Tag Archives: Synaptic Package Manager

Recovering deleted files from USB disks on Ubuntu

Everyday we use USB keys to transfer data without transmitting them through the t. The USB keys and portable disks are small, light and their data capacity allow us to move in privacy huge files. This idyll sometimes is broken by a fatal mistake: we unintentionally delete an important file. Normally, if we are smart we recover the erased file in the Trash but in other situations when we realize the mistake we had made is too late.

In this circumstances is very import to stop to use our USB key or portable disk till we are able to use a good software for data recovering. On Ubuntu you have a wise number of dedicated software that can do this job for you, the most powerful run on Terminal as testdisk, foremost, and scalpel but you can also use a “minimal GUI” software as PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is very intuitive to use and it is able to recover many data formats from jpeg to db. After you install it using Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Center you can launch it in Terminal with:

sudo photorec

Immediately a GUI Terminal interface appears and you have just to follow the instruct ions you visualize on your monitor.

Using the arrows and the Enter keys you have to:

1 – Choose the USB device from where you want to recover the data

2 – Select the partition table (usually Intel)

3 – Specify the partition table

4 – Select the right filesystem where the data were stored

5 – Decide if you want to try the data recovering from all the free space

6 – select the directory where you want to store the recovered data. IMPORTANT: do not store the recovered data on the same USB key you are scanning for recovering

7 – Wait till PhotoRec finishes the recover operations.

PhotoRec is fast and, during our tests, we were able to recover almost the 100% of data. Not bad!!!

How ro repair Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if the Update Manager and Synaptics don’t work

1 Reply

After I installed some new software I wasn’t able to update Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Update Manager was not able to check for updates and when I tried to use the Synaptic Package Manager I hadn’t better results. A reboot was not the right solution and I tested different ways to solve my problem saving the Ubuntu installation in my computer.

Searching on internet I discovered that there are few possible solution to avoid this problem and, in case you have the same bug on your computer, I decided to sum-up the most powerful after I successfully tried them.

First of all you can try to force the update process through the Terminal typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If this doesn’t work you will try with this next step:

sudo rm var/lib/dpkg/lock
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Then launch again the Update Manager to verify if you succeed and if nothing happened solve the matter typing:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

and try again to launch the Update Manager.

In my case this was enough to restore all the Update Manager features and solve the problem. If you have extra problems about this bug or if you want to suggest alternative solutions, please, don’t hesitate to comment this post.

Alien-GUI: an useful software tool to grafically convert deb and tar packages to RPM

4 Replies

Today, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we added a brief news about Alien-GUI which is an interesting software developed to grafically (and automatically) convert tar, deb in RPM. As you already know, RPM is the package manager used to install software on different Linux system as (but not only) Mandriva, Fedora, Red Hat and Suse. Before installing Alien GUI, it is necessary to install Alien directly from Synaptics Package Manager (System – Administration). Alien GUi is very simple to use thanks to its intuitive graphic interface and it passed our test when we use it on a Mandriva. To sum up Alien Gui is a useful tool that sometimes could help all us to fastly solve some package compatibility problems in just few clicks. Recommended!

A fast guide for beginners to install ClamAV on Ubuntu

4 Replies

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we have posted a quick guide to rapidly install ClamAV: one of my favourite and open source antivirus for Linux. We have already written some notes in our previous post “Security package (Rev. 1.2) for Ubuntu: antivirus, firewall and P2P stealth” and in that occasion we decide to suggest an external link. This time we reinstalled a fresh new Ubuntu 8.10 and decided to directly add ClamAV. First of all, it is necessary to run Synaptic Package Manager (in System – Administration) and to search Clam and select clamav and all the extra packages you prefer to install. Read very carefully the description that is visualized each time you click on one of them and select the extra feature you need. Then, with the right button of the mouse, select “mark for installation” and click on Apply in the upper menu bar. After few seconds ClamAV will be correctly installed. Now, if you check on Applications – System Tool you will find a new ClamAV icon whose name is Virus Scanner. Now, if you launch ClamAV you will discover that, unfortunately, it is not possible to upgrade the program without administrative privileges. I solved this “problem” dragging and dropping the ClamAV icon to the upper panel. Then I clicked on the icon using the right button of the mouse and selected the Properties panel. Then, in the “command” space I added sudo before the text clamtk %F that I found already written there (sudo clamtk %F). Now, when you click on the upper panel ClamAV icon, you are able to upgrade your new antivirus in a breeze. Recommended!

How to solve a troublesome problem with the keyboard and AWN (Avant Window Navigator) to when upgrading Ubuntu to its 8.10 version!

13 Replies

Today, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we posted some brief notes about how to solve a graphic bug we found on Ubuntu after the upgrade to the 8.10 version. In fact, when we upgraded Ubuntu to its 8.10 version we were not able to visualize AWN (Avant Window Navigator) because it was impossible to switch the Visual Effects to Normal but we were obliged to use just the None settings. At the same time we lost the left part of our keyboard: the numeric pad and the “arrow pad”. Surfing Internet we found several different suggestions but the only one effective for us (and for our NVidia graphic card) was that which suggested to completely remove the xserver-xgl package using Synaptic Package Manager. We do not know why but, after removinging xserver-xgl, we actually solved all our problems contemporaneously. Suggested for all that people who has found the same bug when upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10!