How to get the latest Linux updates.

By now, most of us are aware of the Update manager in Ubuntu which can be found from the Main menu by selecting System | Administration | Update Manager but some of our updates are applied by use of a script which runs hourly on each Linux laptop. If something has caused those updates to be interrupted, you may find that your computer is not up to date. It is not a bad idea to manually run these updates once a week and even necessary when you find that something is not working or if your X120 (which seniors and juniors have) keeps locking up randomly to force you to power it off.  Here is how you can manually run the BCFG2 updates in order to help your computer provide you with the best service possible. 
From the Main Menu go to Accessories and then Terminal.




A text window will pop up on your desktop. At the command prompt in this window type in the command between these arrows ---> sudo bcfg2 –vdq <--- and press enter.
You may be prompted for your password but you will see nothing on your screen when you type it so type carefully.



Finally, when you see the end of the script, your screen will look something like this:



When you see the prompt with the $ at the end of it, you can type “exit” (without the quotes) to close the terminal window.
Congratulations, you have successfully updated your Linux laptop.

Automatically backup your LibreOffice Files

To setup LibreOffice to keep a backup copy of your working document, follow these steps:
1) Open the Tools menu and click on the “Options…” choice, at the bottom of the menu:

2) From the Options window, expand “Load/Save” and select “General”:

 

3) Check the box in front of “Always create backup copy” (circled above). Click the “OK” button to close this dialog box.
Once this is done, LibreOffice will save the previous version of your document every time you save a new one. If the current version gets corrupted for any reason, the previous version will generally be safe. You should probably change the AutoRecovery field to 3-5 minutes.
To locate the backup version of your file should you need to recover a file:

1) From the Linux system menu, select “Places” then “Home folder” to open your documents folder:

2) From the menu in this window, select “View” and then “Show Hidden Files” (or press CTRL-H) to display a number of files and folders normally hidden from view:

Your screen should now look something like this:

3) To navigate to the location where LibreOffice stores its backup versions, select the following folders in sequence: “.LibreOffice” (highlighted above), “3”, “user” and “backup”.

4) If you have already made the changes to the LibreOffice settings and have saved any documents, then there should be files in this folder. These files will have the same name as your documents, but will end with “.bak”. Copy the file to your desktop. Make sure you do not actually move the file or you risk losing your backup version. You can do this by holding down the “Ctrl” key on the keyboard while dragging the document to your desktop (or another location of your preference) or by right-clicking on the file and selecting copy, the right-clicking where you want to put it and selecting paste.

5) When the file is on your desktop, replace the “.bak” extension with “.doc” to allow LibreOffice to edit this file. It is also advisable to change the name of the document itself, not just the extension, to prevent anything from happening to your original backup. If you keep the same name, LibreOffice will overwrite the backup when you next save this document. While this should be okay, it is safer if you name it something else and preserve the original backup.

6) Once the extension (and the filename) has been changed, you can open the document in LibreOffice and continue working at the point of your previous save.
Last, for this to be most effective, you must save frequently!

Help! I was editing a file and my computer froze

This is a common problem this year with the laptops used by the Juniors and Seniors.

Symptoms: You are typing a research paper (or any document) and the keyboard and mouse completely lock up and stop working. This could happen even when you aren’t doing anything or anytime the computer is running. At this point the only way to unlock your computer is to press the power button until it turns off. When you turn the computer back on and log in you will want to open any application you were using to edit a file. This does not apply to Google Docs or any web application. LibreOffice seems to be the application which gives us the most trouble here. When you open LibreOffice after your reboot, the application will attempt to recover any files which were open when the computer locked up. If you are lucky the file recovers to the last point where it was when auto-save executed. If you are not lucky, the recovery fails and you are left with an empty file even if you had 5 or 6 pages already saved.

Advice: Currently there is no solution for this scenario. However, there are a couple things you can do to minimize your vulnerability. First, make a backup of your files often. This can be done by following my earlier post How can I backup my files to the Whitfield Network? Secondly, within LibreOffice select Tools/Options from the top menu. Under Load/Save choose General and check Always create backup copy. While you are in there, also make sure Save AutoRecovery information is checked and set for 3 or 5 minutes.

Now for the good news: We have known about the problem with this model freezing up since early in the school year and we, along with our partners at Lenovo and Revolution Linux have been trying to find a solution since then. This past Wednesday (November 2) we started testing a possible solution. If all goes well, we will be making that solution available to everyone on Monday, November 7th. We know that this has been a very stressful situation for our students and we are anxious to get a resolution in place. Thank you for your patience and cooperation, especially those kind teachers who voluntarily extended deadlines to students who were affected by this unfortunate problem.

Please continue to watch Kupp's Korner often for more helpful hints in the future.

A word about Linux, Ubuntu, servers and iFolder

Linux – Linux is an operating system designed after the venerable UNIX operating system. We all know what Windows is, and Apple has it’s MAC OSX, but Linux is open source, which means there are no restrictions on who can develop enhancements or features to the operating system. Linux, which includes Google’s Android, runs on a wide variety of computer hardware, including mobile phones, tablet computers, routers, televisions and many other devices including supercomputers. Most websites in the world run on a Linux or UNIX server.

Ubuntu – Since Linux is open source, there are many different companies which publish their own distribution of the operating system. Novell has their version which is called OpenSUSE. Canonical works with the open source community to develop Ubuntu which is the most widely used version of Linux.

iFolder – iFolder is a system that allows people to easily share folders of any type of files with other users, whether they use the same or different operating systems. Thus, Linux, Windows and Macintosh users can all use iFolder to share files. Although iFolder is easy and in some cases almost seamless to use, supporting it is not easy since there are several components in the iFolder system. The first part is the server software which runs on a Linux.. The second part is the Linux server itself which must run on hardware with a large disk  drive (300GB in our case) to hold the users’ files. The next part of the iFolder system is the client software which runs on user’s computers running Linux, Windows or MAC operating systems. Unfortunately, there is no client software which was designed specifically to run on the Ubuntu OS. the system we use at Whitfield for our computers. There is an iFolder client which was designed for a different Linux distribution and the engineers at the consulting company we use, Revolution Linux*, have gone to great pains to get that client working for the past 2 years. This was the first year that this task proved too much for Revolution Linux and we had to abandon iFolder at the beginning of the school year. We will re-address the iFolder issue at a later date.

*Revolution Linux is a Canadian based firm which has helped us configure our Ubuntu desktop environment for the past 3 years.