I recently installed Linux Mint 9 x64 and have been tinkering with it. I’ve also gotten into Folding@Home and am part of a team at W7Forums. However, installing the 64-bit SMP2 client for my triple-core turned out to be a slightly less out-of-the-box experience than it was on Windows. Some dependencies that have been upgraded for Ubuntu 9.10, or Mint 9, don’t work quite the same. Or something.

I’m not a programmer, or an engineer; I like to keep stuff like this simple. So I’m posting these instructions here as to how to install and successfully run the SMP 64-bit client on Mint 9 or Ubuntu 9.10. These instructions work at the time of writing, are intended only for FAH SMP 64-bit client version 6.29, and on Mint 9 or Ubuntu 9.10.

I gathered these instructions and scripts from various sources. I don’t know what makes them work, but they did work for me. If you hose your system, don’t come crying to me.

1. Open Terminal, and enter sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

2. Enter mkdir -p ~/folding

3. Enter cd ~/folding

4. Enter curl -O http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.29-Linux.tgz (the -O after curl is a dash and a capital o, and not a zero) – if you do not have curl installed, you can use wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.29-Linux.tgz instead

5. Enter tar xzf FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

6. Enter chmod +x fah6

7. Enter ./fah6 -configonly -smp and configure the client

8. Once back in Terminal, enter “LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/lib64-fah ./fah6 -smp -verbosity 9 $* &” > fah

9. Enter chmod +x fah

10. Check that wget, bash, binutils, bc and awk are installed; if not, or if you don't know how to find out, install with sudo apt-get

11. Use sudo -k to make sure your elevated privileges are dropped; you have to be logged in as the very user you want to always launch the FAH client on, and without elevated privileges, or the following will not work right

12. Enter cd ~

13. Enter wget http://darkswarm.org/whosyerdaddy-0.6.sh (or, if server/file is unavailable, try wget http://mjs.cc/fah/whosyerdaddy-0.6.sh)

14. Enter chmod +x whosyerdaddy-0.6.sh

15. Enter cp -a /lib ~/lib64-fah (this gave me a few permission errors, but I just ignored them)

16. Enter cd ~/lib64-fah

17. Enter ~/whosyerdaddy-0.6.sh

18. You should be done.

At this point you should be able to launch the client by executing the fah script we created into the ~/folding directory:
~/folding/fah

Good luck!

These instructions were put together by combining the original guide, as to how to install a Linux SMP client, with F@H forum member Tear’s script and great instructions. The whosyerdaddy-0.6.sh script is Tear’s, and I’m only hosting a copy of it on my server in case his site goes down and someone really needs to get their hands on it in order to get these instructions to work.

Using a program called Synergy, you can share a keyboard and a mouse between a Windows 7 machine and a Mac. In this post I try to recreate the steps I took to set up Synergy Server on my Windows 7 64-bit PC and Synergy Client on a Mac Mini G4 running Leopard.

First, we will decide that the Windows machine will be called Windows, and the Mac will be called…Mac. Download the GUI clients for Synergy for both machines. I used SynergyInstaller-1.3.1.exe on Windows, and SynergyKM-1.0b7-Installer.dmg on Leopard.

I highly recommend assigning both machines their own IP addresses. Usually your router will use something called DHCP to assign an “internal” IP address to each machine as they connect to it. These IPs tend to change when your machine reconnects to the router after a reboot for example. You can set up your computers to pick their own IPs instead. I have found it easier to connect via Synergy if I am assigning Synergy screens with IP aliases, instead of just counting on hostnames. But it’s your call.

Configuring Synergy on the PC is very straight-forward. Just install it, and check the option to “share this computer’s keyboard/mouse” if that is what you’re doing. Once done, click Turn On Synergy. There will be a green circle in the system tray signaling that it’s running.

Now configure the client on the Mac.

Please keep in mind that when you configure the server and the client, the information you provide has to match. Make sure you type in the hostnames, IPs, and edge shortcuts correctly.

In my setup, I have two screens called Windows and Mac. Both have assigned IP addresses as aliases. Both have the following shortcuts configured: Mac is to the right of Windows, and Windows is to the left of Mac. This means that if I move my mouse over the right-hand edge of my Windows screen, it’ll show up on the Mac desktop; similarly, moving it past the left edge on the Mac will bring it back to Windows. It may seem like it’s redundant to provide both machines with both details, but it’s not; it’s absolutely necessary.

Once the client is configured on the Mac, it will try to connect. If connecting to the server fails, first check the configuration to make sure you dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s, and that all the information matches. Then, check your firewall software (or Windows Firewall) on the Windows machine to make sure it’s allowing connections through to the Synergys (server) application. Check Windows 7′s sharing settings and make sure you’ve got everything turned on appropriately. I recommend dropping the encryption to the older kind, since I’m not sure Leopard can handle 128-bit encryption. You can also add the Windows machine’s IP and hostname into the Mac’s hosts file: In Terminal, type sudo su - and enter your password. Then type nano /etc/hosts and hit enter. Add 192.168.2.6     Windows to the bottom of the file, if 192.168.2.6 is the IP your Windows machine is using (if not, use the correct one), then press Control-O and accept changes to save the file, and reboot. Start SynergyKM again.

I have also found that using Finder to connect to the Windows machine through the Connect To Server option before you launch the client can be helpful.

If you are having difficulty getting Synergy2 to play nice with Windows and Mac, hit me up in the comments and I’ll try to help you get it running. It’s definitely doable.

For whatever reason, the version of Firefox in my fresh installation of Linux Mint 8 always has the auto-scroll function disabled by default. Auto-scroll is useful if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel; you can just click on the scroll wheel and then move your pointer up and down on the screen, automatically scrolling the web page as you go.

If this feature is disabled in your Firefox browser, you can enable it! Start by typing about:config in the address field, and hit enter. You may get an amusing warning, which you can feel free to dismiss. Look up general.autoScroll in the long list of settings, and switch its value from false to true.

I rarely promote commercial products in this blog for a variety of reasons. However, every now and then I come across a software product that I am just too excited about to not mention it.

I recently gave GNU/Linux a spin and tested out Ubuntu and Debian. I was quite impressed with both; they’ve come a long way in terms of user-friendliness. I was looking for stability and ease of use more than eye candy, and for the most part, in spite of a considerable learning curve, Ubuntu certainly delivered.

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough.

While Windows 7 suffers from the same performance degradation that all Windows releases post-95 have suffered from, its ease of use is hard to beat. While I respected Ubuntu’s decision to “keep it real” by not including native support for things like Lightscribe or Adobe Flash, after a while it just became a huge pain in the rear to try and find little fixes to help me do the most mundane things that Windows does out of the box.

I went back to Windows rather reluctantly, but that is what I felt I had to do. What I missed most about Ubuntu, aside from its snappy performance and amazing security, was the interface. I really liked Gnome – it was refreshingly customizable. Windows felt, in comparison, quite clunky and restricted.

Having used third party software before to enhance the look of Windows XP – back when I still bothered with XP – I knew that products like WindowsBlinds were relatively heavy on the resources and often were slow to have patches available for when Windows updated itself and changed things around. I particularly remember how SP1 rendered my StyleXP installation entirely unusable. Not fun.

Lucky for me, I came across a software product called WinStep, which provides various desktop and taskbar enhancements. It does not use up much resources at all, and it doesn’t latch itself onto the system itself, so it’s easy to turn on and off on the fly. Not once have I had to restart my system due to an issue with it, which is more than I can say for some skinning products.

WinStep doesn’t really skin the desktop as much as it enhances it. What’s so great about this product for me is that it allows me to add certain functionality to my desktop which I’ve always wanted to have:

I don’t like desktop icons. I prefer to start applications from the quick launch bar, or to a lesser extent, from the start menu. Unfortunately, this means that my quick launch area gets pretty crowded, leaving very little space for open applications on the taskbar. The new Windows 7 taskbar does a great job of grouping active tasks, but on the flip side the way it handles quick launch icons is…retarded. Even in “small” mode the icons take up a lot of space.

WinStep allows me to create a dock in the bottom of the screen and move the Windows taskbar to the top (or vice versa if that’s your flavour). Not only can I select a very cool effect for when I mouse-over the icons (and a bounce when I click on one to launch something – similar to OS X’s dock), set the size of the icons, adjust the labels or even remove them, etc…but I can keep my actual Windows taskbar entirely free of quick launch icons! This frees up a tremendous amount of space for active tasks. My launch icons are still in the bottom of the screen where I am used to seeing them, but the systray and the clock are in the top of the screen like they are in Gnome!

Furthermore, combining the dock’s transparency feature with an awesome theme creates a terrific looking dock. WinStep has refreshed my Windows desktop experience, and made Windows a lot more pleasurable to use. I don’t usually make product recommendations, but this one is just too significant for me to pass up on.

I will be collecting here some nifty tidbits that have helped me make my Ubuntu installation more fun to use. In case of very long console commands, quotations are used to emphasize that the command is one long command, even if the blog template splits it into several lines. Do not include the quotations when typing in the commands, as that will not work.

These tips, commands, and possible links are for reference only; any use of them is entirely up to you, and I assume no liability for any damages you do to your or someone else’s system.

NO SHRINKING BOX ANIMATION ON MINIMIZE
When you minimize a window, a rectangular shrinking box animation is shown by default. It gets annoying after time, but there is a way to disable it:
“gconftool-2 -t bool -s /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources true”

I HAVE INSTALLED ADOBE FLASH PLAYER, BUT STILL HAVE TROUBLE WITH FLASH SITES LIKE YOUTUBE
Use the following three commands in console:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Every now and then I come across a Firefox plug-in that I just have to tell people about. This time it’s one called Read It Later. This nifty add-on allows you to temporarily bookmark a web page with just one-click to a list of sites you want to visit at a later time.

Whenever I would stumble upon some page that did not quite have the information I was looking for, but I wanted very much to come back and look at it later, I would bookmark it. As a result, my list of bookmarks is a bottomless pit. It takes about a minute for me to scroll down the whole length of it, and that’s not even getting started on the folders I have created in it. There are pages upon pages of links I wanted to go and follow later, but never got around to it, because finding that one page later on would have been too overwhelming a task.

Read It Later helps with that by keeping these temporary bookmarks in their own list. Not only does it take just one click to add a page to the list, but it’s just as easy to remove it once you’re done checking it out later.

After installing the add-on, a small check mark will appear on the Firefox address bar, after the URL and the star button that’s used for quickly bookmarking a page. As you happen on a page you know you want to come back to and visit later, but don’t want to add to your bookmarks just yet, you can click on the check mark once. This turns the icon red, and the page you’re on is saved in your Read It Later list.

Once you have time to read those pages you wanted to go back to, you can click on the brown book icon in your browser, which presents a list of those links you’ve saved. You can visit pages by clicking on the link, or you can remove them from the list by clicking the red check mark after each one, either in this drop-down list, or in the address bar as you visit them. It could not be more simple.

What if you are browsing the web at home and see something you want to take a look at once you’re back at your desk at work the next day? You could write down the URL… Or email it to yourself. Better yet, you can sign up for a free account at Read It Later’s list synchronization web site, enabling you to synchronize the Read It Later list on your home computer with that of your work PC. Nice!

Supposedly Read It Later also works on any other browser, as well as the iPhone, but I have no personal experience with those alternatives.

Craigslist has become a very popular site over the years for buying and selling goods and services without having to fork over money for advertising fees. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this same service is being actively used by spammers for harvesting the site’s users’ email addresses. Here’s how it works.

In the first step of the process, an application specifically designed for this purpose is used to automatically retrieve the email addresses from each ad in the selected categories in the selected region. This will result in a list of thousands of email addresses.

I know what you’re thinking: “I always use that scrambling feature that creates a temporary forwarding address for me, so I’m safe.”

Wrong.

While the temporary forwarding address system enables you to keep your personal email account from your ad posts, it does not prevent you from giving your address to the spammers yourself. The second step of the process, you see, is automatically sending you an email which usually consists of just a couple of sentences, typically asking you if the “item” is still available. No phone number is given, so you quickly email them back to let them know it’s still available. Bam – your real email address has been harvested, and massive spamming can begin.

You might think that it would take a lot of effort to send people emails asking whether their items are “still available” or to ask them some other vague questions about their items. Fortunately for the spammers, there are software products which make this process automatic for them. They can use hundreds of Gmail accounts (I’ve seen Gmail a lot in particular) as senders, and the software generates the vague question on its own. Response emails are automatically used to record valid addresses.

My wife recently had to change her email address of 8+ years due to it being harvested through an ad she posted on Craigslist. I use the site every now and then and I never fail to receive these one-liners asking for confirmation, and then when I reply, there’s no response back.

I’m personally going to ignore all emails which do not specify alternate means of contact, i.e. a phone number. And I will mention this as I post the ad, because I have no interest in getting hundreds more spam emails each day about sex pills or fake Rolexes.

Windows 7 has a release date! Now that we are getting so close to an official release, it is prudent to start collecting info on little tips and tweaks that people have come across when testing the beta and the release candidate versions.

1. Fonts can be hidden from programs (to free up memory, among other reasons) by right-clicking on a font in the Fonts folder and selecting Hide.

2. Calculator is more versatile than it used to be. The operating modes include Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics. Also available are conversion tools (angles, temperature, velocity, volume, etc.) and a date calculation tool. Gas mileage, lease, and mortgage estimate templates are also available. Handy!

3. Win7 finally has native support for burning .ISO files (disc images) onto blank media. Just double-click on your .ISO file and a simple but useful Burn Disc Image app will pop up.

4. By default, empty memory card slots will not show up as drives in My Computer, but you can change this by unchecking the “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder” option in Folder Options.

5. Remember that a lot of the time the fastest way to find a settings dialog or an application is hitting the Windows key and typing the name of the program into the search field, as opposed to browsing through various menu options.

6. Shortcuts pinned to the taskbar can also be quickly launched by pressing down the Windows key and a numeric key that corresponds to the shortcuts position on the taskbar from left to right. For example, if the icons pinned to your taskbar are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, and WinAmp, pressing Windows and 2 will open up Firefox, while pressing Windows and 4 will launch the Media Player.

7. The new taskbar offers many advantages over the old, but the classic Quick Launch can also be enabled. Do the following: right-click on the taskbar, then go Toolbars/New Toolbar. In the folder selection field, enter the following: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch. Turn off the lock taskbar setting. Right-click on the divider. Disable Show Text and Show Title, and set the view to Small Icons. Position the Quick Launch by dragging the divider to rearrange the toolbar.

8. Certain apps, such as MSN Messenger or Steam, are designed to disappear into the system tray and not take up space on your taskbar. Sometimes such applications will unfortunately stick to the taskbar. You can put them in their right place by going to the app’s shortcut’s properties and enabling the program to be run in Windows Vista compatibility mode.

9. One of the best things about Windows 7 – for me – are the jump lists. Windows Explorer’s jump list keeps track of most commonly accessed folders, but you can also pin folders to the jump list for convenient, quick access. Simply locate the desired folder in Windows Explorer, right-click on it and hold down, and drag it over the Windows Explorer icon in the taskbar, and release. It will now show up in the Explorer jump list under the “Pinned” heading. Snazzy!

More to be added later!