in the future.

Some instructions here

You will also need a VNC client. TightVNC which I used on Windows is capable but is no longer produced natively for Linux as the producers have focused exclusively on Windows for their present and future development of the native client. It is possible however to have it running on Java but I want a native client.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC/Clients

From this I can see a few recommended options like Vinagre. This was easy to install, but terrible to use. It was incredibly slow to update the screen. So I ditched it pretty quickly.

Here is another article that is worth a look:

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/7-of-the-best-linux-remote-desktop-clients-716346

From that article I have tried installing TigerVNC (which is in fact a TightVNC fork), but it won't run on my system. So for now I am playing with Remmina. This at least will give me access to all three screens (on MainPC) in one wide window I can scroll across. There is still a lag I am not quite used to when typing and moving the cursor around. Having used Remmina quite extensively with RDP clients you don't see these sort of delays on RDP so maybe there is just something to adjust in the configuration, but it could also be Vino that is responsible for the slowish performance. I noticed in the article they used X11VNC rather than Vino. TurboVNC looks good as a client but turns out to require Java, which I don't see the point of, as this computer is going to have resource challenges running it. 

Back to the the Ubuntu.com website and we have a separate section on VNC servers worth looking at:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC/Servers

This one talks about both Vino and X11VNC. I chose at this juncture to remove the former and install the latter. The instructions for X11VNC are very useful simply because this software's man page reveals a huge number of configuration options. Well as soon as I got X11VNC running I can see that immediately it is way better than Vino. This well and truly justifies the high praise that the combination got in the TechRadar report mentioned above. In fact I am finishing off this blog post from a remote machine running Remmina accessing MainPC running X11VNC and the result is as good as RDP, flawlessly smooth response for both keyboard and mouse, the colours look great and so on. Although Remmina doesn't appear to provide a way of displaying the client window over multiple local monitors it provides quite a painless way when it is in full screen mode of scrolling between the server's monitors by simply displaying them from left to right and moving the mouse to the right or left simply causes the client to scroll across to the next monitor. Switching between virtual desktops on the server was quite straightforward as well. So I can see that if I choose to work in the lounge with the only PC there now being a fairly lightweight AMD E350 which even with 8 GB of RAM is quite stretched running more than a web browser and definitely struggling with more than a few browser tabs open, then I do have the option of VNCing to one of the other computers. It is further interesting that starting VirtualBox on MainPC provided another means of interacting with it as a pair of windows on MainPC, compared to remoting to it with Remmina. As Remmina does not have the ability via RDP to handle multiple windows, using it under VNC is a more desirable option, although of course I do have the ability to also use XFreeRDP on this computer to get to the VM as previously mentioned.

So all round getting VNC working on my computers is a great move forward due to the location of where computers are currently being used and their various capabilities.

Remote Access with Remmina and XFreeRDP

In the title of this message I have listed two remote access clients: the Remmina gui based RDP software and XFreeRDP which is command line based. Right now these are the tools I am having a play with to try out different remote access systems, which in my scenario is to allow me to remote from a Xubuntu desktop to a Windows 7 virtual machine running on VirtualBox. The big issue is that this VM is running with dual displays, which Remmina in particular doesn't support. I certainly want to have both of those displays appearing on my computer screen on the lounge computer when I work there.

Remmina is otherwise a good package that I use all the time for work purposes, it is similar to RD Tabs with a tabbed interface to access multiple simultaneous remote desktop sessions at the same time. XFreeRDP is something I have tested and shown to work with the dual screens of the VM but I was not able to find a way to exit from its full screen mode so the aim of this post is to more fully document its functionality as a reference for using it later.

Instructions for installing Remmina

The command line syntax for XFreeRDP goes along these lines

xfreerdp [file] [options] [/v:server[:port]]

There are a lot of possible switches and the ability to store settings into a .rdp file, which I presume has the same format as Windows does. The simplest option by far is to simply pass a server name and optional port number. These settings and perhaps the -f (for fullscreen) option could be saved in a shortcut without having to create the .rdp file. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Enter turns out to be the keyboard shortcut that toggles full screen mode, but only if you put -f in to start with. But to get out, also, you can select Disconnect from the start menu. The next thought is how do you make it use the multiple monitors present in the source in this case? And the answer is the -multimon switch. So a useful command line will look something like the following:

xfreerdp -v 192.168.20.103 -u admin -p password -f -multimon

As it happens Remmina is good enough to use for non-multimon purposes so I am just going to use that xfreerdp for this exact situation, connecting to that virtual machine, which it happens I was doing with MSTSC when this computer was running Windows. So I made a shortcut with those parameters, and it works flawlessly.

Here is a description of the man page for xfreerpd:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/xfreerdp

Great image viewers for Xubuntu

I just want something that lets me zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, lets me run multiple instances, and is easy to use. Gliv fits the bill for that, and you can easily install it directly with apt. However, it is not currently maintained.

GPicView, the default viewer of LXDE, was also evaluated, but it was found to use the mouse wheel to scroll between images, which is not my preferred UI option. Therefore GPicView is not my preferred choice.

I eventually discovered Eye of Gnome (Eog), which is better than Gliv as it allows you to turn the mouse wheel the correct way to zoom in and out (that matches Google Earth and Qgis) and also names its windows directly after the image, which is handy if you have a lot of them open. Eog is therefore my preferred image viewer on my Linux computers.

More Xubuntu

As a result of rearranging things in the house and having three computers in one room, I now have three Xubuntu computers in the house and one Windows 8.1 computer. One of those Xubuntu computers is acting as a media player with Kodi. The function of the Windows computer is mostly to do with hardware I don't have Linux drivers for - scanner and cameras etc, as I can do all software requiring functions in a VirtualBox VM running Win7.

Xubuntu is a very nice system with a lot cleaner appearance than Lubuntu, but the latter is still the most resource efficient option for low spec computers. However I have found in practice there is little difference between them resource usage wise and Xubuntu is a lot easier to set up power applications on. So that is why I am using Xubuntu for everything now.

So having just wiped Windows off the lounge computer and installed Xubuntu, now I will be setting it up to use much as it was used before, except that all the hardware will get connected to the Antec-Gigabyte computer which has joined the two other PCs in my bedroom and is the sole Windows computer in the house.

Multimedia playback in Linux & remote access

One of the things people like to do with PCs is to use them as media centres for playback and recording of videos, TV broadcasts and music etc. I haven't really got into this in a big way other than for playback of my CD and DVD collection. Nevertheless I have used a computer for playback of these things for quite a few years. In Windows, DVD playback capability was not included after Windows 7, requiring either an app purchased from MS, or some third party software. VLC Media Player has proven to be reasonably good, although not perfect, as the playback sometimes stutters (although it is possible the computer's hardware may be at fault). 

VLC is one of the free cross platform packages available but others do exist. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a dedicated media player package that is produced for various platforms, including Linux (precompiled specifically for Ubuntu). I have installed it onto the secondary Xubuntu computer and am just getting used to it, it looks very good and it is designed for media-centre type scenarios, where the user will be some distance away from the screen and perhaps (as in my case) using a media-centre type of keyboard (I use the Logitech K400 Plus which incorporates a trackpad) with less precise pointer movements and therefore needing larger visual targets etc. 

So as I am rearranging things here at home with where the computers are situated and will have the 2nd Xubuntu computer in the bedroom alongside the main pc as a 2nd PC and media centre then Kodi will get a lot of use and with all the plugins for various features it looks very good for that purpose.

Remote access is another interesting subject for Linux. In my lounge I have a computer I use for study as it is sometimes a quieter working space than the bedroom and it ideally remotes to the computer I actually use most of the time. Now in fact that computer is a VirtualBox VM running on the mainPC and it can be remoted onto in just the same way as if it were a regular Windows computer. VirtualBox also has its own remote display (VRDP) system which is backward compatible to RDP meaning it is a way of getting RDP on virtual machines that aren't running Windows. I haven't looked into this to see if it is a better option than using the regular RDP for a virtual macine running Windows.

So that is how I actually work with remote access at the moment as I haven't got to the stage of needing to remote access the main part of the computer running Xubuntu just now. If I do get to that point at some time in the future then it will probably be VNC I will use as this is well supported in Linux.

Linux RAID-1 [9]: Removing an array

The last step having set up a new array is to remove the old one from the computer. This is relatively straightforward.

Firstly the array has to be unmounted, which is a simple umount command with the path, in this case umount /oldhome. The next thing is to run a mdadm command to remove the array from the disk.

mdadm --manage --stop /dev/md0

is the command that will stop the running md0 RAID array.

Then another command removes the array:

mdadm --remove /dev/md0

Final action is to remove the superblock on the individual disks (only one disk present in this case as the failed drive has already been taken out of the computer):

mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdd

We also need to remove its entries from /etc/fstab  and from /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

At this point GDU is showing me the disk is just a disk with nothing on it, it still shows "Block device /dev/md0" however, I have not got much of an idea whether that will just disappear the next time the computer is restarted, I assume it will.