Many people just assume that whatever they save in their computer is going to stay there forever, unless they delete it. Never a thought mas more wrong than that!

Computers are mostly made of solid state devices, which are supposed to last for a very long time without breaking. However, sometimes something goes wrong, for example a power surge, and a component on the motherboard goes away, or the whole motherboard fries up, or…

Did you ever think of the hard drive? Yes, that device that actually holds all your data. That is the most fragile piece inside a computer. Why? Because it is a mechanical device with moving parts! Moving parts are subject to friction, and they expand and contract when temperature changes. They get old, then they break. And usually they break way before other parts of the computer reach the end of their lifetime.

Then… what happens to the important things that you stored on the hard drive? All those pictures, and songs, and important documents, and…

Don’t wait ’till the worst happens. Take action immediately. Avoid blaming yourself once the disk dies and you haven’t make a copy of your data.

Take a USB drive, or a recordable DVD or a CD-ROM, and make a copy of all your data on it. Use several of them, if one is not enough. Even use an external removable disk. Then, once you have the copy of your data, store them in a safe place, ready for that day when your disk will break, and you’ll have to recreate your data on a new device.

Pretty easy, isn’t it? Just a little time spent once to make you sleep with no worries. Well, be careful! Every now and then you are surely going to change something in your data. Maybe you are going to add new stuff, like new songs, or new documents, or that video you were looking for since a long time.

Do another backup, save all those things that have changed, or you will end up with an old copy of your original data without the most recent updates.

Yes, I know, it is a never ending chore, but believe me: it is worth it.

Finally, if you want to play really safe, establish a routine:

1. Do periodic backups
2. Store a copy of your backup off site (what about if a fire or a flood strikes right where you keep both the computer and your only copy of backup?)
3. Think about the possibility of storing your data over the Internet, in the so named cloud. There are several on-line services that make available a certain amount of space to store your files in their servers. And if that space is not enough, for a small fee they can give you plenty of extra space and, one day, you’ll be happy you’ve done that.

Next time I will talk again about this topic. I will describe the routine I’ve established for my own computers, so to give you an example of how you could deal with your own stuff. Remember, nothing is perfect. What works for somebody may not be OK for another. In the end you have to decide how you want to protect your data, if at all. But a good example is a place to start, something you can think about to decide how you want to handle your stuff.

Sleep well.

I have this laptop running Windows XP® but, even though it is equipped with an Intel Core Duo® at 1.66 GHz with 4 Gb of RAM, sometimes it makes me think I’m using an ancient computer from 20 years ago. So, I wanted to try Linux on it to see if I could give the PC a new life. At the same time, I didn’t want to remove the existing OS, as the primary user of the laptop is my wife, which really doesn’t know how to live without the programs she is used to.

The solution: to install Linux alongside Windows, in what is called a dual boot configuration. Here is a brief account of how I did it, and some of the challenges I had to face.

If you don’t know that yet, I’m a a big fan of the Fedora distribution, so that is what I immediately decided to install. And since release 13 was just released, I took the opportunity to test drive it, so to decide if it was suited to also upgrade my main machine, which is used as a proxy and a WEB server for the family network.

Having decided what to put on the laptop, I went to the Fedora WEB site to download a copy of the distro. I choose to download the live CD version of it, so I could test it for compatibility before actually install it.

Here is a link to the download WEB page: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

Once I had the .iso file on my desktop computer, I burned a CD with it and started working on the laptop itself.

First, I inserted the CD in the laptop and  restart it, to make it boot from the CD. From the main screen, I selected the option to boot Fedora from the live CD. Once the boot process was completed, I found myself in the Gnome desktop from where I ran a number of simple compatibility tests, to make sure that Fedora was compatible with the laptop hardware:

• check that the display was capable of showing the right resolution, and that the 3D acceleration was handled correctly;
• check that the network interface was working fine and that it was possible to access the LAN and the Internet;
• check that the sound was working properly;
• check that the extra peripherals connected to the computer were working fine (i.e. printer).

Since everything seemed OK, I went to the next step: free up some space on the hard disk to install the new OS. To do that, I used gparted while still on Linux from the live CD.

Unfortunately, when I tried to shrink the existing NTFS Windows partition, gparted told me that it didn’t have enough space to do so. Very odd, since at least 70% of the disk was empty. But, in fact, gparted had it right: my disk was 70% empty, but it was highly fragmented, so there was not enough contiguous space to shrink the partition. I had to shutdown the computer, remove the CD, and reboot the laptop with Windows, then recall the defragmentation program and have it run 3 times, before the disk was finally enough defragmented that I was able to shrink the NTFS partition. I then left about 50% of the disk available to Windows and the remaining 50% unused.

Done that, I finally selected the icon on the Gnome desktop to start the actual installation, which conducted me through a number of choices:

• Language.
• Basic storage device, the hard disk.
• Host name, the name the computer is known in the local network.
• Time zone, and here I made sure to uncheck the box “system clock uses UTC“. Reason for that is that Fedora and Windows both try to update the system time on the motherboard, but Windows always does it in local time, so I had to make sure Fedora did the same to avoid incompatibilities when switching back and forth between Windows and Linux.
• Root password, which is the password used by the system administrator.
• Make the Linux installation use only the free space on the hard disk. Here I also required to be able to review the partitioning layout, so to be able to have the /home file system reside on a partition of its own, which is always better to do to simplify future upgrades.
• Change label used by the boot loader to identify the “other” OS as Windows XP.
• Set Windows XP as the default OS, to make things easier for my wife.

The installation procedure then required the system to be rebooted. After that, the procedure went through a series of steps to complete the configuration. It basically asked to do the following:

• Create one or more user, as you don’t want to use “root” for regular activities. And for that I created two users, one for my wife (in the hope that she will use Linux from time to time and get used to it) and one for myself.
• Set the time, which I required to be set automatically across the network.
• Send the HW profile of the PC to the Fedora Project. This one step is not necessary, but it is a nice thing to do, so that developers know what kind of PCs are used out there, and that helps them to tune up the OS in future releases and make it work better and better.

And there was it: the installation was completed and the PC was ready to use. I just made some small final little adjustments to please my taste:

• Installed Thunderbird, as my primary e-mail application.
• Ran the update tool to install all the latest fixes.
• Setup the system to access the Internet through my proxy server (squid)
• Installed the RPM Fusion repositories, which make available lots of multimedia programs and codecs.
• Installed the Samba services, so to be able to access the Windows shared disks in the home network.

In conclusion, all that took me a good half day of work, but it was worth, as the laptop, with Fedora on it, now runs much faster and smoother than when it runs Windows. One more evidence that Linux is a much lighter and stable OS than Windows.

Not so long ago my wife came to me begging to help her find a file that she knew she had on her laptop, but that she could no longer find. Armed with patience I then sat at her computer and started running searches with whatever she thought was part of the title of her file. Nothing! Then I started searching by some keyword she suggested about the contents of the lost file. Nothing again! Finally I asked her what tool she used to generate that file and, surprise surprise, it was the omnipresent MS® Word.

So, I launched the program and started looking in the list of the latest opened documents. Nothing even there. The history had been wiped out because she kept opening one file after another in search for the missing one and, of course, the history only provides the last 10 opened files.

I finally started asking my wife about details of when she created the file, if she remembered where she put it, what was the purpose of that file, whether she created more than one version of it. After all that questioning, we were able to narrow down the search to a few folders until, finally, we found it.

It was hard, but it was necessary as that file contained an important document she needed at work the very next day.

I just hope this event helped my wife learn an important lesson: computers hard drives are big, and you can put a lot of stuff in it. But the more you store in it, the more it becomes difficult to retrieve your things back, unless you start thinking like a librarian.

Oh my… what am I doing now? A preach on the goodness of keeping things well organized!!!

Well, yes, that’s what I’m doing. You see, with the big hard drive sizes we have available nowadays, we have the capacity to store as much information as a real public library, maybe even more. How do you think you are going to find your stuff if you don’t design a method for storing and retrieving information? Failing to do so will inevitably bring you to the chaos, to the moment when you won’t be able to easily find anymore what you are looking for.

You know, this is a well understood concept among those companies that want you to use the computer for everything you do every day. And they help you on this task by providing for free some tools that simplify the search for something missing. Think at the search capabilities of MS Windows®, or the Google® search that you can install on your own computer to easily find stuff on it.

Are these tools really the answer to all the problems? Maybe yes, maybe not. If you use your computer only occasionally and you name your files with very creative names all quite different from each other, then yes, these tools help you out. But if you start having different files with similar names and worst, different files with similar names and similar contents, how are you going to distinguish one from another in the long run?

Organization is the only key. And all the computers have the one tool to make you succeed in your quest for the data organization. This tool is called file system. Start with your Documents, or MyDocuments, or whatever you want to call it, folder. Don’t put all your files in this folders regardless of what they refer to. Create other folders within this main folder using meaningful names. Some people use to name these folders with the year when the documents were created. Other people names them into categories. Then, in each of this second level folders, create more folders, with more specific names. And so on and so on, until you reach the point where the file name itself becomes the most meaningful object at that level, so you finally start putting files in this lower level folders. It will be easier, later, to navigate the folders depending on the thing you are looking for, and you’ll find it in no time.

Think of it as family tree. Well, this method of organizing is actually called a tree. Why? Look at the graphical representation of it. Doesn’t it look like an upside down tree?

Organized tree

Can you feel how easy it would be to find things in it? Don’t let the programs put the saved files wherever they decide. Be in control! You decide where to put a saved file. Everything becomes so easy.

After a long pause (my job kept me very busy lately), here we are again to talk about virtual machines. This time I will tell you where to get and install an effective software package, called VirtualBox, that is capable of running almost any type of Operating System that a PC can support.

It is important to say that the best performance from such a package is obtained if you run it from a 64 bit PC, i.e. a PC equipped with a 64 bit OS, either MS-Windows or Linux. It is possible to use this package also on a 32 bit machine but, in this case, please make sure that the CPU of your computer is virtualization technology enabled, as not all the CPUs can do that.

Here is some reference for you. This is an Intel web site listing all the virtualization technology enabled CPUs. And this is the official VirtualBox web site.

Now, from the VirtualBox web site, search for the version of product you need to download, based on the OS you are running (i.e. MS-Windows or Linux) and whether it is the 32 or 64 bits version. Note that 64 bit versions of the package are labeled with AMD64. This is the right version also for Intel CPUs.

Once you find what you are looking for, download it and install it according to the procedure for your OS. For example, in MS-Windows, just double-click on the installer.

Please just note the following, when you run the installation:

1. The installer will ask you for installing options; usually the default choices are good enough. Don’t play with the choices if you don’t know what you are doing.
2. You may be asked to choose the driver where to install the application, if you have more than one. Usually the installer will suggest you the right one, but you may choose a different one if you like. Just make sure it has enough space in it; the installer will tell you how much space it needs and how much is available in each drive.
3. The installer will shut down the network interface of your computer, will make some modifications to its setup, then it will reactivate it. This is done to give transparent access to the network to the Virtual machines. The installation will suspend waiting for your OK to continue, to avoid network services disruption in case you are accessing the network with some other application.
4. If you are installing on MS-Windows, you will see a warning saying that the software you are installing is not Microsoft certified. You may continue the installation anyway, as VirtualBox is not going to cause you or your computer any trouble. However, the final decision is yours and yours only. If for any unforeseen reason the software misbehaves and causes breakage on your computer, I will not take any responsibility on that. You have been warned
5. After the installation is complete, when you start VirtualBox for the first time you will be presented with a registration form. You may choose whether to register or not. VirtualBox will work either way.

For your reference, here is a set of snapshots of the installation procedure executed under MS-Windows XP.

What is a Virtual Machine?

If you run a Google search for the definition of a Virtual Machine, you get something like this:

• In computer science, a virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (computer) that executes programs like a real machine.
• A software emulation of a computer that runs in an isolated partition of a real computer; A computer system that is implemented in software …
• A simulated computer in that it runs on a host computer but behaves as if it were a separate computer.

…. and several more definitions.

But what that really means for us? Simply put, think of the Virtual Machine as a program that runs on your computer and acts like a computer in itself, a computer where you can install an operating system, like MS-Windows or Linux, and where you can run programs for that operating system. And that operating system may even be different from the one installed on your actual computer.

OK, you might say, so what?  I already have a computer and I have already my Windows 7  happily running on it. Why would I care to use a Virtual Machine to install another OS? Couldn’t I do that simply by double booting my machine? I could install both Windows 7  and Ubuntu, for example, and when I turn on my computer I choose which one to use.

True, that’s a very good point. But think about this now: what if you want to go back and forth from one OS to the other? What if you are running an application on Windows, for example, and then you want to run another one from another OS? Ubuntu, for example, or Mac.

Do you start seeing the point? One of the great things of using a Virtual Machine, is the possibility to run side by side programs that can only run on a specific platform. So, for example, you could be able to run at the same time an application from a Mac computer and another one for a Windows computer, keep them side by side, and be more productive that having to reboot your computer every time you have to switch from one application to the other.

Or maybe, you are one of those guys who likes testing all possible programs that come in your hands and, once you are done, you may want to discard some of the programs from your computer, leaving no traces of it.  Using a Virtual Machine to emulate a PC would just help you on this. The Virtual Machine would create an isolated environment for you where you can do all the experiments you like. Then, once you’re done, you could actually remove from your computer the whole Virtual Machine and leave your PC exactly the way it was before you started your experimentation.

And what about browsing on the Internet with the constant fear that you could catch a virus that would infect your machine and damage it? Again, a Virtual Machine would help you in this case, because the virus would be imprisoned in it, unable to spread in to the host computer where the Virtual Machine runs. Stopping the Virtual Machine and simply deleting it, would eliminate the virus from your computer with very little effort.

Finally, running a virtual machine on your computer, would allow you to run that old program that you liked so much and that is not supported anymore in your new version of Windows. How about that?

Am I intriguing you? I really hope so because when you’ll experience all the benefits that the use of a VM can bring to you, you will actually starting loving it.

So, follow me through the next posts, and I will show you how you can actually install a Virtual Machine Manager on your computer (any OS you are using will work), and how you can use it to safely browse the web, or run your old programs, or experiment with a new OS by installing it and all, without altering the setup of your real computer.

See you soon and … Happy browsing.