Computer FAQs & Tips

Configure default Boot Loader

In most cases, users are installing Ubuntu as dual boots to their Windows. By default the system will boot to Ubuntu. Now they want to the default boot to Windows.

This post is showing you how to configure the default Boot Loader on Ubuntu.

The file which you need to modify is /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now use the following command to edit

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Scroll to (almost) end of file, you will see a list similar to example below
Read more…

I am sure a lot of people have similar question.

What is vsmon.exe?

My computer start to get very slow after I started to download 1.7GB file using DownThemAll (Firefox addon), I was wondering what was happening in the background. So I open up Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) to see what’s going on.

Wow! vsmon.exe is taking approximately 40% of my CPU and Firefox 40% and svchost.exe 20%. I knew 2 processes firefox and svchost but what on earth is vsmon.exe?

I did a few google searches and found that vsmon.exe belong to ZoneAlarm personal firewall, it is used to monitor your internet traffic.

So this process sis quite safe, as soon as my download is finished everything came back to normal. But keep in mind that spyware or virus could be named anything, you need to know exactly where is this process located on your computer and who created it.

You can use Process Explorer tool to identify it. The rest of this article is showing you how to do it.

Read more…

The scenario that I came across is, when I am working on a excel file which required to present in multiple page print out, I will need to keep showing every column on each page printed out. Ok, how do I achieve that?

In this post, I will show you how to get around it.

Say you have data similar to the Screenshot below

In printed out on A4 paper size, there will be 2 pages. Page 1 will include Task Item column, Page 2 will not inlcude Task Item column. Now follow steps below to get repeat print column
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This tutorial is showing you how to setup secured ftp connection from another machine to Linux. In this demonstration purpose, I am going to use Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 Server.

The rest of this post will take you through

• Requirements
• Installation
• Setup connection

Requirements

• SSH Server
• SFTP Client

Read more…

To set up your own web server is not a hard thing to do. This post is showing you how to install IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows XP and get your first welcome page up and running.

IIS server is shipped with Windows XP, you do not need to download or use any other third party software.

Table of Content

• Requirement
• Installing
• Setup Website
• Testing

Read more…

By default Windows XP does not enable Clear Type Font. You have to set it manually. You can do this one of the two methods

1. Change Desktop Properties Settings
   Recommended for normal users
2. Edit Windows Registry
   Recommended for Advanced users

Let’s get start

Change Desktop Properties Settings

• Right Click on your desktop
• Display Properties Windows appears
  
• Click on Effects button
• Effects Windows appears
  
• Select Clear Type
• Click OK button
• Click OK button again on Display Properties Windows

Read more…

After looking through forums, I saw a lot of people (including myself) experienced a bad time with wordpress upgrade where thing doesn’t always happen in the way you expected to happen, either the whole thing get screwed up or not 100% working in the way it should be. The worst thing is they could not revert back the old working version.

If you have similar problem above, maybe this post is a great tip for you. This will also be a good post for my future reference. I have used this method when I upgrading this website (computer-faqs.com).

Table of Content

• Before upgrade
• Upgrade
  • Export
  • Install
  • Import
• After upgrade
• Prepare to go live
• Simple Rollback
• Summary

Read more…

Occasionally I am writing a post about HTML which I need to post the code to illustrate my argument (I guess I am not alone).

By default, WordPress will convert unrecognized uses of < and > into characters which actually look like &lt; and &gt;, which will “look” like a < and a > when posted. Or, if it finds the use of an HTML tag within the post, it will use the tag like it is HTML and you will have funky looking text and a messed up layout. (quoted from codex discussion)

I find this very frustrating when my post doesn’t appear to the way I wanted it to.

How to get around it?

You just simply convert your html open and close bracket “< and >” to “&lt; and &gt;“. However you are not going to do it one by one or do search-replace in text editor, it will be time consuming.

I wrote a simple Java Swing program which does just what I mention above plus it can convert html character code back to html code in case you need to make any changes.
Read more…

There are a few options/commands you can use to find out which version of Ubuntu you are using. They give very similar information which you wanted to know but present in different format.

Command line:

cat /etc/lsb-release

Example:

manet@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

Command line:

lsb_release -a

Example:

manet@ubuntu:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 8.10
Release:        8.10
Codename:       intrepid

Command line:

cat /ect/issue

Example:

manet@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.10 n l

Command line:

cat /proc/version

Example:

manet@ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.27-9-server (buildd@rothera)
(gcc version 4.3.2 (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) )
#1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:53:41 UTC 2008

Here’s another simple command for novice linux user

Copy entire folder (including content) to another location

cp -R

Example:

cp -R /home/myid/myfolder /var/www/newfolder

This will copy myfolder to newfolder. In another word, content inside myfolder will be now in newfolder