Guide Overview

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to check whether your system's RAM (Ramdom Access Memory) is working properly. Bad RAM can lead to a whole host of problems, often which do not appear to have a single cause -- appearing as systemwide glitches, blue screens, and other system trouble. MemTest86+ provides a very good detection mechanism for failed RAM, and is about as good a test you get short of actually replacing the module itself.

Tools Needed
Please perform these steps from a separate, working, machine.

1. Download MemTest86+, and unzip it to your desktop.
2. Burn the image file to a CD, as an image file. If you're unsure how to do this, see the How to Burn an ISO File

1. Put your CD in the drive and configure your machine to boot to the CD. This is different on all machines, but it's usually by pressing F12 or F10 as your system boots, and selecting either "CDROM" or your cdrom drive. If you are unable to force a CDRom boot, reply with the make and model of your machine and I should be able to get you exact instructions.
2. If you've done it correctly, MemTest86+ will start to run automaticly, as shown below:
   
   
3. If you want to be reasonably your RAM is OK, then allow MemTest to run until you see this message:
   
   
   On the other hand, if you want to be completely sure your RAM is OK, allow MemTest to run overnight. Memtest will run forever until power is pulled on the machine.
4. Check the MemTest screen for any reported errors. Errors will appear as RED warnings at the bottom of the screen, similar to the following screenshot:
   
   
5. Hard-Reset the machine, removing the MemTest disk in the process.

If you didn't get an error screen, Congratulations!

1. Set the Incoming port to higher than 45000, I have found that 47532 is a nice selection.
2. Then make sure you set the max upload speed to at least half of your connection upload speed (this will ensure faster downloading) because high upload speeds are the main cause for slow downloads.
3. Do not use randomized port on every startup, as this will have problems with your firewall and this is highly unnecessary.
4. Choose the correct number of maximum connections, too much connections can slow down your torrent download speed instead of speeding them up. For best results use uTorrent's speed guide found on Options >Speed Guide, and it will suggest you the best settings. For users with a max upload speed of 256 Kbits/s uTorrent suggeests 35 connections per torrent and 60 in total. Check the total speed guide for your type of connection here.
5. Run as few torrents as possible, this means that your connection can handle and deliver maximum speed for the running torrents. I suggest running 2 torrents if you have a 256 Kbits/s upload speed connection and 1 torrent at a time if you have a 128 Kbits/s upload connection.
6. When selecting from similar torrents select from the best seeds/peers ratio as well as swarm speed. Here is a guide on how a perfect torrent should be.
7. If you are using a DSL router then enable port forwarding in your router. If you are using a DSL Modem this is unnecessary.
8. Enable UPnP Port Mapping And NAT-PMP Port Mapping, (found on Options > Preferences > Connection. If you are manually forwarding your port than keep it UNCHECKED, but if you don't know what port forwarding is or you?re not forwarding the port manually than CHECK it.
9. Do not use windows firewall, windows firewall simply hates torrents and you will have a truckload of speed problems with it. Disable it permanantly, and use a secure firewall such as Comodo Firewall or Eset.
10. Manage your upload slots per torrent, usually it should be 2-3 per torrent. More than that will reduce the download speed of your torrents.
11. Increase the Net.max_Halfopen Connections to 50-60 in uTorrent Advanced configaration panel, there is also a patch for windows XP to increase this limit. In Windows XP increase the limit to 100 connections.
12. Enable the following, they greatly improve your download speed.

Cheers

If you want to disable X screen blanking (aka. disable the X screensaver) that comes up unexpectedly while you’re watching a movie in MPlayer, all you have to do is

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

To make the change permanent, add the following to your ~/.xinitrc file:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0

xset s off

NTP sometimes greatly slows down your Ubuntu’s boot time.

To disable it just do a simple

sudo apt-get remove ntpdate

Note: doing this will also remove ubuntu-minimal in ubuntu linux

If you for whatever reason dislike OpenOffice.org’s logo or want to gain an extra few seconds of speed while the application loads, you can disable OO.o’s logo by editing the

/etc/openoffice/sofficerc

file and modifying the

Logo=1

value into

Logo=0

If you wish to change your MAC address in Linux, all you have to do is bring the interface down then use the hw ether switch:

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 02:01:02:03:04:08
ifconfig eth0 up

ok just a quick note ,, if you’re tryin to unrar an archive thats been corrupted or been split up into multiple parts, keep the broken parts using unrar.

more description

4 Rar files, part1-4, 3 fails becuase of a crc check issue, so you can recover part of the archive using the keep broken flag for unrar ‘-kb’

mnk0@tree:~/downloads$ unrar x -kb Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.rar
UNRAR 3.80 beta 2 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2008 Alexander Roshal
Extracting from Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.rar
Extracting Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.rar 99%
Calculating control sums of all volumes.
Cannot find volume Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.rar
Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.mkv - CRC failed
Total errors: 1
mnk0@tree:~/downloads$ ls Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.mkv*
Bleach_Naruto Shippuuden 98 - 720p.mkv
mnk0@tree:~/downloads$

This can be a very handy function if we want to use a file, instead of a partition, and with modern filesystems the performance is almost on par with using a dedicated partition for your swap area.

1. Using dd lets make a zero’d file for the swap

This example would create a swapfile of 1 gig using a blocksize of a megabyte (1048576).

2. Make file as a swapfile

3. Activate swapfile

4. Verify that our swapfile has been activated

We should see something like this in the list ..
If you want to have this a permanent solution, then adding the entry to fstab would probally be a better idea,
open up /etc/fstab in your favourite editor and add the following line.

Configuration

Download and install the Cisco vpn Client. im using vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.02.0030-k9 at the time of this article.
(if u need it send me an email). unpack, and install in my installation i opted out of the option for starting as a daemon so i start it manually everytime.

Using my PROFILE.pcf file

Then we can copy our Cisco VPN Profile over to the profile directory.
Now we are ready to connect to our connection. Note we dont add the .pcf extension to the profile we’re going to use
mnk0@tree:~$ /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient connect PROFILE
Initializing the VPN connection.
Contacting the gateway at 4.23.45.21
Contacting the gateway at 4.23.45.21 (balancing)
User Authentication for PROFILE...
The server has requested the following information to complete the user authentication:
Username [mnk0]:
Passcode []:
Authenticating user.
Negotiating security policies.
Securing communication channel.
Your VPN connection is secure.
VPN tunnel information.
Client address: 10.10.10.46
Server address: 4.23.45.21
Encryption: 256-bit AES
Authentication: HMAC-SHA
IP Compression: None
NAT passthrough is active on port UDP 4500
Local LAN Access is disabled


Exiting

When we are ready to exit, just hit CTRL+C on your terminal session, and shutdown the daemon.

Save precious CPU and memory by using mplayer to play mp3s, also keep your playlist file up to date with all your mp3 media files.
First and foremost we need to have mplayer installed, if your on a ubuntu-debian based system use the following command
to install mplayer, if not then you can download the appropriate packages and install them.

Lets make a home for our script file, and set the appropiate permissions

Paste the following code into your new script file, if you keep your Music files in a different location then change the variable musdir to match your setup.


#/bin/bash
# VARS ##########################################
tmpdir='/tmp'
musdir='/home/osamad/Music'
filename='playlist.m3u'
# CODE ##########################################
find $musdir -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' 2>/dev/null >> $tmpdir/$filename
mplayer -playlist $tmpdir/$filename -shuffle -loop 0 -radio volume=80



Using find we build a list of all our mp3s, in this case we have multiple types of media files we want to play so we can specify that by adding the -o -name flags and add them in.

• -playlist ;flag we set the playlist file we just created
• -shuffle ; enables shuffle mode
• -loop 0 ; enables loop 0=forever
• -radio volume=80 ; set the default volume to 80% (use * or / to adjust when playing)

RunTime

Push ALT+F2 or launch from a terminal

MORE

To find out more information, or to customize your mplayer settings
Create a custom launcher and run your script from the gnome-panel

Want to create a disk image of a system but write it on another hard disk? This can easily be done with the help of netcat and dd.
For this example you will need two computers connected on the same network, and enough room on one machine to hold your disk image

Destination Machine

So we’ll start off this example by preparing our destination machine to listen on tcp port 4444 via netcat. The port is arbitrary so you can really pick any port that is not being used. Just have to make sure that its the same on both ends.

Source Machine

Next we’ll start a dd on the source machine and pipe it to netcat on port 4444


Now sit back and wait for your image to be done, when it’s finished dd will print out its status something like
NOTE: you will have to push CTRL+C to cancel out after this is completed, as the netcat session will still be active.

root@leaf:~#
30820468+71926 records in
30867456+0 records out
15804137472 bytes (16 GB) copied, 739.395 s, 21.4 MB/s
^C


If you want to find out the status of dd during the copy theres a couple of ways to do this, open up the system monitor in Ubuntu Linux, and it should tell you the transfer rate. Launch iostat or ifstat through a terminal. Invoke a command from terminal to get dd to display the current progress .
Viola, we’ll now have a dd image of our disk or partition. I like to verify the exact size of the file matches the size output from fdisk.

Destination Machine

Source Machine

Ever had a failing disk? Using some hard drive recovery tools we can make salvaging our valueble data something possible.
Using dd_rescue we are going to make an image of the hard drive onto a reliable storage area, then we can run whatever filesystem recovery utilities we want.
The beauty of ddrescue is that it is fully automated and will rescue all the blocks that it can read successfully on the first pass, and with any bad blocks it will come back and retry as much as possible.

Install ddrescue tools

Connect the failed disk to your system

By either plugging the drive directly into system, or using one of those usb enclosure or slotted drive device you’ll need to have your failing hard disk connected and unmounted before we can begin.

We can now mount this image on our system and take a look at the files.

Was having the issue of not being able to save my dual monitor configuration with a default installation of 9.10. The xorg.conf seems to be unable to be parsed by nvidia-settings tool, so to get around this we can run nvidia-
xconfig to reset the config file to something that it can work with.

after that


and we can save to xorg.conf successfully.

Started a dd but wondering what the progress is? I haven’t found a way to do a verbose mode for dd, but this command seems to do the trick.

Lets start off by creating a dd of /dev/sda1

We’ll need to find the process number of our dd which can easily be done with the following command.


we’ll get something like this


Now we can run our command to find the status of this dd. Open another terminal session.


and looking back at our dd page we should see dd dump out a status of its current progress.

mnk0@tree:~# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=my-dd.img
12574781+40555 records in
12601304+0 records out
6451867648 bytes (6.5 GB) copied, 224.634 s, 28.7 MB/s