Saturday, 9 April 2016

Sharing resources between Windows and Linux computers

Since I have two main computers and one runs Windows while the other runs Linux, there are inevitably going to be some ways in which I will try to share resources between the two computers. Linux of course comes with Samba preinstalled to allow shared folders to be accessible to Windows. One of the key issues has been that the Canon download software for my cameras doesn't have a Linux edition so I have decided after a bit of experimentation that the Windows computer will be the one that has the download software on it and where the cameras will be connected to a USB cable for this purpose. There will be a full set of photos kept on this computer that will be synchronised automatically to the Linux computer for use there. That may change eventually to having the Windows computer keep the only set of the photos if I can figure out how to connect to it from Linux; so far I haven't been able to do this successfully.

Another issue is the backup which has also been running in the past from the Windows computer, which accessed the computer that is now running Linux over the network to back its files up. Since I can use Samba to set up file shares on the Linux computer then it should be possible to share all of my Home folder and then continue to use Cobian Backup on the Windows computer to do the backups just as I have been doing them already.

In other things: I have been able to get the latest version of Remmina installed and done a lot of remote access stuff with it. The clipboard seems to work better in the 1.2 release. I also had a look at antivirus software. Although it may not be necessary for Linux itself, it is useful to have when sharing stuff with Windows computers. After looking at a few options I settled on the free edition of Sophos Antivirus as being the best choice and have installed it.

UPDATE: Well after playing with the settings on the Windows computer I was able to get the Linux computer to connect to its shared pictures folder from Nemo, the Mint file manager. I am not sure if it was a case-sensitivity problem or with the Windows Live user account I tried to use first. When I capitalised all the letters of the Windows computer name and used a local account it worked.

The main issue is does it get put in as a local path? Well, in fact, it does. This is not immediately apparent. In fact, it will appear as /run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share... where smb-share is followed by the path to the share. It turns out I can do most things with files accessed through that path, for example IrfanView running under Wine can scan and rename and so on. So at the moment the idea is to see how I go accessing my photos from the Windows computer over the network which will save from having to maintain two separate copies on two computers with synchronisation. Ideally it would be preferable if Nemo could map into something that was easier to remember but we will see how that goes for now. At least I have been able to get Wine to map that to a drive letter for IrfanView to make it easier to use in there.

So over the next few days I will be testing that out, and if that works, the Windows computer will hold all the photos and not the Linux computer, but it will be just as easy on the Linux computer to access them, even if it means I have to have two computers on for some of the time.
Posted by Anonymous at 17:37
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Saturday, 2 April 2016

Irfanview on Wine

With any computer system there is a point reached where the software you like is on a different platform and you have to find some workaround. Various types of virtualisation are common workarounds. Wine is a type of virtualisation that allows some software packages designed for Windows to be run under Linux.

Well, IrfanView can be run under Wine, but you have to make sure you download the Zip version of the software package because the installer uses MFC42.dll which is a Windows component. Installing Wine is straightfoward using the PPA from WineHQ as described here.

Extract the Zip archive into a folder and copy it to Wine's Program Files or Program Files (x86) folder (/home/username/.wine/drive_c). I found that simply starting it with the wine command worked first time and no other fiddles were necessary.

The shortcut icon seems to be a tricky issue with Wine as you have to extract icons from the software package. There are some tools such as icoutils that will help with this. In the case of IrfanView, icoutils wasn't able to get any icons out of the exe file. I can probably get the icon from Windows.

Of course another option to Wine is to use a native Linux package. XnViewer is a possibility; I don't know about any other packages that might be available.
Posted by Anonymous at 17:32
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Monday, 28 March 2016

Mint here we come

Well finally I have put my main computer onto Mint. The preparation was mainly making the various backups to ensure I don't lose any data on switching over.

As you can imagine it is not always straightforward especially if doing something a little out of the ordinary. Some of these different elements in my setup include:
  • The two disks in a RAID-1 array where my home folders are stored.
  • The NVIDIA video card driving three display screens.
  • The separation of the home folders from the boot volume.
So I had to use the custom partitioning to split the installation over two different disks. First mistake was to redirect /usr to the 1 TB disk instead of /home (once upon a time /usr was the home folders root path but it was changed to /home quite a long time ago in fact). After realising the mistake and looking at options I decided it was just easier to do the installation again as no data had been put into the home folders at that stage. With this done it means the core operating system files are on the SSD but the home folder is on the 1 TB hard drive where there is plenty of room. At least Linux supports this properly unlike Windows where it can be put in with a registry key but Microsoft won't support it. In fact, recent editions of Windows like 8, 8.1 and 10 will not update to a new release if the Users folder has been moved to a different path.

Now that I have the home drive set up I can start copying stuff across from the other half of what used to be the 1 TB RAID-1 array. Basically when I was setting up to install the computer, one of the tasks before shutting down Windows for the last time was to break the mirror, so that I ended up with two separate 1 TB disks that just happened to contain the same identical data. When I did the install, the first of these disks (/dev/sda1) was set up to be the home partition. This meant of course it was wiped, but the other disk (/dev/sdd1) was left alone. So /dev/sdd1 is still waiting for me to shift stuff across onto /dev/sda1. And once I have completed doing that then /dev/sdd1 can be set up as a mirror of /dev/sda1.

The second major issue was getting the system to boot with the NVIDIA card with only the Nouveau driver that comes in Linux. As it happens I had to edit the boot configuration in GRUB to add a couple of switches to it. The articles linked below are helpful (the boot options couldn't be edited on the fly and I had to boot from the install CD then figure out how to mount the boot volume and make the edits and then update the configuration). This took quite a lot of fiddling before I managed to get it to work properly. The second time I worked out how to do it before rebooting at the end of the install so that went a bit more smoothly as it came up at the first boot into compatibility mode (software rendering).

Things are generally good as of now but naturally there is a mountain of work getting everything set up and running. The Mint driver manager had no problems installing the Nvidia proprietary drivers and getting the card going so I have three screens back on and things are moving along pretty smoothly at the moment.

Posted by Anonymous at 15:48
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