Install

How To: Use Equation editor in Office 2008 (for Mac)

Posted by Rick on in Microsoft, OSX, Technology How To's 2 Comments

How To: Use Equation editor in Office 2008 (for Mac)

Equation Editor in Office 2008 should be installed by a default install of Office. If for some reason it is not, you’ll need to find your Office Disc and reinstall Office 2008 for Macintosh.

To check if Equation Editor is already installed, look in /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office. The Application, Equation Editor, should located there. But you don’t need to launch it from here or you’ll get error messages saying fonts are missing. Equation Editor is meant to be used inside of Word, and other Office applications.

To use Equation Editor, first step is to launch “Word” from your toolbar, or from Applications.

In Word, click on “Insert” in the menu bar, then at the bottom choose “Object.”

Choose “Equation Editor” from the list of Object Types.

Type in the required equation using the buttons at the top of the Equation Editor to get the Mathematical Operations needed.

Once you have your equation, click the red button in the upper left hand corner to close the Equation Editor. This will automatically insert the equation you just entered into the Word document at the cursor location.

Keep in mind this is for MS Office 2008 for Mac only. If you know how to do this in Office 2011 for Mac, please comment below!

How To: Fix Portable Ubuntu Remix in Windows

Posted by Rick on in Linux, Technology How To's 1 Comment

How To: Fix Portable Ubuntu Remix in Windows

The Portable Ubuntu Remix or pubuntu project allows Linux to run INSIDE Windows as a native win32 application. This is not the same as running Linux within a VMWare or Virtual Machine environment.

Recent versions have become much more stable, to the point that it’s now possible to even run Gnome (a typical Linux GUI Desktop). Screenshots can be found on Lifehacker.

Installing Pubuntu is actually pretty easy, just open the downloaded file, click on the application and follow the prompts.

The first thing to do after it’s installed is to change the default user and password. (pubuntu, 123456)

1. Open up a terminal
2. Type: adduser (Replace with the new user name from here down)
3. Enter the password 123456 if prompted for pubuntu’s password and then fill out the information it asks for
4. type: cd (Just to make sure you’re in the right directory)
5. type: cp ./* ..//
6. type: cp ./.* ..//
7. type: cd ../
8. type: chown *
9. type: chown .[^.]*
10. type: chgrp *
11. type: chgrp .[^.]*
12. type: sudo nano /etc/event.d/tty1
13. Find the line near the bottom that says: exec /sbin/mingetty –autologin pubuntu tty1
14. Replace pubuntu with the new name
15. press Ctrl+X, press Y, press ENTER
16. type: sudo nano /etc/init/tty1
17. Repeat steps 13-15
18. type: sudo visudo
19. Find the line that says: root ALL=(ALL) ALL
20. Underneath it, add the following line: ALL=(ALL) ALL
21. Repeat step 15
22. type: reboot

Every once in a while pubuntu’s fstab will get messed up. If it hangs when trying to launch, you need to do this:

1. Look for the pubuntu icon in your task bar, right click it, and click restore
2. In the terminal that pops up, press ESCAPE
3. type: mount -o remount,rw /
4. type: nano /etc/fstab
5. delete the “-e” at the beginning of a line, just after cofsX.
6. Press Ctrl+X, press Y, and press ENTER
7. type: nano /etc/init.d/postmount_pubuntu.sh
8. replace the first like (#! /bin/sh) with #! /bin/bash
9. Press Ctrl+X, press Y, and press ENTER (again)
10. type: reboot

How To: Use Dump to back up a full filesystem

Posted by Rick on in FreeBSD, GPL, Linux, Technology How To's, Unix 0 Comment

How To: Use Dump to back up a full filesystem

Way back in the day when tape drives first started being heavily used to do backups of Unix machines, the dump command was created. In typical Unix simplicity the dump command “dumps” files from one device to another device. This can be a tape drive, a hard drive, even a network share. rsync does a similar process but is meant for immediate use of those files.

First step is to be sure dump is installed. If not use, rpm, yum, port, apt-get, or your local repository method to install dump on your system.

The quickest command to get started is: dump -0 -j9 -f /pathtosavebackup /pathtobackup

This would give us a down and dirty dump of the requested path, or if / is used in the second part of the command, the full file system starting at the root.

-j9 tells the command to compress (using tar) the file as much as possible.

-f defines the device (or filesystem path) to dump too. Keep in mind that this command could not be used to dump files from the local filesystem back to the local filesystem.

The bad news is that this will take quite a while depending on how much data needs to be dumped, how fast the hard drives (or tape drive) is, and if backing up to a network share, how fast the ethernet connection is. In my tests 100gb filesystem got compressed down to 23gb, and took about fives hours across a 10/100 connection.

After the dump is done, tar can be used to unarchive the file to a new file system.

How To: Budget Network Attached Raid 5 Fileserver, Part 2

Posted by Rick on in FreeBSD, Hardware, Linux, Open Source, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Budget Network Attached Raid 5 Fileserver, Part 2

In Part One I talked about selecting the hardware and my thoughts behind the choices I made. It’s all been put together and the next step is to install an OS. For various reasons I decided to install FreeNAS which is based off of FreeBSD. It can be grabbed from here.

After a few minutes of looking at FreeNAS I was really quite impressed with it. They’ve taken a quite hard and convoluted process, added menus and made quite easy to setup. Like FreeBSD in general it can feel picky about hardware. If you’re using some off the shelf no-name SATA RAID controller, the odds are it’s not going be supported. But a lot of the more popular and better quality models are supported. The FreeNAS website (and also the FreeBSD website,) are both a tiny bit hard to find information and support when first using it. Counter intuitively you need to click on the Wiki link first, then knowledge base, not the Support link to find Installation and Configuration documentation. Luckily the menus within FreeNAS are fairly self explanatory.

The first step is of course to download the image. In my case I grabbed the live CD so that I could simple have the machine boot off of it and was good to go. Another option is to use a USB thumb drive to boot off of. I’m personally disinclined to use one as they stick out and get broken easily.A UNIX installer screen will come up and start probing and self configuring hardware in the machine. A FreeNAS graphic screen may come up, and eventually it’ll beep when ready. Hit the escape key and choose option 2 to get an IP address via DHCP. Make sure to hit “Yes” when it wants to choose a IPv6 address. That step messed me up the first time I saw it, but it’ll simply fail as most likely there is not an IPv6 server around. Most home routers have a DHCP server built in, but there may be some configuration needed so check the router’s documentation.

Once the IP address has been discovered, type the address it gives you into a web browser to open up the FreeNAS configuration page. The default user name and password is admin:freenas, it’s highly suggest you change the password ASAP. Once everything is fully configured we’ll go ahead and change this. At this point the instructions proved useful.

Step One is to add the physical disks. Under Disks Click on Management, then the + sign. This brings up the disk management screen:

As can be seen the available disks are at the top. In this case ad0 is the 40gb IDE drive I’m going to eventually use as a boot disk. Per the instructions change the “Preformatted file system” option to “Software raid” (the other options in that article may not be available). In this case I have four SATA drives so each needs to be added individually. Hit the apply button and each drive is added.

The next step is to create the raid partition. Go to Disks, Software RAID, then choose RAID5. Choose a RAID name it doesn’t matter what. For simplicity I used “server” put a check next to all the disks that are going to be part of the RAID then another on the “Format and Initialize” box. Hit OK, then once again “Apply”. Now sit back and wait. On this screen very little is going on. But on the RAID server itself messages will start popping up. Even better, they’re helpful!GEOM_RAD5: server: all(-1): re-sync in progress: 0.01% p:x ETA:232min (cause: store verify progess). After 232 minutes of waiting we then got this screen:

As can be seen my four 250gb SATA drives have been built into a 715gb RAID5 Partition. It now needs to be formatted which is done in Disk, Format. Choose the RAID array, give it a name again, no hurt in using the same name again. We’ll format it out to UFS+ with GPT and Softupdates as the as the filesystem. The other options may work, but are not recommended by the FreeNAS team. Hit the format button and thirty seconds later the drive is ready to mount.

The mounting screen is sort of confusing at this point. After all we’ve already created and formatted the RAID drive so it should be ready. But this physically mounts it so that it can actually be accessed.

Under Disks, click on Mount Point. Pick the disk. Then choose “EFI GPT” under the partition menu. This menu was a bit confusing for me at first, and once again FreeNAS’s documentation left this step out. Reading it at first it seems option 1 was wanted as we’d setup UFS before. The filesystem stays UFS though, and the name can be what ever. I choose the simple “raid” moniker for simplicity. The last option could be a real life saver if the power ever goes out. “Enable foreground/background file system consistency check during boot process,” would run fsck and other filesystem utilities when the machine was powered back on. It might take longer to get the RAID back up, but could save problems in the long run.At this point we’re ready to start mounting the RAID and writing data to it. I’ll talk about doing that in the next article in this series, including troubleshooting and setting up Time Machine to back up to the RAID automatically.

Part Three