Basenji 0.8 (Tool To Index Your CDs/DVDs, USB Devices And Network Drives), Released

Basenji is a cross-platform tool you can use to index your CDs/DVDs and USB devices so you can later search the database without having plug the media into your computer.

Basenji is very useful for those with large movies / music collections but not only. You can also use it to easily search some backups you store on removable media or your photos, etc.

Basenji features:

• Audio CD Support
• Metadata Extraction (image dimensions or MP3 tags)
• Thumbnails
• Optional daemon that automatically scans a device you plug in and adds it to the Basenji database

Basenji 0.8 was released yesterday, getting lots of useful features. These were already available (some were already there for quite a long time actually) in the Basenji daily PPA - such as the daemon that automatically scans inserted drives, but these are finally stable enough for a wide audience. Here's the Basenji 0.8 changelog:

• Added support for network drives and mountpoints
• Added option to disable the iteminfo panel
• Added option to hide hidden files
• Added support for metadata searching
• Added debugging options
• Added daemon for automated drive scanning
• Many new translations
• Many optimizations and bugfixes

Install Basenji 0.8 in Ubuntu (stable PPA)

Add the Basenji stable PPA and install it in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pulb/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install basenji

Also install the Basenji daemon using the following command (but the daemon is not available for Ubuntu 10.04!):

sudo apt-get install volumedb-tools

To learn how to use the Basenji daemon, run the following command:

volumedb-scanner-daemon --help

More about setting up the Basenji daemon @ Basenji Gets A Scanner Daemon Which Automatically Adds Inserted Volumes To The Database

Download Basenji for other Linux distributions and Windows @ Launchpad.

How To Remove Mounted Drives From The Ubuntu Unity Launcher

All the mounted drives (this includes USB drives, NTFS and other partitions that you set to automount, etc. - basically everything that's in /media) show up in the Ubuntu 11.04 Unity launcher by default which is usually ok if you have a big monitor or if you don't have a lot of applications pinned to the Launcher. But if you use a netbook or just want more space on your Unity launcher, here's how to change the launcher behavior so that it doesn't display any mounted drives.


But firstly, here is how to unmount external devices.

How to unmount external devices

How will you unmount / safely remove mounted external media if you do this? You have at least 2 easy options:

A. Open Nautilus, right click on the mounted device and select "Eject" or "Safely remove drive".

B. Using "ejecter", an AppIndicator available in the official Ubuntu 11.04 repositories which you can install by clicking the button below:

If the above button doesn't work for your browser, open a terminal and copy/paste the following command to install Ejecter:

sudo apt-get install ejecter

Once installed, press ALT + F2 and enter "ejecter" to run it. To run it when your computer starts, open "Startup Applications", add a new startup item and add "ejecter" for both the name and command.

There is another appindicator called "indicator-usb" but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work anymore (when running it on my Natty installation, nothing happens).

By the way, for a huge list of AppIndicators, check out this AskUbuntu question.

Now that you know how to unmount external media easily, let's remove the mounted media icons from the Unity launcher.

How to remove mounted drives from the Ubuntu Unity launcher

1. Install dconf-tools by clicking the button below:

Or install it using a terminal:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

2. Press ALT + F2 and enter: "dconf-editor", then navigate to desktop > unity > devices and change the "devices-option" value from "OnlyMounted" to "Never".

That's all - the mounted usb drives (or any other mounted volumes) should now stop showing up on the Unity launcher.

Extra tip: also remove mounted drives from your desktop

If you decide to keep the default Ubuntu 11.04 Unity launcher behavior and display the mounted media icons on the launcher, there's really no reason to have the mounted volumes show up on the desktop too. Really now, why both on the launcher and desktop?

You probably already know how to do this, since this is an option in Ubuntu Tweak but if you don't want to install Ubuntu Tweak just for this, to remove mounted volumes from your dekstop, press ALT + F2 and enter: "gconf-editor", then navigate to apps > nautilus > desktop and disable (uncheck the box) "volumes_visible".

Get Your USB Drives To Work With VirtualBox (Ubuntu Host)

To get your USB drives to work with VirtualBox when using Ubuntu as a host, you need to add your user to the vboxusers group. Please note that this doesn't work with VirtualBox OSE, so you'll need to install VirtualBox 4.0.x from its repository.

To add your username to the vboxusers group in Ubuntu, go to System > Administration > Users and Groups, click on "Manage groups", scroll down to the "vboxusers" group and click "Propreties", then check the box next to your username and click OK:

Then log out and log back in, plug in an USB stick (or whatever you may need), start a VirtualBox machine and select the USB device in the lower right. Using this, the USB device won't be accessible each time you start the VM.

To have an USB device available each time you start a VM, open VirtualBox, select a VM, click on "Settings" and on the USB tab, click the "+" icon on the right - this will display a list of your USB devices which you can add to your VM.

If you want to set up USB for VirtualBox manually, you can run the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/group

Then search for the "vboxusers" group and add your username to that line, like so:

vboxusers:x:125:andrei

"andrei" is my username - replace it with yours. Then save the file, log out and see above on how to add an USB drive to VirtualBox.

Create A Bootable ISO With Multiple Linux Distributions Using MultiCD [Version 6.2, Released]

MultiCD is a shell script designed to build a multiboot ISO containing multiple Linux distributions and/or utilities, which you can then burn on a DVD or use it to create a live USB memory stick. As an example, you can use it to create DVD ISO with Gparted, Clonezilla, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. There are a lot of supported live CDs - a complete list if available @ MultiCD website.

MultiCD 6.2 was released a couple of days ago with support for archiso-live, AVG, 64-bit fedora and opensuse network installers. Further more, MultiCD now supports all Ubuntu versions.

How to use MultiCD

Important: the ISO files (or symbolic links) must be named as described on the MultiCD website. It's easier for Ubuntu - starting with version 6.2 - you don't have to change the ISO name if you've downloaded it from the Ubuntu website. Alternatively you can name any Ubuntu ISO to *.ubuntu.iso (* = anything).

1. Create a folder which you will then use to add the ISO files and MultiCD script.

2. In the folder created at step 1, download the MultiCD script archive and extract it.

3. Copy or create a symbolic link to the ISOs you want to use in your multiboot ISO, to the folder created on step 1. Remember to name the files as described on the MultiCD website (as noted above). Also, make sure the actual MultiCD script files are in the same folder as the ISO files, or else MultiCD will not detect them!

4. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder you've created on step 1 (cd /path/to/your/folder) and run the following commands:

chmod +x multicd.sh
sudo ./multicd.sh

At this point, MultiCD will detect the images present in the folder it's ran from and will make an ISO for you which you can then use to burn a CD / DVD.

Please note that in my test, there was an error when running MultiCD to build an ISO with Pinguy OS, Ubuntu 10.10 and openSuse, however the Live DVD worked just fine (I've posted a comment about this on its thread at Ubuntuforums so hopefully it will be fixed soon).

Download MultiCD | For feedback, bugs and so on, visit the MultiCD Ubuntuforums thread.

Create A Bootable Windows 7 USB Drive From Linux (Tested On Ubuntu)

I recently had to create a Windows 7 bootable USB flash drive for my girlfriend because she doesn't have a DVD-ROM, and I had to do it from Ubuntu as I don't have Windows (neither at work or at home).

What I ended up on using is the good old (just a figure of speech) UNetbootin which is available for both Windows and Linux. It's in the Ubuntu repositories so to install it, search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center. For Windows and other Linux distributions, get it from HERE.

At first I didn't think it'll work since you can't choose Windows from the UNetbooting options, but it actually works and I've successfully installed Windows 7 on my girlfriend's computer using UNetbootin. Here's what I did:

Firstly, make sure you have a Windows 7 .ISO file (you can create it from the DVD) and a 4GB USB flash drive (or larger).


1. Install Gparted and format the USB drive to NTFS. In Ubuntu, use the following command to install Gparted:

sudo apt-get install gparted

To format the USB drive as NTFS, open Gparted via the System > Administration > GParted Partition Editor. Then select your USB drive from the top right drop-down. If you only have one hard disk, your USB drive should be "sdb". Now right click your USB drive in GParted and select "Unmount" and you'll then be able to select Partition > Format > ntfs. The drive will be formatted to NTFS in a few seconds.

I'm not sure if UNetbootin will mark the drive as bootable as my USB drive already had the "boot" flag enabled from Gparted, so you may want to enable it too: right click the USB drive and select "Manage flags", then check the "boot" flag.

Then you'll have to mount the USB drive back. You can do it from the command line or Disk Utility (System > Administration > Disk Utility) but to keep things simple, you can just unplug the USB flash drive and plug it back in to the computer.

2. Open UNetbootin, select "Diskimage" and then browse for your Windows 7 ISO file.

Now at the bottom, check the "Show all Drives" box and then select your USB drive. For me, that's "/dev/sdb1" but it might be different for you (you should know this from Gparted which you've used to format the USB drive under step 1. Important: if your USB drive is "dev/sdb", then you'll have to select "/dev/sdb1" in UNetbootin!). Do not select / check anything else!

Now simply click the "OK" button and wait for the files to be copied to the USB drive.

Basenji Helps You Keep Track Of Your CDs/DVDs And USB Sticks Data

Basenji is a tool which indexes your removable media such as CDs/DVDs and USB sticks and keeps a history of the data on each media you add to its database so you can later easily search / browse for something on your CDs/DVDs or USB sticks without actually plugging them into your computer.

Do you have a lot of audio CDs? Basenji has that covered too, along with metadata extraction (image dimensions and mp3 tags) and thumbnail support (so you can see a thumbnail for your indexed data without having the media inserted into your computer).

Further more, Basenji is crossplaform and there are binaries available already for both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). The database can easily be exported so you can move it to a different computer and if that's too much hassle, you could always use Dropbox (or UbuntuOne) to directly synchronize the database between multiple computers. Basenji can also import Gnome Catalog databases which has ceased development.

Install Basenji in Ubuntu

To install Basenji in Ubuntu, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pulb/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install basenji

Once installed, launch Basenji via the Applications > Accessories > Basenji menu item.

The above PPA is for stable Basenji builds but if you want to run the latest daily build, there's a PPA for that too (but note that it may be unstable). You can find the Basenji daily builds PPA @ Launchpad (it's only available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx at the time I'm writing this post).


To install Basenji on Windows, once you download the Win32 archive, see the Readme (important, as you'll have to install Gtk# for .NET).

Download Basenji portable volume indexer (Windows binaries and source files are available).

How To Use Rhythmbox To Transfer Music To Any Mass Storage Device (Phone, USB Memory Stick) [Sync]

Rhythmbox is simply great for transferring music to your iPhone or mp3 player. It automatically converts the tracks and all that.

But what if you want to use Rhythmbox to transfer music to your phone which is detected as a mass storage device? Or an USB memory stick? Well, you can't do that - not by default. Just 2 days ago I wanted to transfer some music to an USB memory stick (to listen in the car) and I had to use the "Send to" plugin which is slow, doesn't convert any music and on top of that it was very buggy and some music didn't even get synced to the USB memory stick.

But you can do it with a small tweak: all you have to do is create a file called ".is_audio_player" on the mass storage device you want Rhythmbox to "see" as a music player, and paste this inside the file:

audio_folders=mp3/
folder_depth=1

Save the file, open Rhythmbox and start syncing your music with your phone, USB memory stick or whatever mass storage device you want.

Special thanks to RKV for sending us the tip! [via m-phasis.de]

Fix USB Devices Automount Not Working In Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

It seems there's a bug in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which affects USB devices which do not automount when plugged-in meaning the device isn't displayed on the desktop and also doesn't show up in Nautilus.

I upgraded to Lucid a long time ago and this bug wasn't occurring but today when trying to plug in an USB device (I actually tried several devices - a music player and several USB memory sticks) they simply won't automount.

After some research it seems this is caused (weird, I know...) by the BIOS "Legacy Floppy" setting being enabled (it seems it's related to this). So to fix it, all I had to do is restart the computer and next to the "Floppy" setting in the BIOS I selected "Disabled" instead of "Legacy Floppy" - problem solved, as soon as Ubuntu booted, automount was working again and my USB devices were showing up in Nautilus again.

Hopefully this will help those of you having the same issue as I did.

Update: alternatively (thanks to Benplanet), run the following command in a terminal:

sudo modprobe -r floppy

And then restart your computer.

How To Create A MultiBoot LiveUSB Using A GUI [Ubuntu]

MultiSystem (formerly called MultiBoot) is an application similar to the MultiCD script which we wrote a while back, except MultiSystem comes with a GUI so is somewhat easier to use for non-technical users.

What MultiSystem does is allows you to make a live USB with multiple Linux distributions. A list of supported Linux distributions can be found HERE.

To install MultiSystem in Ubuntu, simply paste this in a terminal:

wget http://liveusb.info/multisystem/install-depot-multisystem.sh.tar.bz2
tar -xvf install-depot-multisystem.sh.tar.bz2
sudo ./install-depot-multisystem.sh

Of crouse, you may want to check out the script before running it. The last command will run the installer.

Once installed, you can access it via the Applications > Accessories > Multi System menu item.


To use MultiSystem, you will need a FAT32 formatted USB memory stick. Then, running MultiSystem will display the following screen:

Where you must select the USB drive and after clicking "Validate", you can start adding the ISO images to your multi-boot USB using drag and drop:

Thanks to WebDevOnLinux (French)

iPhone USB / Bluetooth Tethering With Linux

In order for tethering to work, your iPhone must actually have the tethering option enabled. This depends on your network carrier and contract. For iPhone 3.0 OS you can also just install a so-called mobileconfig profile which enables tethering, but this in a gray zone legally. For later firmwares your iPhone additionally needs to be jailbroken and a system file patched which is surely not everybody's thing. Anyway, with that out of the way let's get to the actual setup.

Since we already added the required PPA for general iPhone/iPod Touch Synchronising in our previous article about syncing via GVFS, it's now a snap to install everything needed for tethering via USB and Bluetooth:

sudo apt-get install ipheth-dkms ipheth-utils

Now, reboot. You could try to reload udev rules etc. but since you're probably not doing this on a server just reboot to be safe.

iPhone tethering via USB

To tether via USB, all you need to do now is FIRST enable tethering in your iPhone, stay on that screen and THEN connect your iPhone to your PC/laptop via USB and it will automatically start to tether after a few seconds (you will see an additional blue bar on your iPhone). Now you can leave that screen on your iPhone. If it doesn't automatically start to tether or you have other network connections then NetworkManager should show you a new interface in its dropdown menu (it's called "ifupdown (bnep0)" for me). Just connect to it.

iPhone tethering via Bluetooth

Some people had success with Ubuntu/Gnome's default bluetooth applet but I didn't so I followed other people's advice which was to install blueman to replace current bluetooth panel:

sudo apt-get install blueman

After a reboot you'll have all your Bluetooth functionality back and more!

Now, to tether via Bluetooth, first enable tethering again on your iPhone. Make sure you select both USB & Bluetooth tethering. Then, turn on Bluetooth on your phone and make sure you stay on the bluetooth page in order to be visible. Click on the computer in the iphone search list. Your phone should now show up in Blueman list, too (if not, use the Search in Blueman to find your iPhone). Do a right-click on your iPhone and choose "Setup" in Blueman. You will be asked if you want to use a random password, just go ahead. Enter the PIN code Blueman shows you on your iPhone and just click through to the end to finish the Blueman wizard.

Next, right-click on your iPhone again in the Blueman main window and choose "Trust". Now, you can just right-click on your iPhone in Blueman and select "Update Service" and then choose "Network Access Point (NAP)" again via right-click and you'll be tethering via Bluetooth. You can now leave the Bluetooth screen again. Done!


Please note: It may happen that you need to re-add and re-pair (PIN code) your iPhone every time you want to use Bluetooth to tether. Please also note, that individual program entries may be called something else as I use a non-english Ubuntu. But I'm sure you'll figure it out.

This post was written by StoneCut (many thanks once again!). Browse all of his posts.

PLoP Boot Manager Lets You Boot From An USB Even If The BIOS Doesn't Support It

PLoP Boot Manager is a small program to boot different operating systems harddisk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. The interesting part about PLoP is that it can boot from an USB even without BIOS support so if you have an old computer with no BIOS USB boot support (and the same goes for CD/DVD) and want to install Linux (or Windows), you may want to give it a try. The boot manager itself can reside on a floppy, CD or on a network and you can install it on your harddisk. There is no extra partition required for the boot manager.

PLoP Boot Manager is not open source, but is free for personal and commercial use.

An important note for Linux users: install LILO or GRUB to the boot sector of your Linux instead of the Master Boot Record (MBR). The PLoP Boot Manager is not a Linux loader and cannot start Linux without LILO, GRUB, Syslinux and similar!


PLop Boot Manager features:

• CD/DVD boot without BIOS support
• USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
• Floppy boot
• Different profiles for operating systems
• Define up to 16 partitions
• No extra partition for the boot manager
• Hidden boot, maybe you have a rescue system installed and the user should not see that there is another system installed
• Boot countdown
• Hide partitions
• Password protection for the computer and the boot manager setup
• Backup of partition table data
• Textmode user interface 80x50
• Graphic user interface 640x480, 800x600, 1024x786, 1280x1024
• MBR partition table edit
• Start of the boot manager from harddisk, floppy, USB, CD, DVD
• Starting from Windows boot menu
• Starting from LILO, GRUB, Syslinux, Isolinux, Pxelinux (network)
• It can be used as ISA/PCI option ROM
• The boot manager is freeware

Limitations: USB floppy, USB CD/DVD ROM, USB keyboards, SATA CD/DVD drives and PCMCIA Card - are all not supported.


For more info and exact how-to use, see PLoP Boot Manager homepage.

How To Convert .IMG Files To .VDI For VirtualBox [Quick Tip]

To convert an .img file to .vdi in Linux, so that you can directly use it in VirtualBox, open a terminal and paste this:

VBoxManage convertdd  file.img file.vdi

For instance, to convert the recently mentioned ChromeOS Cherry from .img to .vdi:

VBoxManage convertdd ChromeOS-Cherry.img ChromeOS-Cherry.vdi

To do this is Windows (I haven't tested it but it should work), open cmd.exe (Start > Run, enter: cmd.exe), navigate to "C:\Program Files\innotek VirtualBox" (using the "cd" command), then run this (after placing the .img file inside the "C:\Program Files\innotek VirtualBox" folder):

VBoxManage.exe convertdd file.img file.vdi

Please let us know if you have tried this in Windows and rather or not it worked.

To use it in VirtualBox, create a new Virtual Machine, select "Use existing hard disk" and browse for the recetly converted .vdi file:

You may also want to check out how to create a shortcut to launch Virtual Machines without opening the VirtualBox GUI (for both Windows and Linux)

Install Chrome OS On A USB Stick [Complete How-to For Windows and Linux]

Note: For running Chrome OS from USB stick, we are going to use Chrome OS Cherry (formerly Diet Chromium), a slimmer Chrome OS that supports more hardware.

Here's what you need to do to install Chrome OS on an USB stick:

1. Download Chrome OS Cherry and extract the downloaded archive.

2. Let's write the chromiumos.img file onto an USB stick (bootable, obviously):

-For Windows, download and install Win32 Image Writer

Then, under "Image File", select the chomiumos.img file and on the "Device" section, select your USB drive. Now you can click "Write" and the image will begin to be written on the USB drive.

-For Ubuntu, install USB Image Writer:

sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter

After installing it, you will find it under Applications > Accessories > Image Writer.

Then simply select the chomiumos.img under "Write image", select your USB drive, and click on the "Write on device" button:

-For any Linux distribution:
If you are more comfortable with the command line, simply use this command:

dd if=<path to IMG file> of=<path to USB drive>

Replacing the bolded text with the path to the chromiumos.img and the path to your USB drive.

More methods of creating bootable USB drives (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X).

3. Now you can restart your PC and select to boot from the USB stick (from BIOS). Google Chrome OS should then start.

Note: to make the Internet connection work, firstly you can login with the default username and password:

Default username is facepunch, default password is facepunch.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Nothing to hide for the Diet Chromium tip.

Linux: Format Your USB Drive Via Command Line

Formating your USB memory pen / stick via command line is pretty easy. Once you know how to do it, that is.

Just follow these steps to quickly format your USB media in Linux:

1. Insert your usb memory pen / stick or whatever into the USB drive and immediately after that, open a terminal and paste this:

dmesg | tail

You should get an output of something like this:

andrei@andrei-desktop:~# dmesg | tail
[ 2143.440053] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access JetFlash TS1GJFV30 8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[ 2143.464348] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[ 2143.466113] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 2002942 512-byte logical blocks: (1.02 GB/977 MiB)
[ 2143.466607] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[ 2143.466610] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[ 2143.466612] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2143.468733] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2143.468737] sdd: sdd1
[ 2143.476393] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2143.476398] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk

See the "sdd" between the brackets? That's your usb media you just inserted. Remember it (it may be different for you, obviously!)!

2. Unmount your USB drive using the following command:

sudo umount /dev/sdd

Where "sdd" is your media drive you had to remember at step 1.

3. Format the drive using the following commands:

a) Format to FAT:

sudo mkdosfs -n 'Label' -I /dev/sdd

You can also use the "-F 32" parameter to create a FAT32 partition.

b) Format to EXT3:

sudo mkfs.ext3 -n 'Label' -I /dev/sdd

For both:
Where Label is will be the name displayed for the USB media so you can set it to whatever you want; and sdd is your usb drive you had to remember at step 1.


If your are not friends with command line tools, you can use a GUI for this called Gnome Format.

Linux: Nautilus 'Send To Media' Script

Have you ever wished you had an option in Linux / Gnome, so that when right clicking file you could send them to, let's say an USB drive? You can do this with a simple Nautilus script called send-to-media.

To use it, simply download the script, extract the archive and copy the file called "sendtomedia" to the following location:

~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts

Then, using the terminal, navigate to the above location and make the script executable:

cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
chmod 777 sendtomedia 

And finally, restart Nautilus:

killall nautilus && nautilus &

Install Ubuntu On A Removable Drive Using Portable Linux

We covered how to create an Ubuntu live USB from Windows, Linux and MacOSX and how to actually install Ubuntu on an USB stick from Windows and in this post, we'll talk about about an application for installing Ubuntu on any removable media such as pen, thumb, SD, MMC or even phones with USB Mass Storage support FROM Ubuntu (actually it works for other Linux distributions too) - meaning that the program used for installing Ubuntu onto the USB must be run from within Ubuntu (Want to install it from Windows? See the links above).

By installing Ubuntu on an USB memory stick or any other removable media, Ubuntu will remember the changes you make across reboots, and boot other operating systems so you can run your favorite Linux distribution with your favorite settings, anywhere in the world. We can easly achieve this using Portable Linux.

Portable Linux features:

1. Save disk space and use your removable drive as usual: The live removable drives created by this program let you use the remaining disk space on your removable drive to store and transport files between Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as usual. Since it uses a Live CD, you save valuable disk space on your removable drive.
   
2. Remember your customizations: What's more, if your distribution supports persistence, the files and settings you edit on your live Linux distribution are persisted across reboots.
3. Install any distribution, on any distribution: Unlike the competition, it runs on any Linux distribution. On top of that, you can install not just Ubuntu, but any distribution that uses Casper as its LiveCD technology. So if you have Fedora and want to create a live removable drive with Debian, no problem, Portable Linux can do it.
4. Rescue systems and run other OSes: Since it uses GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader), you can:
• easily add memtest86+ and MS-DOS to it (handy for those BIOS updates),
• boot a Linux or Windows machine with a damaged MBR (master boot record), then subsequently repair it,
• boot any operating system installed in any of the disks in your computer; and even
• boot your Linux operating system using the root partition on your hard disk.
  
5. Access all your files saved on the USB drive: Finally, you can access the area used to store your files just fine from within your Linux distribution. In that manner, you can create your live Linux distro, install a couple of codecs and applications on it, put a bunch of MP3s or movies in it, and you've got a complete multimedia center on your pocket!

Download Portable Linux (.deb and .rpm files available). Alternatively, you could add the Portable Linux PPA. Please note that even though it says there are packages only for Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty, I've tested the Jaunty .deb on Karmic Koala and it works just fine.


This tutorial won't be a long tutorial like the links in the beginning of the post because after installing Portable Linux, all you have to do is go to Applications > System Tools > Portable Linux and select the ISO and portable media:

Then follow the instructions and you are basically done.

Mount iPhone / iPod Touch in Ubuntu [How-to]

To mount an Apple iPhone / iPod Touch to your Ubuntu computer, connect the cable via an USB cable to your computer and follow the steps below:

1. Add the following repository

Open a terminal and paste this:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

For any other version, simply replace the jaunty by the respective version name (hardy, intrepid or karmic).

Alternatively, Ubuntu Karmic users can run this instead of the command above:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonabeck

2. Add the PPA key using this command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com F0876AC9

3. Install ifuse:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ifuse

Once the installation is done, connect your iPhone to your computer via the USB cable.

Open up your Nautilus. You should see the iPhone/iPod entry at the side pane. This show that it is already mounted in your system.

Now you can: view/copy/download photos, create folders, upload/download files. Managing address book/calendar is on it's way (not yet available). Unfortunately, you won't be able to manage your music database because Apple uses a cryptographic signing algorithm to encrypt all the music files. While you can access the music folder, there is no way that you can transfer your music over and get it to work in your iPhone.

[via gnometips & T4n | n0 Ru | 3z]

Update: you may want to take a look at this also: Mount iPhone On A Fresh Ubuntu Karmic Koala Installation (The Complete Guide)

Cactus Jukebox - Fast Audio Player For Linux and Windows Which Can Synchronize Your Music Collection With An USB Device

Cactus Jukebox is an audio player and music organizing tool. You will love this audio player for Linux and Windows (experimental on Windows) if your focus is on usability and speed. Cactus Jukebox still runs smoothly with 15GB of music files on an old computer like a P3 @ 500MHz. Another great thing about Cactus Jukebox is that it features an option to synchronize your music collection with a mobile player device (USB).

Features:

+ Fast database
+ Audio CD ripper
+ Webradio support
+ Upload/synchronize to mobile players
+ Plattform independent(GTK, GTK2, win32)
+ Browse your music collection by artist, albums and titles
+ Save and load m3u playlists
+ ID3 tag support
+ Easy tagging of mp3-files

What's coming next:

+ Support flac, wma
+ Audio CD Player
+ Burn CD's
+ Support more plattforms(MacOSX, QT,...)
+ Many bugfixes
+ And more

Screenshots:

The main window Linux/GTK2	Cactus Jukebox on WindowsXP

Download Cactus Jukebox (Ubuntu .deb (both 32 and 64 bit), openSUSE .rpm and Windows .exe) | via ubuntu tips

How To Install Windows 7 From An USB Stick

There are various reasons for wanting to install Windows 7 from an USB drive. For instance, you may own a netbook which doesn't come with a DVD/CD-ROM.

To install Windows 7 from an USB stick (drive), we must firstly prepare the USB stick. For this, follow the steps below:

Go to Start > Run and enter: cmd.exe and in this window, type the following commands:

1. Diskpart
2. List Disk
3. Select Disk 1 (Replace 1 with number reflecting your USB Drive)
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32 quick
8. assign

Now, a drive letter reflecting the drive should appear. Copy the files from the DVD to the USB Stick (Simply drag and drop in Windows Explorer).
If you get errors along the way, simply remove the drive and repeat the process.

In order to boot from the USB stick, you need to modify the boot order in the BIOS of your computer. Accessing the BIOS menu depends on your machine. When you are done installing Windows 7, revert the setting to always boot from the hard disk.