Fixing a broken pendrive

Hey guys, after the installation of Lucid had to install all the softwares from the beginning. It was a time consuming task, but I kinda like the idea of apt line commands of installation so I did all the installations without going to synaptic package manager. Thats what happened so far, today I’m gonna talk about what happened to me yesterday and how I fixed it.
This is the story from the beginning;
I was copying some image files to my pen drive, (its a Kingston DataTraveler 2Gb) suddenly it got ummounted during the copying process. Then when I plugged it back it didn’t work. When I do a lsusb it shows the pen drive but for sudo fdisk -l it says there is no partition table. I was so upset, and since then I was searching the web and looking for a solution. There were certain suggestions for Linux those are testdisk, gparted etc but nothing worked the worst part was it was write protected too. 😦 gparted didn’t even recognize the pen drive. I thought it was the end, even in certain ubuntu forums some users said its the end of the pen drive. I never gave up, i just kept searching, while doing that I plugged the pen to windows xp machine the same problem occurs the pen drive is available but can’t format it cos of the write protection. Then I found this article, about how to remove write protection on pen drives, but in windows that didn’t work too, but I kept on reading the comments of that article on one of those comments I found this COMMENT and that particular comment saved my life.
This is what you have to do, first download the software from this Link. Then unplug all the other usb devices except the one you need to recover or the one you want to fix. Extract the file and double click on the .exe file (ah btw you have to do this in a machine with windows xp). The software will automatically format your pen drive with fat16 file system (Format it again with ntfs or fat32 if you want).
And finally the pen drive is recovered 🙂 you are over joyed 😀
Hope this was helpful!
bye for now
Good Luck!!

~~ Rusiru Boteju ~~

The change it self – Lucid Lynx

Hey guys! hope you have already installed “Lucid Lynx” or as we all know it ubuntu 10.04. I installed Lucid few hours back, and it is definitely a change. I installed it by creating Startup Disk, it was an exciting idea for me, because I tried it out for the first time. The installation was really impressive, it took me less than 10mins (it was that fast) and I’m proud to say, from today onwards I’m totally “opensourced” (at least the operating system) and also I might install windows on virtual box in time to come (if I want it).

What I like about Lucid:
– E220 Huawei dongle works like a charm (it was not like this when I was using Karmic)
– The UI design is way cooler than the earlier editions and the window controls on the right hand side of the window border gives it a more sleek look.
– Ubuntu software center is renewed with more features.
– Gnome-terminal looks purple
– And finally the menu items are improved and more user friendly.

Terminal

Software Center

What I don’t like about Lucid:
– The indicator applet takes too much space (the space between icons are too much when comparing to the icon sizes).
– Bluetooth with phoenix bios still suck till you install omnibook module (check my post on Phoenix bios and bluetooth)

I hope the indicator applet problem will get solved soon its not that much of a big issue.

Lucid Lynx really shows that change can happen, because its that good, and when you use it you’ll realize its fast(i.e. installation, boot-up and response time).
Now I’m gonna tell you about few things you have to do after installing Lucid(there are many blog posts about that but here I’m gonna tell you what I did so far)

1. Change font sizes, the default font size is 10 but I changed it to 9.

2. Remove the panel on the bottom and install Docky
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:docky-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docky
then add more docklets change settings to make it look like what I did or as you prefer,

3. Lucid comes with Empathy as the default chat client it was the same with Karmic too but I like pidgin so I installed pidgin sudo apt-get install pidgin if you want to change the smiley theme to those smilies in yahoo messenger or MSN messenger download the file in this LINK extract it on ~/.purple/smileys then go to Preferences -> Themes -> Smiley Theme and select original – M@her and that will do the trick.

4. When it comes to twitter I use Choqok as in my previous post so to install choqok, sudo apt-get install choqok but in default Gwibber comes with Lucid.

5. I installed chrome too by downloading and installing the .deb file

Those are the major changes I did after installing Lucid Lynx.

If you are new to Linux then the best OS to use is ubuntu and also if you are new to computing then again the best OS is ubuntu that is what I recommend.

bye for now download, install and experience the change !!!!!!!

~~ Rusiru Boteju ~~