Category: Switching from Windows

Whenever i get the following message

mount /dev/sdd1 /hds/sgt2tb
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only

The command

ntfsfix /dev/sdd1

resolves the issue, and produces the following message

Mounting volume... The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... OK
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdd1 was processed successfully

The same mount command you see here will now work flawlessly

mount /dev/sdd1 /hds/sgt2tb

I am still unsure what process from the mentioned above is responsible, as this oftentimes pops up on drives that were never system drives, so there is no hibernation file problem

On linux, when i needed to edit a video I usually go to Kdenlive, I used to think it is THE linux alternative to Adobe Premier Pro, until yesterday, when a friend recommended I try out OpenShot

I am a Gnome user, Kdenlive was designed for KDE, I have always run it in gnome (Unity) and it worked fine, but today, I am feeling adventurous and up for trying OpenShot, openshot too is pyQt which is a bummer, but hey, this is not why we doing this

Reminder
KDE is based on Qt and Gnome is based on GTK. both applications here are meant for KDE, and I don’t really want to install KDE on my machine

This post here is where I will leave my impressions so hang tight.

On windows, you might have been using text editors that search or search&replace within files in a folder, one such tool i have used in windows is “source edit” by Joacim Andersson (Brixoft Software). that text editor does not seem to be maintained any longer as the developer seems to have moved into making games, but there are certainly many other editors that allow you to do the same thing.

On the other hand, on Linux, I don’t need to do that, the basic tools that come with the operating system allow for that, multi gigabyte files can be searched and have certain text replaced at the speed it takes to read them (Without having to open them for editing)

So, let us assume we have a folder with many text files (Including css or js or html or php files for example), to search that folder, we can combine

grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" /path/to/file/

-R (-r) look for files recursively
-l show file names, not the contents that were found
-i ….

Another tool which is better suited for looking in code is ack (ack-grep) which i will come back to cover in this article, and a newer tool that i have never used is

Now, replacing a string inside a file is simple, there is a cool tool called sed

sed -i '/TEXTTOFIND/ s//TEXTTOREPLACEWITH/g' verylargefile.txt

Now, to find all occurances of a string in all the files in a directory and it’s subdirectories, you can use the following command, Mind you, this is always treated as a regular expression, if your string contains a dot or anything else that is part of regular expression syntax, you will need to escape it, to avoid that, check out the sd command below

find -type f -exec sed -i 's/find/replace/g' {} +

{} + invokes the “exec” command with multiple file names at once, instead of once per file

The sd command

the -s flag disables regular expressions, sd and fd have rust crates, apt install fd-find sd

fd --type file --exec sd 'Find' 'Replace'
Or with backup
fd --type file --exec cp {} {}.bk \; --exec sd 'from "react"' 'from "preact"'

-s : No regular expressions

In some cases you can even forget about fd, as sd is now capable of dealing with multiple files
sd -i "\n" "," *.txt

Being a linux super user / server administrator for many many years, i still use windows for my work / personal use, working with putty all the time to access the linx machines.

So just in order to drop the laptop, and replace it with a flash stick in my pocket, and maybe sometimes an external hard drive (when i am dealing with big files), I have decide to drop windows all together, in favor of a linux installation on a flash stick in my pocket.

Then, i can use the work PC, and the home PC, and my laptop anywhere without having multiple installations of the same thing.

Because my computer has data aging back to 2001 that i sometimes need or use etc… I will probably be keeping my windows installation in my laptop even when i boot it from a flash stick with Debian Linux on it.

But for this ambitious project, i have to compile a list of programs that replace my everyday use programs, i am not talking adobe premier here, i am talking more like adobe photoshop. and something to replace adobe dreamweaver.

To do this, i will use a USB3 64GB flash stick, and dedicate 32GBs to a FAT/NTFS system suitable for use on any windows PC, and a bootable EXT4 (has to be the second one because windows only sees the first partition on flash sticks) that boots debian wheezy. I have left a post somewhere on this blog on how to do that that i will link from here very soon.

So, here is a list of things i use every day, and candidates for linux, I will keep growing this list as i go because i think it is very essential

	Windows	Linux
I use it for all my image processing needs	Adobe Photoshop	The Gimp
I might use it for documents i get by email etc…	Microsoft office	One of the 2 popular office suites for Linux.
I use dreamweaver for everything, All the formatted documents i create for myself or to send to others are either HTML or PDF, plain text documents are the ones i use most of the time, but that comes with vanilla debian	Adobe dramweaver	Quanta Plus, Aptana, KompoZer, BlueGriffon
Web browser	Firefox	Whatever name the chose for Firefox
	WinSCP
	FileZilla
	VMWARE workstation	VMWARE workstation
	Windows Network	Samba

 

An application for windows that i wantin Linux is WINSCP, but it seems the author of WINSCP says (on his forum) that ” Sorry, there’s no chance for that.”

In any case, i have no doubts there are hundreds of applications that can do the Job, in fact the file browser that comes with your gnome or KDE already opens FTP and SFTP and SCP connections, so you need to look no further.

There are also applications that can mount a remote file system that is run on SSH, xxx is one such software

But truth be told since the days of Norton commander, i have always liked the two window view that winSCP is similar to.

So in this post, i will add screenshots of the applications similar to WINSCP, i will try both krusader and filezilla (Yes, filezilla does support)

apt-get update

then

apt-get install krusader filezilla

With Krusader, it is a good idea to install 

apt-get install kdiff3 kompare xxdiff krename rar unrar zip

Another software to be tested would be snowflake, confusingly it is being renamed to muon, which is already the name of a package manager for debian !, in any case, installing snowflake is as simple as downloading the deb file then installing it

wget https://github.com/subhra74/snowflake/releases/download/v1.0.4/snowflake-1.0.4-setup-amd64.deb

then install it

dpkg -i snowflake-1.0.4-setup-amd64.deb

Worth noting that on my 4K display which has a 200% setting, snowflake is not usable, the font is so small, and clicking on something is a challenge, so to work around this while the maintainers fix this for people who have settings like mine, i run snowflake from the terminal with

java -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.5 -jar /opt/snowflake/snowflake.jar

And now we have both, on my computer which is a fresh install, krusader was a 90MB download, in your case, it is probably much less because most of the things downloaded are libraries you probably already have.

in any case, let me take those screenshots of WINSCP’s alternatives and get back to this post