Windows 7: Finding a DIR Alternative

I needed a DIR-type listing that would provide extended information about a file:  its name, date, and size, and also its path (i.e., the folder and subfolder where it was located), all on a single line of output.  DIR didn't seem to be capable of this, and neither did the utilities I found with a search (e.g., Karen's Directory Printer).

Another search raised the possibility that certain Linux utilities brought over to Windows might have this kind of capability.  I didn't want to run a Linux virtual machine on Win7; I just wanted to be able to run Linux commands that might add functionality I wasn't getting in Windows 7.

Linux commands were probably not the only alternative.  For instance, I could have learned how to use Windows PowerShell scripts.  My general impression of the Microsoft approach (as in the contrast between original BASIC and VB) was that, unfortunately, something that could be done with one relatively simple command in another tool would require three or four lines of code, which I would be able to write only after mastering a handful of relatively abstruse programming concepts, in the Microsoft product.  This impression seemed borne out when a search led to an indication that the DIR equivalent in PowerShell would require a multiline FOREACH loop.

Preliminary inquiries gave me the impression that Cygwin sought to provide a subsystem that would emulate a Linux machine within Windows.  There were indications that other projects (e.g., MSYS) sought to provide a somewhat comparable (e.g., 110MB) environment.  These seemed a tad heavy for my purposes; I was looking for something more like GnuWin, which was described as relying "only on libraries provided with any standard 32-bits MS-Windows operating system" and as not needing any Unix emulation.  Ideally, I would have some cool, relatively simple Linux-like commands available at the Windows command prompt.

By this point in my investigation, several people had mentioned CoreUtils.  This turned out to be a package within GnuWin.  The CoreUtils homepage described it as "the basic file, shell, and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system."  GNU was "a Unix-like operating system," in development since 1983, that apparently provided most of the materials used by Linux (which was, in turn, the source of Debian Linux, from which Ubuntu was built).

To clarify, it appeared that the CoreUtils existed in GNU, and there was an offshoot called CoreUtils for Windows.  Apparently this was what I would be getting through GnuWin.  There were other approaches to this sort of thing (e.g., Gow, UTools, UnxUtils), but my sense at this point was that GnuWin was dominant in this category.

I looked at the list of tools included in CoreUtils (for Windows).  I didn't count them, but I thought I remembered seeing an indication that there were more than 100 of them.  They were grouped into three main categories:  file utilities, text utilities, and shell utilities.  In the file utilities group, the description of the ls command was simply "lists directory contents,"; and vdir would apparently provide a "long directory listing."  These sounded like what I needed.  Examples in the text utilities category included comm ("compares two sorted files line by line") and uniq ("remove duplicate lines from a sorted file").  Examples in the shell utilities category included sleep ("suspends execution for a specified time") and uname ("print system information").

Although I could have just clicked on a download link, I went into the folder for the latest version and saw that it had not been updated since 2005.  This made me wonder whether I should have opted instead for Gow (short for GNU on Windows), which had apparently been updated as recently as November 2011.  I found a spate of (1 2 3 4 5) brief summaries of Gow published about that time.  Their similarities raised the thought that they may have been written from similar press releases.  Not that that would necessarily be bad.  Any product being promoted in 2011 could count as fresh air against a 2005 alternative.  But it was not reassuring that none of these explained clearly whether Gow was genuinely different, or just a borrowing, from the seemingly better-documented and more widely used GnuWin.  I found a page stating that Gow had been developed by a corporation in 2010 and used for some years before being released as open source.  This appeared to be an authoritative page.  It puzzlingly characterized GnuWin as being appropriate "if you want just one or two utilities."  A list of Gow utilities seemed similar, at a glance, to the GnuWin list (above), though I noticed that it did not have vdir.  The seeming mischaracterization of GnuWin, combined with the sense of evasion in the press-release writeups, persuaded me to stick with Plan A.

So now I did download and install the executable (exe; not src.exe) version of CoreUtils (6MB).  But, weird thing, they didn't give me a way to run the program.  My Start Menu had links to several PDFs.  Actually, it was rather messed up: they gave me four shortcuts to a total of two PDFs, and some of those links were buried about five layers deep in superfluous subdirectories. They also gave me two links to CoreUtils Help files that, when I clicked on them, gave me the familiar "Why can't I get Help from this program?" message that Windows 7 kindly provided when I would try to run Help files written for Windows XP.

Obviously, I ignored the manuals' actual contents and went looking for a way to run the program.  Weird thing:  I had all these redundant and dysfunctional help materials, and a link to an Uninstall routine, but no actual "Run CoreUtils" shortcut. I was half-tempted to uninstall them as defective, when it occurred to me that, well, they're supposed to be run from the command line, not the Start Menu.  So, OK, I went to the command line and typed "ls."  Windows said, "'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."  Hmm.  The manual, then, if I must.  Or manuals, I should say:  a regular-looking manual and also what appeared to be the set of Linux MAN (i.e., manual) pages, both in PDF format.  Neither had installation instructions.  I went to the ls MAN page.  It seemed to say that "ls -a" would be a working command.  Well, not on my machine, it wasn't.

I rooted around and found an article on how to use CoreUtils.  It said that I would have to adjust the PATH environment variable to tell the system where to look for the CoreUtils command instructions.  My way of applying those instructions was as follows:  first, in Windows Explorer, find where the CoreUtils executables (e.g., ls.exe) were installed.  On a 32-bit Windows 7 system, the location would probably be C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin; on a 64-bit system, C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin.  With that folder selected, click on the address bar at the top of Windows Explorer, make sure the whole address was highlighted (Ctrl-A if necessary), and copy the address (Ctrl-C).  Now I went to Start > Run > SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe (could have used sysdm.cpl and then the Advanced tab) > Environmental Variables > System Variables > highlight Path > Edit > hit the End key.  There, I typed a semicolon (";") and then pasted in what I had copied from the Windows Explorer address bar.  (Could have typed it manually, using the 32-bit or 64-bit address just shown, but this was more accurate and it also forced me to verify the actual location.)  I OKed out of there and tried ls -a again on the command line.  Did I have to reboot to make the Path take hold?  Yes.  That was it.  I had ls, and it listed files.

So now, how about getting all that information mentioned at the outset -- path, date, etc., all on one line?  First question:  how could I get command-line command help?  In Windows, it was DIR /?.  But the /? option gave me an error with ls.  "man ls" didn't work either.  Page 9 of the manual PDF said the MAN pages were no longer being maintained.  I wasn't sure if that applied to what looked like the MAN pages included with GnuWin.  There wasn't a MAN MAN page in that PDF.  Page 10 said --help might work.  I tried "ls --help" and experienced satisfaction.  What I was seeing there looked like what appeared on pages 50-52 of the man PDF, pages 60-70 of 176 (text pages 52-62) in the more explanatory help PDF.  I wasn't inclined to read 11 pages to figure out how to get my directory listing.  Skimming down through the ls --help output, I tried "ls -l -N -R."  Good, but no cigar:  the path wasn't on the same line as the filename; no improvement over DIR.

The user's guide PDF didn't seem to think that there actually was a way to print the file's path on the same line as its date, filename, etc.  And so there I was.  I had come all this way with faith in my heart for the infinite possibilities of Linux.  I fervently believed that, with GNU, anything was possible.  But now, with my limited knowledge of Linux and such, cruel reality was saying Bismillah, no! we will not let you have all that stuff on one line of output.  There actually probably was a way to do it with some other tool, like the awe-inspiring grep, available in a different GnuWin package.  But I wasn't quite ready to go there.  In this project, grep looked, for me, like a bridge too far.

I thought about posting a question in the GnuWin Help forum.  But there had only been a handful of posts there in the last couple of months.  I also thought about going down the list of other utilities contained in CoreUtilities, so as to demonstrate to myself that this hadn't been a wild goose chase.  I thought about trying Gow after all, just in case its version of ls had different capabilities.  I thought about working up a kludge in which I would do a listing of all directories first (with e.g., "dir /ad /s /b") and then try to invent a way to append the pathname to each file line.

But before pursuing those rather lame possibilities, I noticed TCC/LE, advertised as a complete, powerful replacement for Windows CMD.  (TCC was short for "Take Command Console.")  It got 3.5 stars from 43 voters at Softpedia, only a solitary vote (five stars) at CNET -- but it had apparently been updated there just a few days earlier.  At MajorGeeks, it averaged 4.07 from 38 voters.  The description said it had enhanced commands (specifically including DIR) with new options.  A search didn't encourage the sense that there was a regular category of this sort of thing, with lots of competitors.  I downloaded and installed it.  The installation process seemed pretty slick, ending with a direct ride to their forums.  The installation left me with an open CMD window with a funky prompt, though apparently it was actually their own version of a command window.  (I did have another Win7 command window open throughout the installation.  It remained functional; I was able to close and open a new one after installation.)  I typed Help at their command prompt and went straight into their GUI help dialog, which actually made me say "Wow."  It wasn't spectacular; it was just good, and helpful, which I guess counts as spectacular after a long slog.  I replaced their ugly prompt with the ordinary Windows one by typing "prompt $P$g" at the prompt, though not without first amusing myself with variants (e.g., "Now what?").

Eventually I discovered that their help dialog was more or less the same as their online help page.  The manual had a large number of further instructions on how to tinker with the prompt and, it seemed, everything else.  Typing "option" at the prompt brought up settings, but not an obvious way to preserve prompt settings between sessions; it appeared the answer to that might lie somewhere within their SET command.  Anyway, I found information on their DIR command almost instantly, and also got a cursory version of it by typing dir /? at their prompt.  It led me to PDIR, and there I found the answer I was looking for.  What I had to type in a TCC/LE command window was this:

pdir D:\ /s /(dy-m-d zc fpn) > dirlist.txt

That gave me all of the information I was looking for, on a line-by-line basis, for every file on drive D, output into dirlist.txt.  Specifically, with the options in that sequence, I got the date (y-m-d), size (with commas), and the file path and name.

I took a quick look at their list of Commands by Category.  I also saw that they had a number of video and textual tutorials.  An impressive program.  But in any case, this investigation was done.

Farewell, Ubuntu

I first started looking into Linux in the 1990s.  I have been playing, and then subsequently relying on, Ubuntu since I started this blog in 2007.  And now I may be going away from Ubuntu, and Linux, for a while.

My situation is that, throughout this time, I have had work to do.  There were always applications or capabilities that I was using in Windows that I could not yet match in Ubuntu.  As a transitional step, I bought VMware Workstation and ran that on Ubuntu, so that I could use those Windows applications in Windows XP virtual machines while continuing to become more familiar with Ubuntu.  And this worked.  I did become fairly comfortable with Ubuntu.  I have spent what must have been hundreds of hours researching, tinkering, and troubleshooting, as shown in many posts in this blog.  The performance was never as good as on the Windows machine.  But it was a good arrangement nonetheless.

During the past year or so, unfortunately, VMware or the underlying Ubuntu installation grew flaky.  I reinstalled both a couple of times.  It just wasn't working.  The VM was working so slowly, even with faster hardware and a fair amount of attention to performance tweaks.  I still don't know why.  If I knew, I would fix it, because one odd thing I noticed was that Windows XP running in a VMware Workstation virtual machine was vastly more stable than Windows XP running in native mode.

Right now, there are too many things that I still can't do in Linux.  The promise has been a long time in coming, and it's still not here.  I will probably keep a dual-boot on at least one computer, and I may find that I need it sometimes, for some purposes.  I got to the point where installing and tweaking Ubuntu was a lot faster and easier than doing so in Windows.  I like Ubuntu.  But at the end of the day, I need my software to work.  So, for now, I am going back to Windows.

Wiping a Hard Drive in Ubuntu

I had an old ATA (PATA) hard drive that I wanted to wipe and dump. I didn't know if there had ever been anything particularly sensitive on there, but anything is possible, and anyway I wanted to know how to do it in Ubuntu.  This post presents what I learned in that process.

After a preliminary search, I came across this advice:  "The first thing to do is to see if hpa is enabled."  "HPA," according to Thinkwiki, was short for "Hidden Protected Area" or "Host Protected Area."  It was "a special area (usually a few gigabytes in size)."  The recommended way to see if hpa was enabled was to type "sudo hdparm -N /dev/sdx."  I did that and got this:

625142448/4385456(625142448?), HPA setting seems invalid (buggy kernel device driver?)

A search for that error message led to just a dozen or so hits, containing various bits of information.  For instance, thorkelljarl noted that "The HDD utilities supplied by Seagate, Samsung and some other HDD makers can set the HDD capacity and should remove HPA totally."  NeCod suggested trying this:

grep -i HPA /var/log/kern.log

That produced two messages, each beginning with the date and time and then reading as follows:

ubuntu kernel: [    3.076473] ata5.01: HPA unlocked: 625140335 - > 625142448, native 625142448
ubuntu kernel: [    3.482031] ata1.00: HPA unlocked: 156299375 - > 156301488, native 156301488

I wasn't sure what those messages meant.  I thought the system in question might have been confused about the hpa on this drive because I had booted the system using a live Ubuntu CD.  WilliTo offered some advice pertaining to RAID, but the first two steps sounded more generically useful:

1- Disable backup bios to disk in gigabyte bios if enabled
2- Disable HPA with HDAT2 (disk must be in sata mode not raid)

Similarly, that Thinkwiki page said "If the HPA is enabled in the BIOS (mode set to "Normal"), Linux may get confused about the correct partition geometry."  I tried rebooting, hit Del to go into the BIOS settings > Advanced BIOS Features > Dual BIOS Recovery Source.  That didn't have an option to disable this; it just had HPA or Backup BIOS options.  A Launchpad page gave me the impression that this was particularly a Gigabyte motherboard problem:

Virtual BIOS solutions - like GigaByte motherboards use

This is absolutely CRITICAL. When the hd is unlocked and fully used new GigaByte boards tend to write 1.5 MB at the end of IDE or SATA drives in legacy mode as BIOS backup. Then HPA is activated, every OS has to respect this otherwise it will definitely overwrite data. That's usally not directly visable for the user, but it definitely happens. Depending of the filesystem used for the partition using that last mb will immediately kill data or it will take time till it is filled, but corruption is inevitable.

That Launchpad page said that HPA takes only 1.5MB.  But I preferred not to have it there, for purposes of this erasure.  I had seen another note, somewhere, indicating that the person in question was finding that the HPA was more like 8GB.

Going back to WilliTo's advice, I did a search for HDAT2.  According to its homepage, HDAT2 was a "program for test or diagnostics of ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD and SCSI/USB devices."  A desultory glance at a few reviews suggested that HDAT2 was an OK program.  My next question was whether I could add it to a BartPE bootable USB stick as one more boot utility, but it looked like UBCD4Win (the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows) and/or UBCD had beat me to it.  Rather than pursue that, however, I found that Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) was a simple and highly recommended bootable eraser, so I went with that.

Exporting from Thunderbird, Importing into Thunderbird

I was using Thunderbird as my e-mail program in Ubuntu.  I decided to switch to using Thunderbird 3.1 for Windows as my e-mail program.  It seemed, at this writing, that most people who were transitioning to Thunderbird were going toward Ubuntu, not away from it.  So in this post I am writing up some things that I had to figure out along the way.

I decided to switch to Thunderbird for Windows because I was planning to keep Ubuntu as my underlying operating system, but to focus my applications on Windows XP, which I would be running in a virtual machine in VMware.  This arrangement, I found, gave me dual-boot advantages without having to reboot.

I was particularly interested in using the portable version of Thunderbird as my Windows XP e-mail application.  This would enable me to take my e-mail and my address book with me on a USB flash drive.  The discussion of Thunderbird for Windows in this post relates specifically to the portable version.

After setting up Thunderbird Portable on a Windows computer and making a backup copy, I went into Ubuntu and simply copied over my data.  I found the relevant data in Nautilus (i.e., Ubuntu's File Browser, the equivalent of Windows Explorer), in this location:  Home Folder / .thunderbird / 6abstqrst.default.  (The 6abstqrst part of that name was apparently generated at random, and as such would have a different name in other installations.  Point is, it's the "default" folder.)

I copied that entire default folder to a USB jump drive and compared its subfolders, item by item, to those on the computer where I had installed Thunderbird Portable.  (Of course, I did these and other folder manipulations (below) while Thunderbird was *not* running.)  The comparable e-mail account data seemed especially to be located under the Data\profile\Mail folder.  Thunderbird's Address Book seemed to be in Data\profile\abook.mab.  The Address Book copied and worked without any problem.  The following discussion focuses on problems in getting the e-mail accounts to work correctly.

The simple process of copying e-mail accounts over seemed to work well enough.  I copied all of the folders from Ubuntu via my jump drive to the corresponding Thunderbird folders on the Windows machine.  I kept backups and did this rather painstakingly.  After replacing the contents of one subfolder in Thunderbird Portable with the contents brought over from Thunderbird for Linux, I would start up Thunderbird Portable and make sure that it still seemed to be functioning OK.  Through this process, I ended up with a Thunderbird Portable setup where the desired e-mail accounts did exist.  This may have been helped by the decision to run Thunderbird's Tools > Import option, which I did somewhere along the way.

When I was done, unfortunately, the e-mail accounts that showed up when I ran Thunderbird Portable were still not showing the contents that I wanted them to show.  For example, my Hotmail account was there, but its Inbox was empty, whereas the Hotmail Inbox on Thunderbird for Linux had contained a dozen e-mail messages.  I could see, moreover, that the Data\profile\Mail\pop3.live.com folder contained an Inbox that was 96MB in size.  That was larger than I would have expected, and in any case much larger than an Inbox containing nothing, which is what Thunderbird Portable was showing me.

It seemed that Thunderbird Portable was recognizing the e-mail accounts themselves, but was drawing the contents of those accounts from the wrong place.  I verified this by removing the entire Mail subfolder from Thunderbird Portable.  When I started it up, it was still seeing the same few old items in the same accounts.  I thought it might have observed or figured out where I had moved the Mail folder, so I removed it from that computer entirely; yet Portable was still seeing those same ghostly remnants of some previous state of my Thunderbird for Linux installation.

It took a bit of effort to figure out where those ghostly remains were hanging out.  Portable wasn't drawing them from Data\profile\Cache; they persisted even after I emptied that.  To find the answer, I started Portable, changed the system date to a year in the future, copied one of those old e-mail messages from one folder to another, changed the system date back to the correct year, and exited Portable.  Then I copied the entire Portable folder to a workspace folder elsewhere on the computer, and searched for files bearing that future year's date.  Aside from cache files and scripts, there turned out to be only a handful of files dated in that future year.

That effort led to the discovery that the Data\profile\prefs.js file that I had brought over from Ubuntu was not suited for Windows.  I went to the original backup of my Thunderbird for Windows Portable and copied its prefs.js file to the Portable installation that I was tinkering with, thus overwriting the Ubuntu prefs.js file.  Both of them began with a warning:  "Do not edit this file."  Instead, the warning said, I could follow the instructions provided on a webpage that, as it turned out, was no longer in existence.  A different webpage did advise me to edit prefs.js directly.  Again, of course, I would want to do this while Thunderbird was not running; and if there was any doubt about that, Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del > Processes tab) would confirm whether there was an instance of thunderbird.exe or ThunderbirdPortable.exe currently running.

I opened prefs.js in Notepad, widened the Notepad window to prevent lines from wrapping, and took a look.  I decided I didn't know exactly how to edit prefs.js, so I tried the alternative that the instructions at the top of prefs.js seemed to prefer:  I started Firefox, typed about:config in the address line, and looked to see what was there.  (Note that I did not have any other copies or versions of Thunderbird installed on that computer, else things could have become very confusing.)  I searched for instructions, and eventually realized that it might not make sense to use about:config to change system preferences for a portable program.

So I tried another search.  This led to a webpage that led, eventually, to a mozillaZine webpage that advised me to start over and try using the Kaosmos ImportExportTools utility.  So I made a fresh start, replacing my munged-up Thunderbird Portable with a copy of the backup, and then I installed the ImportExportTools utility as instructed.  Then, in Thunderbird Portable, I went to Tools > ImportExportTools > Import mbox file.  At this point, I had to ask myself:  What, exactly, is an mbox file?  A search led to the discovery that mbox is an e-mail storage format that didn't seem very relevant to Thunderbird's own storage format

To test this, I went ahead with where I was in the ImportExportTools process:  I selected the "Select a directory where searching the mbox files to import (also in subdirectories)" option, and pointed it toward the top level of the folder I had copied over from Ubuntu Thunderbird.  To my surprise, the tool asked me if I wanted to import various programs.  I said no to parentlock and yes to all the other folders it asked me about.  After asking me about those folders, it didn't seem to be doing anything, except that I could see movement in the green progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  When it seemed to be finished, I didn't see any change in Thunderbird's list of folders.  I killed and restarted Thunderbird.  Still no change.  I poked around and then, whoa, I discovered that it had imported everything, including my archives, into the Hotmail Inbox folder (not the actual online one -- just the copy of it that Thunderbird keeps).  I killed T-bird again, made a backup copy of this remarkable state of Thunderbird Portable, restarted the program, and began moving and rearranging folders.

This was looking good, but there were still some things to fix.  First, in T-bird Portable, I tried sending a message that I had kept in the Hotmail drafts folder in Thunderbird for Ubuntu.  I got this message:

Send Message Error
Sending of message failed.
An error occurred sending mail.  Unable to establish a secure link with SMTP server smtp.live.com using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature.  Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

A search and then a refined search led to the quick answer that I just had to stop my avast! antivirus software from scanning outgoing messages.

Next, I wanted to get rid of some Local Folders, especially the Inbox and Outbox.  I found a thread that made me think these folders were a product of Smart Folders, which would supposedly combine all of my e-mail inboxes into one Inbox, etc.  I did not want this.  Actually, I wasn't sure this was even the correct explanation, because I was seeing new incoming messages in my Hotmail Inbox, and they were not being mirrored in my Local Folders Inbox.  The advice I got from Yahoo! Answers, usually a font of goofy bewilderment, was as follows:

You can't remove the Smart Folders account using Tools -> Account Settings. You need to either edit prefs.js with a text editor or use the Config editor to delete the account from mail.accountmanager.accounts.

I was inclined to believe this because I had just run across another webpage with more or less the same conclusion.  But the advice on that webpage was oriented toward deleting all local folders, whereas I was using the Local Folders heading as the place to park my e-mail archive.  I right-clicked and saw, from Properties, that Outbox folder was located at Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Unsent Messages.  I quit T-bird, made a backup copy of the whole T-bird Portable folder, went into that Local Folders folder in Windows Explorer, and deleted the Unsent Messages entries.  I then restarted T-bird.  No joy.  As expected, the Outbox was still there and the Unsent Messages entries were back.  A new search led to a blanket statement that you could not delete the Outbox because it served an essential function, different from a Drafts folder:  it held messages that the user had tried to send but (because of e.g., no Internet connection) had not yet actually been sent.

So I turned to the next problem arising from the import into Thunderbird Portable for Windows.  I now had two top-level folders appearing at the left side of the T-bird window.  One was for my Hotmail account; the other was for Local Folders.  There should have been a third one, for another e-mail account that had appeared as a top-level folder in T-bird in Ubuntu.  This seemed to be a simple matter of going into T-bird Portable > File > New > Mail Account and entering the information about the account as it was recorded in T-bird for Ubuntu.  But the Mail Account Setup process stayed stuck for a long time on "Looking up configuration:  Trying common server names."  I finally went into Manual Setup and got it working that way.  And with that, the project was done.  I had transitioned from Thunderbird (Ubuntu) to Thunderbird Portable for Windows.

Resizing Virtual Disks in VMware Workstation 7.1 for Linux

I was running Windows XP guest machines in VMware Workstation 7.1 on an Ubuntu Linux 10.04 host.  I had created a new WinXP guest, called Master, and I wanted to tinker with it.  I ran into some problems.  This blog records the situation.

Taking VMware's advice, I created the new WinXP guest with a size of 40GB.  This turned out to be too large for present purposes.  I wasn't sure I would ever install that much software in it.  Meanwhile, it consumed a lot of disk space and took a long time to load.  I could have just deleted it and started over, but I had already installed a bunch of software in it before coming to this insight.  So I wanted to shrink it.

In case something went wrong, I cloned it inside Workstation.  The name of the clone was Reference--Master.  Then I proceeded to figure out how to shrink the clone.  On my first try, I used Workstation's VM > Settings > Hardware tab > select the Hard Disk > Utilities button > Compact option.  But then I read somewhere -- probably in the VMware Workstation 7.1 User's Manual -- that this only worked if you had not preallocated the space for the virtual drive.  I thought I had done so, but then I got an indication that I had not.  But apparently I had, after all; the disk seemed to have been shrunk.  The problem there was that they shrunk it all the way down.  I had actually hoped to specify a size somewhat larger than its present size, so as to allow space for additional programs.  But I didn't know how to do that, and I also didn't know how to grow the clone to a somewhat larger size.  So I deleted that clone and started over.

On my second try, I looked into what the User's Manual (p. 254) called the VMware Virtual Disk Manager (VDM).  They said it was a Workstation utility.  They directed me to the Virtual Disk Manager User's Guide for more information.  It said (p. 12) that, in a Linux host, I should execute commands that would mount the VM, wipe its free space, unmount it and then shrink it.  I went through this process; but as far as I could tell, this was just a more complicated way of doing what I had already done with the Compact option (above) in Workstation's built-in utilities.  Having shrunk the VM down to around 11GB (as distinct from the 17GB I wanted), I tried the Expand utility; but again, it wouldn't let me specify anything smaller than 40GB, the original excessive size I had assigned to the VM.

Luis Rocha said that the solution was to go into the Hardware tab, select the hard disk, click the Add button, specify a new hard disk of the desired size (in my case, 17GB) there within the same folder as the existing hard drive, use GParted (or some other tool) to resize the logical partition of the previous hard drive, so that it would fit onto the new disk.  This step was actually a bit more complex than Luis let on.  To run GParted (or any other bootable CD) within VMware Workstation, you had to boot the CD before Workstation was able to fire up the installed virtual machine.  I decided to try this with an Ubuntu 10.04 live CD, which contained GParted.  I inserted the CD into the CD drive.  Then, in Workstation, with the VM powered off, I made sure that the Hardware tab indicated that the CD/DVD drive was set to "Connect at power on" and "Use a physical device" (though I was intrigued by the "Use ISO image" option).  With my finger on the Pause key (top right corner of most keyboards), I powered on the VM; clicked on the screen as soon as it went black (so as to switch from Workstation's fist-like cursor to Windows's arrow cursor); pressed the Pause key as soon as the vmware logo appeared; and then read the options.  Per the advice of Peter_vm, in Ubuntu's Terminal I typed "sudo gedit [path][filename].vmx," for the .vmx file pertaining to this VM; and at the end of that file I added a line that said this:

bios.bootDelay = "10000"

and that bought me ten seconds instead of one or two, when that vmware logo came up.  So now, when I restarted, I saw this at the bottom of the screen:  "Press F2 to enter SETUP, F12 for Network Boot, ESC for Boot Menu."  I decided to set my virtual BIOS so that it would always check for a bootable CD first.  So I hit F2 and then, in the virtual BIOS, I went to Boot, went down to CD-ROM drive, and hit the + key until it moved to the top of the list.  Then F10 to save, exit, and restart.  The system went into WinXP anyway.  I went to Start > Turn Off Computer > Restart.  It still came back up in WinXP.  I tried again, this time turning it completely off instead of choosing Restart.  It came back up in XP again, so I did the bootus interruptus procedure again, this time choosing the Boot Menu.  No problem there -- it was still set to boot from the CD first -- but still no actual boot from the CD.  I swapped out the Ubuntu CD in favor of an actual GParted CD and did another complete shutdown and restart.  And that worked.  Not sure why the Ubuntu CD didn't, but whatever. The GParted CD took a long time to boot -- maybe 15-20 minutes.  At a couple of points, I thought it was hung up, but no, it was just incredibly slow.  But then, when I did get a GParted screen, it was basically unresponsive.  It would show me the different partitions, but it would not accept any commands to do anything with any of them.  Maybe it was still just being slow, but this was slowness to the point of nonfunctionality.

Ultimately, I powered it off and deleted Reference--Master.  Taking a different approach, I recalled seeing indications that VMware Converter might provide an easier way to do some things related to the kind of process I was undertaking.  So I powered up Master, the original VM, and installed VMware Converter 4.0 (freeware) on it.  In Converter, I clicked on "Convert Machine" and specified the "Powered-on machine" > "This local machine."  The selected destination was "VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine."  I was able to specify a target size of 17GB.  Before I could proceed, though, I saw a banner message across the top:

Warning: Unable to locate the required Sysprep files.  Please upload them under 'C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMare\Vmware vCenter Converter Standalone\sysprep\xp' on the Converter server machine. See 'Help' for more details.

Help didn't actually give me much additional information, beyond a repeat of that indication of the Sysprep file location.  I clicked Back, so that maybe Converter would search again after I located and installed those files.  It turned out that I had worked through some sysprep issues a year earlier, so I just went through that procedure again.  The only real difference was that, instead of copying setupcl.exe and sysprep.exe to C:\Sysprep, I copied them to the location specified in the foregoing quote.  I went through the rest of the Sysprep process and I guess I must have completed the Converter process, because the system did something or other and then shut down.  When it restarted, for some reason I was looking at a "Welcome to Microsoft Windows" screen, as though this were a new installation.  I played along with it.  I accepted the license agreement and entered the product key.  It defaulted to MASTERVM as the name of the computer, just as I had entered it into VMware Converter.  I wasn't sure how to answer some of the questions.  A search led me to a tutorial video and other sources, including one in VMware's Knowledgebase, regarding the step-by-step conversion process.  When the Windows setup process asked, "Will this computer connect directly to the Internet?" I ran a search but got surprisingly few hits and no clear answer, so I chose No. 
And then I was in Windows XP, and the first thing I got was this:

setup50.exe - No Disk
There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:.

I clicked Cancel, but it came back.  I tried several times.  I tried Continue; same thing, and likewise for the remaining option, Try Again.  I noticed that the box in the upper right corner of the screen said this:

Personalized Settings
Setting up personalized settings for:
Outlook Express

and I noticed that the name of the program kept changing, and so did the error -- it had started out as set50.exe, but went on to shmgrate.exe and others.  So evidently we were stepping through dysfunctional installation of standard WinXP programs.  At some point, with one of those error messages still on the screen, I ran a search and got the idea to start Computer Management (Start > Run > compmgmt.msc).  There, I clicked on Storage > Disk Management.  This opened the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard.  But that only initialized a 4GB drive that I had previously added to hold my VM's paging file.  Worse, Computer Management showed that drive C in this VM was still at 40GB.  It also appeared -- horrors -- that the name of this VM was Master.  Had we just screwed up my original VM?  It seemed so.  I shut down the VM and consulted reality.  What I found, on the disk, was no new VM and no converted VM.  Very confusing!  I restarted the Master VM.  No weird errors this time.  But the system was still as I just said:  no sign of any new VM.  So, OK, so much for that.  But I had no idea what had just happened.

Back to the drawing board.  How could I get that 40GB drive down to 17GB?  GParted was really the sensible solution, but why wasn't it working for me?  I thought about trying to boot from UBCD4Win or some other such tool, but then decided to try the approach of booting from an ISO.  I didn't have one on my hard drive, so I began downloading another Ubuntu live CD.  Or at least I tried to.  My Master installation was not interested in downloading anything in Firefox, and it wouldn't even start Internet Explorer.  It seemed I had a preliminary answer to the question of whether the Converter process had screwed up my system.  I say "preliminary" because there had been some less-than-snappy performance previously -- the new installation had not seemed perfect -- but now it was responding *very* slowly.  It also seemed not to want to recognize my data partition anymore.  I was afraid it might have wiped it out entirely, and dropped out to Ubuntu to make sure it was still there.

Well.  There were lots of problems here.  I was not confident that this Master installation was going to be a solid start for a new system.  What made more sense, I decided, was to start a new VM of the desired size, and give up on this concept of resizing the virtual disk in VMware Workstation.  Not to say it couldn't be done; it just wasn't working well -- and since the resulting machine wasn't too impressive anyway, it was OK to just start over.  A drag, I mean, but the best choice in a bad situation.

Making a Post Look Right on Blogger

For several years, I had been using Blogger.com to host this blog. Blogger had a nasty habit of screwing up my formatting: it would insert spaces where I didn't want them, and would invent and repeat various codes that I did not want in my HTML.  That is, even if things did look fine and function reasonably in the Compose view in Blogger, they could be a complete wreck in the Edit HTML view -- and in the final outcome.  Blogger had often messed up my final posts, so that they would look different from how they had looked while I was editing them.  Sometimes, things went to bizarre extremes.  Here's an example:


<b></b>
<b></b></span></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">


<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<b><b>Conclusion</b></b>
<b>
</b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b></span></span>
<div style="text-align: left;">


<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b></b></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b></b></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b></b></span></b>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b></b></span></b></span></span>
<div style="display: inline ! important; text-align: center;">


<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span></span>
<div style="display: inline ! important;">


<span style="font-size: x-small;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>


Now, what was that all about?  In normal view, it was just one word, "Conclusion," surrounded by a bunch of blank lines -- which, incidentally, I had not inserted; the webpage just took it upon itself to introduce all that junk into my *final* product.  (Note that, even here, the foregoing example is surrounded by extra spaces that I did not insert.)

I posted a question about this in a Google help forum.  One response pointed me toward a Blogger post on this Blogger problem.  That post offered these tips:

• Before creating your post, arrange your paragraphs using a word processor like MS Word, then paste it into Blogger.
• Minimize changes (e.g., repositioning paragraphs) in the editor.
• Preview before publishing to view initial output and put changes on it.

I felt that these were imperfect tips.  On the first one, I had discovered that Word would add its own HTML codes when I pasted material directly into Blogger.  I found it was better to copy the Word text into Notepad, which would tend to strip away that stuff, and then move it from Notepad to Blogger (or just do the editing in Notepad).  The third one was not very helpful to me either, as the attempt to fix problems observed in Preview would sometimes just make things worse.

It seemed to me that the second of those three tips was the heart of the matter.  Blogger's internal editor was just not up to the task of managing text editing.  What I needed to do, I believed, was to try using some kind of HTML editing program, get my text  all set up there, and then copy it over and post it without any further changes.  I say an HTML editor, rather than a word processor, because I would want to insert links and make sure that the formatting was right in HTML terms.

About.com, which I had found to be a good general-purpose source of information, had a list of the 10 Best Windows WYSIWYG Editors.  The ones topping the list, from Adobe and Microsoft, cost hundreds of dollars.  In the past, I had used Microsoft FrontPage, which was part of Microsoft Office up through 2003, but seemed to have vanished thereafter.  I was still running Office 2003, so I could have gone with that.  I was trying to get away from relying on Microsoft software, however, and in any event About.com also listed four freeware HTML editors at the bottom of its Top 10 list.  Of those four, SeaMonkey ranked highest, and had versions for Linux and Mac as well as Linux.  It was also described as being appropriate for HTML newcomers.  I was not that, but I was certainly not the alternative in their descriptions, i.e., a professional web designer.  About.com also ranked SeaMonkey third in its list of Linux-specific HTML editors.  On another list, though, SeaMonkey ranked only 17th, well behind Amaya (for professional web developers), which was ninth on the About.com list.  Between the two, as I looked at their webpages, I felt that SeaMonkey was probably more the direction I wanted to go.

Before pursuing that choice further, I recalled that there was another possibility, namely, to use a blogging tool.  Wikipedia offered a list of the blogging software used by what it described as the Top 20 blogs.  Just two programs, Moveable Type and WordPress, dominated that list.  The latter could be confusing:  it was also the name of a blog hosting website, like Blogger, through which bloggers could easily use the WordPress blogging tool to prepare their own blogs.  That last observation raised the question of why someone would use Blogger instead of WordPress to host a blog.  The answer, in my case, was that I had started out with Blogger, I had a lot of stuff on there, and anyway I already had a WordPress blog, with a different orientation, and found it convenient to host this other blog somewhere else.  I was already familiar with the WordPress website, though, and a brief glance at features suggested that it might be more approachable than Moveable Type.  That said, a search for blogging tools introduced me to a number of factoids:  that Twitter, among others, was considered a micro-blogging tool; that there was a free version of CoffeeCup, which had appeared on that About.com list; that PC Magazine gave me a comparison of blogging tools, and that Xanga -- the only one they rated with four stars (out of five) -- was free and seemed to offer good features, and that it just turned out to be another place to host a blog.

So now, I felt, my choice was down to the free tools (not blog hosting sites) offered by SeaMonkey, WordPress, and CoffeeCup. SeaMonkey came out sounding pretty good in Smashing Magazine's list, whereas one of the comments posted in response to their list said that CoffeeCup had the very problem I was experiencing, of having a lot of superfluous code generation.  Another comment said positive things about SeaMonkey.  As some of the foregoing comments suggest, WordPress seemed to be for web designers above my ability or interest level -- intended, among other things, for a direct link between the blogging tool and the blog host website.  That seemed like a potentially more complex arrangement than I could justify at present.

I took one last look around and decided not to explore htmlArea's long list of WYSIWYG HTML editors.  Instead, for purposes of my dual-boot and VMware-based machines, I downloaded the Windows version and installed the Ubuntu version via Synaptic.  The latter was then available at Applications > Internet > SeaMonkey.  I opened the program and selected File > New > Composer Page.  (I wasn't able to install the Windows version right away because I had other programs running in my virtual machine, but I suspected the functionality was largely the same.)  I went over to the webpage I was composing in Blogger and then realized that I wasn't sure whether I should copy my HTML or my normal text from Blogger into SeaMonkey.  I went back to SeaMonkey and clicked the "HTML Tags" tab at the bottom.  And -- whoa -- the program vanished.  Not good!  I went back to Applications > Internet > SeaMonkey and started it again.  This time, I clicked on the HTML Source tab at the bottom of the screen.  No problem:  it opened a nearly empty HTML editing page.

I went over to Blogger, went into its HTML view, copied everything, and pasted it into that SeaMonkey page, between the two "body" codes.  I clicked on the Normal tab and there it was, in more or less normal layout.  I went back to the HTML Source tab and saw that it had not actually removed any of those excess codes.  I cut and pasted the code out of there, put it into gedit (similar to Notepad), did a bunch of Find and Replace operations to remove the excess codes, and then pasted it back into the HTML Source tab.   That removed all of my paragraph breaks, so I had to reinsert them manually.  The location of paragraph breaks was easier to spot in the HTML Source tab.  But then, when I flipped to the Normal view and back, the paragraph breaks that I had inserted by just using an extra Enter keystroke were gone.  So I had to either do my paragraph breaks in Normal view or else use <p codes to break my paragraphs in HTML Source view.  Also, lines were wrapped in a weird way.  I didn't know how to remove unwanted line breaks in gedit or OpenOffice Writer, so I saved the HTML code as a text file, went into my virtual machine, and used Microsoft Word to replace ^p with a spacebar space, and then brought it back into the HTML Source tab -- but then it just reverted to how it was before.  Also, the print in SeaMonkey was a bit small for good proofreading, but I couldn't figure out how to make it larger.

When I was done tinkering, I flipped back and forth between the Normal and HTML Source tabs a couple of times.  It looked good; it did not stop looking good; and it did not seem to be inserting any unwanted new codes.  Now, I needed to get all that nice HTML from SeaMonkey back into my Blogger webpage.  SeaMonkey had a Publish Page option, wher it appeared that I could have just sent the result directly to Blogger.  I wasn't sure how to do that, and anyway I wanted to look at the result in Blogger before publishing it.  So I switched into HTML Source view, in SeaMonkey, and copied everything into the Edit HTML tab in Blogger (having deleted whatever was there before).  I switched to Blogger's Compose view.  This did not look too good.  I clicked on Blogger's Preview button.  It was a train wreck, mostly because lines were ending all over the place -- after one word, two words, three words, whatever.  I looked again at the Edit HTML view in Blogger.  The weird line endings and extra blank lines were there too.  But they definitely weren't in the HTML in SeaMonkey.

I tried a different approach.  I wiped out everything in Blogger and copied over again from SeaMonkey.  This time, though, I copied from SeaMonkey's Normal view (i.e., not HTML Source) to Blogger's Compose view (i.e., not Edit HTML), and then I clicked on Blogger's Preview button.  This was much better.  Now lines were wrapping in sensible places.  The problem now seemed to be that I was just getting line breaks (i.e., just the start of a new line) instead of paragraph breaks (i.e., with a blank line between paragraphs).  So, OK, in SeaMonkey's HTML Source view, I tried doing a global replace (Ctrl-F) of <p> with <p><br>.  I looked at the result in SeaMonkey's Normal view.  Now most of my paragraph breaks were extra wide.  Again, I copied this Normal view into Blogger's Compose view.  But that wasn't it, either.  Eventually I figured out that what I needed was to forget about <p> and just use <br>, so that took another global replacement in SeaMonkey, followed by manual adjustment of a lot of paragraph breaks.  Later, I found SeaMonkey's Edit > Preferences > Composer option that said, "Return in a paragraph always creates a new paragraph."  That was not checked, but I checked it.  It would take another project to determine whether that would help.

The next problem was that, in Blogger's Preview, the first two paragraphs were in a larger typeface.  They looked fine everywhere else; but in Preview they were wrong.  I took a look in Blogger's Edit HTML view.  Sure enough, Blogger had inserted this before the first word of my code:  <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">.  Don't ask me why.  I deleted it and took another look in Preview.  That fixed that.

Now I had a few remaining random line breaks.  The problem appeared to be that, somehow, some of my ordinary spacebar spaces had gotten replaced with nonbreaking space codes (i.e., "&nbsp;").  In SeaMonkey's HTML Source view, I did a temporary global replace of the space-nonbreaking space combination (i.e., " "&nbsp;") to @@@.  (Likewise when the two appeared in reverse order.)  Then I did a search for all remaining occurrences of nonbreaking spaces, and replaced most of them with regular spaces.  Not the ones at the starts or ends of lines, though:  I had noticed that SeaMonkey did not search correctly for items wrapping over its own line breaks.  So if a space occurred at the end of one line and a &38nbsp; occurred at the start of the next, SeaMonkey's find-and-replace would not find and replace.  But making these decisions manually, for the hundreds of occurrences that may appear in a long post, was beyond my patience at this point.  So I just made it global.  Finally, I replaced the @@@ with the space-nonbreaking space combination again, and then took a look in SeaMonkey's Normal view.  It looked good.

I belatedly realized that I had not yet tried SeaMonkey's Preview view, so I tried that now.  It still looked good.  I copied it from Normal view over to Blogger's Compose view again.  I had to go into Blogger's Edit HTML view again to remove that funky starting font code again.

After hours of futzing around, it was done, and I posted it.  Even with the aid of SeaMonkey, it was a hassle.  SeaMonkey was definitely better than Blogger; my changes were making an improvement each time, and it was not undoing things that I had just fixed, and I did wind up with a satisfactory result.  There seemed nonetheless to be some glitches in the way SeaMonkey worked, and I thought that I might want to try a different HTML editor next time.  The foregoing review suggested that WordPress might be the weapon of choice, unless something new came along in the meantime.

Using Ubuntu Linux Tools on a Windows Machine

I was using Windows XP SP3 on one machine and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on another.  There were times when I found that Ubuntu (my preferred version of the Linux operating system) could do things that Windows could not.  For example, Ubuntu was much faster and cleaner at moving large numbers of files from one folder to another.  It could also delete files and folders that Windows said could not be deleted.  So I wondered if there was a way to use Ubuntu tools on a Windows installation.  This post discusses that question.

One solution that I already knew about was to set up a dual-boot machine, with Windows XP and Ubuntu coexisting side-by-side.  If you wanted to do something in Ubuntu, you could just shut down Windows and reboot into Ubunt.  This wasn't always the world's most convenient approach.

Another solution that I was currently using was to use both of them together via virtualization.  The virtualization tool I had been using was VMware Workstation.  The way it worked for me was that I installed Ubuntu as my base layer, installed VMware Workstation in Ubuntu, and then installed Windows XP in a virtual (i.e., make-believe) "computer" inside Workstation.  So if I was working in Windows and had something I wanted to do in Ubuntu, I could just go out of the Windows virtual machine for a moment, do my thing in Ubuntu, and then resume work in Windows.  I have written lots of posts on this combination.

A different approach, for those who didn't mind rebooting and didn't want to install Ubuntu or VMware on their Windows machines, was to use an Ubuntu Live CD.  In this approach, you wouldn't reboot into an Ubuntu installation that was already present on your hard drive; you would reboot into an Ubuntu installation that was self-contained on a CD.  The CD image was free, and could easily be downloaded and burned to a CD.  It would be necessary to adjust the BIOS settings (typically, by hitting Del or perhaps F2 while the computer was booting) so as to set the CD (or DVD) drive to be the first in the boot sequence, so that the computer would try to boot from a CD (if you had inserted one into the computer) before moving on to the option of booting from your Windows installation on the hard drive.  Assuming your computer supported it (and most did, by this point), it was also possible to boot Ubuntu from a USB drive instead of a CD.

Those approaches were all familiar to me.  Two other approaches or variations were not.  The first was to use an Ubuntu live CD or USB stick, but to customize it to include Ubuntu programs that were not included on the standard Live CD.  Among the various ways of doing this, two that seemed to draw frequent attention were Reconstructor and Remastersys.  A recent post made it sound like Reconstructor was especially easy to use.  Among other possibilities, these tools would apparently allow the user to create a bootable CD or USB stick that would contain the user's own customized Ubuntu installation.

There seemed to be an endless number of variations and possibilities, some of which would require a lot of work and/or would not work well.  The last one mentioned here involved running Ubuntu, or something like it, on a Windows installation.  In essence, Ubuntu in this approach would function like just another Windows application.  As such, it would tend to be limited by the things that Windows could do.  Portable Ubuntu Tres was a recent example of this approach.

These possible approaches suggested two steps I could take, as described in more detail in separate posts.  One was to update my knowledge of virtualization alternatives to VMware Workstation.  It had been a year since I had last reviewed that topic, and I did not know whether there had perhaps been developments that would give me a superior alternative to VMware.  The other was to try my hand at burning a custom live Ubuntu DVD via Reconstructor or Remastersys.

Installing a Brother MFC-7340 Printer in Ubuntu 10.04

I was installing Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on a desktop computer.  I wanted to get my Brother MFC-7340 printer working from within Ubuntu.  I had not been able to make it work with Ubuntu 9.10, but now I had found a post where mdgrech described how it could be done.  The steps I took were as follows:

sudo -i

aa-complain cupsd

mkdir /usr/share/cups/model

mkdir /var/spool/lpd

apt-get install sane-utils

apt-get install psutils

It puzzled me that mdgrech’s link led to the LPR driver for the MFC-7420.  I suspected he knew exactly what he was doing; but just in case that was a mistaken link, I went to the Brother Linux driver download page and downloaded the Debian LPR driver for the MFC-7340 instead.  This gave me a file called brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb.  To install the LPR driver, Brother advised using CUPS if it was working on my system.  I wasn’t sure if it was.  I was advised to try this:  “sudo /etc./init.d/cups status.”  That said “cupsd is running.”  Now what?  I followed the links to the Cupswrapper Driver Install page.  There, I had to follow certain “pre-required procedures.”  These appeared to be more or less the steps that mdgrech had already had me take (above).  So apparently he had used the CUPS approach too.  Encouraged, I continued along this CUPS route.  There was some disagreement on the next step.  Brother said that I should turn on the printer and connect it to the computer now; mdgrech seemed to say I should install the driver first.  I wound up not connecting the printer until later.  Meanwhile, it seemed that I would need to be installing the cupswrapper driver as well as the LPR driver, so I went back to the download page and did that.  This gave me a download called cupswrapperMFC7340-2.0.2-1.i386.deb.  The next steps were to navigate to the folder where I had downloaded brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb and then type these commands:

dpkg -i --force-all brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb

dpkg -i --force-all cupswrapperMFC7340-2.0.2-1.i386.deb

dpkg -l | grep Brother

The next step was to go to http://localhost:631/printers.  It showed the printer.  So now I did turn on the printer and plug in the USB cable.  (Note that there are slightly different instructions if your connection is ethernet.)  Ubuntu saw the printer, but gave me a “Missing printer driver” note in the upper right corner of the screen, and then said “Searching for available drivers.”  Eventually it gave me a New Printer dialog.  

Note:  mdgrech had advised, instead, to go to http://localhost:631/admin, select Add printer, choose Brother MFC-7340, choose “Another Make/Manufacturer,” select the MFC-7340, and click Add Printer.  Since I had gone to http://localhost:631/printers as Brother advised, I was now at the New Printer dialog, so I proceeded from there.  I selected “Select printer from database” (with Brother highlighted) > Forward > MFC7340 for CUPS > Brother MFC7340 for CUPS [en] (recommended) > Forward.  I went with the defaults in the “Describe Printer” dialog > Apply.  I printed a test page.  It worked!

There was one other thing I needed to check.  On this Ubuntu machine, I was running Windows XP in a virtual machine in VMware, and had previously tried to install the MFC-7340 from there.  I still had it listed as a printer.  So I went into VMware at this point and tried printing from there.  The print job queued up, but it didn’t print.  I ran Brother’s Installation Diagnostics software, there in Windows XP, and it reported failure:  “Cannot communicate with the machine.”  I went into Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes (right-click) > right-click on the Brother MFC-7340 Printer > Properties > Ports tab.  I checked the box next to the USB003 port, which was the only port that specifically referred to the Brother MFC-7340.  I clicked OK and tried printing again.  Once again, it queued but did not print.  Then it occurred to me that, of course, I would have to go into VMware’s VM > Removable Devices.  There, sure enough, I saw “Brother Printer.”  I clicked Connect.  The queue dialog said, “Printing,” and then it did print.

The other thing I really wanted to be able to do with the Brother MFC-7340 was to scan.  This appeared to be an entirely different process, so I started another post for that.  Otherwise, with this step finished, I returned to the project of tweaking Ubuntu 10.04, as described in a separate post.

Long-Term Backup Verification: Beyond Compare, in Windows and Ubuntu

Some time back, I had looked into software that would verify that I was not losing data without realizing it. Data could disappear, as I have discovered, when files become corrupted but continue to look the same (until you try to open them). Data could also disappear if files quietly vanish through unnoticed mistakes (e.g., hitting Delete when an archival folder is highlighted). I had a backup system, in other words, but I lacked a way of checking whether anything might be falling through the cracks. The programs I had examined in my previous investigation had not turned out to be quite what I was looking for, so I still had this need.

Then I became aware of Beyond Compare from Scooter Software. BC had gotten a lot of very positive reviews from programmers and other users here and there. It came with a 30-day free trial offer, after which it would cost me $30. Amid praises that sometimes seemed to come from BC's own friends and/or employees, there were also references to Araxis Merge, which some considered much superior. After expiration of the trial period, it was available for $169/259 (standard/professional), but there was supposedly an academic discount of about 70%. Araxis Merge didn't offer a Linux version. There were also a number of other file and folder comparison tools, some of which were free but few of which offered CRC checksum calculation, which I wanted. I decided to start with BC and see how that went.

First Try: Ubuntu Installation

There were versions of BC for Windows and for Linux. In the spirit of my gradual, long-term effort to move away from Windows, I decided to start by trying the Linux version of the program. I was running 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Beyond Compare was a 32-bit program.

The 32-bit version may have been very easy to install. But it seemed I would have to make some adjustments in order to run this program on my 64-bit system. I found two different sets of advice on how to make those adjustments. One was for running BC on 32-bit Kubuntu 8.04. I figured it would probably work, if I wanted to try it. But the other was for Ubuntu 9.04, so I decided to try that one.

Following the latter set of instructions, I downloaded the .tar.gz version of BC. Ordinarily, it seems, it would have been necessary to download ia32-libs and libqt3-mt; but in my way of installing Ubuntu, Synaptic showed that these packages were already installed. I unzipped (technically, I guess, I should say untarred) the file by using the "tar -zxf [filename]" format instead of the "tar -vxf [filename]" format that I had previously decided I should use. (I was definitely still in a learning mode for purposes of Ubuntu commands.) Just out of curiosity, I deleted the resulting folder, went into a WinXP VM, right-clicked on the .tar.gz file, and told 7Zip (one of my Windows XP utilities, with a right-click context menu option) to unzip it. It did. Once again, I had that folder containing a file called bcompare-3.1.4.10554.tar. So if, like me, you weren't smart enough to just right-click on the tar.gz file and select Open with Archive Manager > Extract, you could do it this other way. Actually, in this case, the Windows approach may have been superior, because when I did belatedly try the Archive Manager approach, I got "An error occurred while extracting files." So I went back and did it with Windows again after all. This gave me a much larger .tar archive. I used 7zip in WinXP again on this .tar file. Now I had a regular folder called bcompare-3.1.4.10554.

I decided to continue trying the GUI approach. In Ubuntu's File Browser, I went into the unzipped folder and double-clicked on install.sh. I got a dialog asking, "Do you want to run 'install.sh', or display its contents?" I chose Run. Nothing seemed to happen. I went back to Terminal, navigated into that folder, and (reverting to the instructions) typed "sudo ./install sh". Now it seemed to install. At the end of its various messages, it said, "Please place the following in your .bashrc or .cshrc (etc.): export PATH=/home/ray/bin:$PATH," where "ray" was my username. It also said, "Executable is /home/ray/bin/bcompare." It was apparently telling me that I had to add /home/ray/bin to my computer's path, so that the program would know where to look when I typed "bcompare" (or whatever) to start the program.

I tried just typing "bcompare" right where I was in Terminal, but no joy. So I navigated over to where it said it had installed itself: "cd /home/ray/bin." Sure enough, there was a file called "bcompare." But when I typed "bcompare" there, I just got "command not found." Double-clicking on bcompare didn't do anything either. The installation instructions cited above said nothing about this. Was I supposed to make it executable? I typed "chmod +x bcompare" and then typed "bcompare" again, but this still just gave me "command not found."

It seemed I would have to figure out how to add something to my path, though I didn't understand what good that would be, if the damn thing wasn't executable. I found instructions that seemed to work, or at least they got me to an open .bashrc file. I didn't find any path lines in that file to use as a model, so I gathered that I was just supposed to type exactly what they said. I added it at the end of the .bashrc file as follows:

# add Beyond Compare to path [this is a non-executing comment]

export PATH=/home/ray/bin:$PATH

I saved and closed .bashrc. I opened a new Terminal session and typed "bcompare" at the $ prompt. It said "bcompare: command not found." I navigated to /home/ray/bin and tried again. Same result. I decided to back up and try the approach from that other webpage, the one that was supposed to work in Kubuntu 8.04 with the .deb download. Given ia32-libs and libqt3-mt (above), it now appeared that I had assumed that the installation of these libraries meant that the files I needed were installed in the right places -- that, in other words, Synaptic had already taken care of putting those lib files in their proper places. But now it seemed that I should have copied over program files from one folder to another. Putting this Kubuntu approach on hold, I reverted to the instructions from the approach I had already worked through. Specifically, the first command I apparently needed to enter was:

dpkg-deb --extract libqt3-mt_3.3.8-b-5ubuntu1_i386.deb libqt3-mt

changing the specific libqt3-mt file name as needed. But at this point, not knowing what particular file that might be, I said to hell with it and downloaded the Windows version instead. I then looked for a way to uninstall this version of Beyond Compare from my Ubuntu installation; but since I had not used Synaptic to install it, I did not seem to be finding uninstallation instructions that applied. So it's still installed.

Second Try: Windows XP Installation

I downloaded and ran the WinXP installer. Interestingly, they had an option to create a "portable install," which could apparently be put on a removable USB drive or wherever, without making any changes to the registry. Presumably it would still fail to work after the 30-day trial period unless I bought a license. But if I was going to keep the program, this would definitely be a useful form for it. So I went with that approach. (One special advantage of this approach, for my purposes, was that I could put it on a drive other than drive C, within my computer, and could therefore make it available to all of my virtual machines under VMware Workstation, without having to reinstall it on each VM.)

The program seemed good. I was impressed with the comparisons. When I tried to use its help feature, I got an error message, "Navigation to the webpage was canceled." I searched the database and didn't find anything, so I sent Scooter Software an e-mail about that.

The folder comparison feature was very smooth. Folders were color-coded according to whether they matched or not. Black folders matched -- that is, they were identical. Other colors seemed to indicate some degree of mismatch. Lacking the help feature, I looked for a user's manual on the website. All they had was a bunch of knowledgebase articles. I'm sure these were very helpful for some purposes, but their titles revealed none on the subject of folder contents or colors. Nonetheless, when I clicked on a purple folder, I saw that only one of its subfolders differed. Eventually, I found that I could actually configure my own preferred colors for the following statuses: same (i.e., the folders in the two comparison panes are the same), orphan, older, newer, and different. There were also color options for file comparisons.

Cool feature: when you click on a folder on one side of the comparison screen, the problem automatically opens the parallel folder on the other side. In other words, I'm looking into a subfolder on drive F, and it's opening up that folder for me; but at the same time it's also opening the comparison subfolder on drive H. With just this much knowledge, within about a minute after starting to fool with the program for the first time, I was able to detect that there was one varying file, nested seven layers down, in a folder containing almost 30,000 files. As far as I could tell, the difference was that the filename for the one had been truncated.

One thing that I didn't find was the ability to reload an old comparison log and compare it against a new drive. For example, suppose that, on December 31, 2007, I burn a CD to archive some files. I compare that CD against the source folder on the hard drive. Everything looks good. Then, sometime during 2008, something happens and it appears that I may have lost some stuff from the hard drive. What did I lose? I don't know, because the hard drive has changed by now, and unfortunately I can't find the CD. Ah, but if I could run a comparison of the hard drive's current state against the previously saved log comparing the hard drive and the CD on December 31, 2007, at least I could know what might be missing and take appropriate steps to replace or compensate for it. Another scenario: I back up my data every year, and now I want to see a single list of all the changes in my folders since 2003.

About this time, I realized that I had not actually examined the support forums at Scooter Software. As it turned out, there were several hundred threads in those forums. Some of them appeared to be exchanges between the proprietor of Scooter Software and his chief programmer, but whatever; it was still good to see the effort and interest in the product.

There was a lot more that I wanted to try with Beyond Compare, but I was not quite set up for some of that, so this is where the matter stopped for the time being.