Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Recently I had the rare opportunity to tackle a serious problem with a Macbook Pro. For some reason an update locked up midway through and the owner had no choice but to shut the laptop off abruptly after it had been siting on for several hours not making any progress in the update and with no available option to cancel/revert.  I suspect the hard drive is beginning to wear out and failed to read/write something important, locking the system up completely.  When they attempted to power their system on next time it remained stuck with the startup screen (Apple Logo with the rotating “gears” below).

Apple includes a copy of their OS on discs you can boot from to run the included  Disk Utility. This checks the file system for integrity issues, file permission errors and corrects them for you. Unfortunately doing this did not solve this particular problem and the laptop remained stuck. Even booting into MacOS’s “Safe Mode” (by holding down SHIFT right after the startup chime is heard) didn’t work.

Most guides I’ve found on the Internet will tell you to send the system to an Apple Expert at this point. While there is a slim chance they might be able to revert the changes or correct the problem that’s causing a system to lockup while booting, an alternative approach is to do what is termed a “destructive recovery”, where the hard drive is erased and the OS reinstalled on a clean slate so to speak. Before you do that of course you’ll want to pull your own personal files/data off the drive. You can’t do this with the Disk Utility provided by the MacOS install discs, but there is another “utility” that’s totally free to download that you can do this with: Ubuntu Linux.

What You Need

1.  A blank CD
2.  Another computer to burn that CD with
3.  Ubuntu Linux ISO image file
4.  An external hard drive (preferably one that’s formatted to Windows NTFS; I will explain why in a moment)

Burning Ubuntu to a CD

First, visit the link to Ubuntu’s website.  Click the Get Ubuntu button and follow the steps to download the 32-bit version of Ubuntu.  You’ll be asked to download a large (about 700MB) ISO image file.  Once downloaded, you need to burn this file to a CD.  If you are burning this CD with another Mac you can follow this guide that will show you how to use the built in Disk Utility app to burn the Ubuntu ISO file you have to download from www.ubuntu.com.  And if you are burning with Windows, there is a “Show Me How” button you can click on at Ubuntu’s download page that will show you how to use a program called InfraRecorder to burn the ISO file.

Booting Ubuntu On Your Mac

Once the CD is burnt you will need to boot from it.  I have found the best way to do this on a Mac is to turn the system on and immediately after you hear the classic “chime” sound, hold down the Option key on your keyboard.   (Tip:  If you are using a Mac with a Windows keyboard hold down ALT instead.  Also, if you need to eject a disc from the system, hold down F12).  Eventually you will see this:

Double-click on the CD that says “Windows”.  We know it’s not actually Windows, but Mac doesn’t know any better… or Ubuntu isn’t presenting itself correctly.  Anyhooo…

If all goes well (and I can’t promise that it will but it did for me) you will see the Ubuntu boot screen appear (pictured above) with the purple background.  Please be patient as this is a slow process; loading an entire OS from a CD is not a quick and snappy ordeal.  Eventually Ubuntu will load up the Ubuntu installer screen.  At this point click “Try Ubuntu”.

It will proceed to load the rest of Ubuntu Linux right off the disc.  Eventually you will see something like this:

Accessing Your Data

First, we need to browse the hard drive inside the Mac.  You’ll do this using the Places menu.  When you click Places, you will see a list of several common folders like Home Folder, Pictures, etc.  Look past those in about the middle of the list and you should see an item called Macintosh HD.  We will mount it by clicking on it in the places menu.  (Note: It would also be a good idea to repeat this step to mount the external hard drive or media you intend to copy your data on to at this time, just to get mounting it out of the way).  The next thing you’ll see is the contents of the Macintosh HD volume.  Unfortunately there is a lot of data in this drive that you won’t be able to access/read right away due to file ownership and permissions.  But there’s a way around that.

You need to gain full administrative access to the hard drive so you don’t have to worry about file permissions getting in the way.  It is also recommended that you use an NTFS formated external hard drive for this because it will help avoid further file permission issues later down the road when you move your data back.  (If you use a Linux/Unix/Mac formatted external drive the files you copy are going to change owners from you to the Linux superuser account which means you’d have to change ownership of every file after copying them, so it’s just easier to scrape all those attributes off the files by sending them to an NTFS filesystem which does not store those descriptors).

Gaining Full Administrative Access To Your Files

To gain administrative access to the hard drive and browse the contents, click Applications>Accessories>Terminal in the upper left.  A new window will appear with a black background and white text.  From here type:

gksu nautilus

…and press the Enter key.  This will open the Nautilus file browser as the SuperUser (aka, “root” user).  It is exactly the same window you saw open when you mounted the drives from the Places menu, but keep in mind that this new file browsing window that has appeared is the ONLY window with root access.  Any others that were already open are still running at the standard user level, so you can’t drag files from the super users browser to any others unless you open a second terminal window and start a second instance of Nautilus in the same manner.  But it’s pretty easy to do all the browsing you need with the one window using the Edit>Copy and Edit>Paste menu options.

Note: The rooted instance of Nautilus will only let you browse volumes that have already been mounted.  If you’ve not already accessed your external hard drive or the Macintosh HD hard drive using the Places menu as mentioned earlier, do so now and then close or minimize those windows to get them out of the way, leaving the super-user instance of Nautilus running up front.

Copying Your Data

Once you’ve started the Nautilus file browser as the super-user, you can click on “Macintosh HD” in the left hand side of the Natilus window to begin browsing your hard drive.  For most users the most important data is going to be stored in the Users folder.  Simply scroll through the Macintosh HD hard drive to find a folder called Users.  If you browse through it a little you will quickly be familiar with the files you are looking at inside the Users folder.  You just need to copy everything out to the external hard drive.  To makes things simple and quick it’s easy to just copy and paste the entire Users folder to an external hard drive (as mentioned, NTFS drives are recommended purely to make the copying of data back to the computer easier after the OS has been reinstalled).

Also note: Stopping after the Users folder alone may not be adequate enough for some advanced users who may have data stored in other folders, such as the /var folder if the system was an Apache server.  Details about where your production/business critical data is auto-saved should be researched from the developers/publishers of said software or their respective README.txt/help documentation before proceeding to format your hard drive as all data will be lost after formatting.  In almost all cases everything will be in the Users folder, but fair warning to you if you are not certain.  For more information, refer to this official help article about application data storage locations.  By the way, the ” ~/ ” folder they refer to is shorthand for “your home folder”, which is inside the Users folder; you will find that everything they list is stored somewhere in there so you should be good with not copying anything else.

Reinstalling Mac OS

Now with all the user data backed up on an external hard drive you can restart the system with your original Mac OS install discs and proceed to use the Disk Utility to erase and re-format the hard drive and then proceed with installing the OS on a fresh partition.  Just press that Option key again to bring up the boot menu and boot from the MacOS install disc 1.  I would strongly recommend searching for and installing any and all available updates available for the OS and software before moving data back to the computer.

Moving Your Data Back

I have found that moving data back isn’t going to be as simple as moving the entire Users folder at once because Mac doesn’t like to let you merge folders.  You will be able to copy and paste the files and folders in groups to get everything back to where it was originally.  Alternatively you can use this tool called Folder Merge for Mac to help you copy all your files and folders back into place while skipping the ones that can’t be overwritten in their place.

If all goes well, you should be able to backup the data from your Mac and reinstall the OS in a matter of about 3 hours, most of which is a just a matter of sitting and waiting for things to finish.

Troubleshooting:  What if the drive isn’t shown?

In newer versions of Ubuntu (verions 11.04 and newer) the new Unity desktop interface is used, so there is no Places menu to open up.  However, you can still open your Nautilus file browser by clicking on the Home Folder icon.  Once open, look along the left side of the screen to see if your drive is shown among the other popular locations.

If it is not shown it may be necessary to mount the drive manually via a terminal window.  To open a terminal in Ubuntu 11.04 or later, click the Ubuntu button at the top of your dock bar to open the search panel and type in “Terminal”.  You’ll see the shortcut for Terminal appear which you can just click on to open up a terminal/command prompt.

Once the terminal is open you’ll want to get a list of the drives Linux is able to see.  To do this, type in the command:

sudo fdisk -l

The output will look something like this:

Starting at the top Linux is telling me that it sees an 80 gigabyte sized hard drive and has called the drive /dev/sda.  Within that hard drive are three partitions, called /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5.  Below that we see there is a second 2000 gigabyte sized external hard drive and it has been called /dev/sdb, with only one partition called /dev/sdb1.  If we were looking at a Mac we’d likely only care about /dev/sda partitions and would only be interested in mounting whichever of these partitions is the largest.  You can quickly determine which is the largest of them all by checking under the Blocks column.

Once you’ve determined which partition is the largest we need to mount it.  For the sake of example, lets pretend that /dev/sda1 needs to be mounted.  Before we can do that we need to create a temporary placeholder folder for this partition to be aliased with after mounting.  To create an empty folder on your desktop called “temp” you would type:

mkdir ~/Desktop/temp

(Note: all linux terminal commands are case-sensitive).  Now we can mount /dev/sda1 into this temp folder with the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 ~/Desktop/temp

You can close or minimize the terminal window at this point and find the folder we created called temp on your desktop and open it.  Within should be the contents of your Mac hard drive, and you can now begin copying data from there into an external hard drive or other external media.  When you are finished it’s easiest to use the shut down menu in the top-right corner to shut the computer down (which will eject the disk for you).  If you were successful at extracting your data the next step would be to boot from your MacOS disc and proceed with using the Disk Utility to remove/format the existing partition(s) on your Mac’s hard drive, create a new partition and install MacOS on top.  I would recommend disconnecting your external hard drive before doing this so you don’t risk deleting your external hard drives partition by accident.

Good luck!

I’ve recorded a new screencast introducing Ubuntu 10.10. This video gives beginner Ubuntu users a brief tour of the operating system, and covers installing updates, proprietary drivers, customizing appearance, and installing software via the Ubuntu Software Center as well as with downloaded *.deb files, all in less than 10 minutes.  Enjoy!

Preamble:   The techniques described in this guide are intended for educational purposes and should not be used to bypass copyright restrictions or download copyrighted material without consent from the respective owners/licensees.  In the below example I use a track by Nine Inch Nails for this demonstration for two reasons:

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

This tutorial will show you how to setup a program called PS3mediaserver which will allow you to share your multimedia files with your PlayStation 3 over a local area network.

Commands and links mentioned:

• sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg mplayer vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras
• http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/downloads/list

This tutorial will show you how to share a folder in Ubuntu with a Windows virtual machine running inside Virtualbox. Make the video full-screen to enjoy it in HD quality.

I was just browsing Ubuntu Forums recently and someone wanted to get a second opinion to see if it were indeed true that Linux doesn’t need anti-virus software.  I humbly obliged them with my own answer on the matter:

You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.

So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.

The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.

Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.

EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement:  The User.  A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website  that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*).  Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow.  I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it.  Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).

There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems.  Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed.  So that’s one scenario.  You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.

Several months ago I bought my girlfriend a laptop to use for school and replaced the Operating System that came with it with Ubuntu. She likes it but feels that it’s kind of an inconvenience to have to type in her account password to apply the latest software updates. Further, it’s also a hassle to even be made aware that there are updates available to be installed in the first place. When the Update Manager would pop up she’d exclaim, “Ugghh! I just did this yesterday.” So I decided to find a way for Ubuntu to apply ALL updates silently in the background without even making the user aware they were being applied.

Step one:

First you need to click System -> Administration -> Software Sources. On the updates tab make sure “Check for updates: ‘Daily’” is set and “Install security updates without confirmation” is set. Then close this window.

Step two:

Open a terminal window and paste in the following command:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

This will open a file in your text editor. In that file is a section that looks like this (which will vary slightly, depending on the version of Ubuntu you are using):

Step three:

Remove the slashes “//” from the next to last line, like this:

That’s it!

Save and close the file and then restart your system. From now on all updates for Ubuntu will attempt to install in the background automatically without any intervention required by the user. You won’t even know they are being applied unless a system restart is required as it is after kernel updates.

However, if you feel it’s necessary, you can have the system automatically restart itself if one is required.  This is achieved by removing the slashes at the bottom of the same text file, in the portion which pertain to auto-restarting, and changing the value at the end of the line from “false” to “true” to enable it.  But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

DISCLAIMER:  Something’s broke with the latest version of Ubuntu (11.10) and adjusting these settings as shown below don’t seem to work like they’re supposed to, and I’ve not yet found a work around.  So this guide may not work at all for you.  I will update it as news emerges about this.

——

VNC is the default remote-desktop protocol for Ubuntu Linux and it can be used by anyone to access their home PC while they are away from home.  Anyone who has used VNC and also has a router are likely familiar with setting up a port-forward rule in their router so that all inbound traffic destined for port number 5900 is sent to the correct/desired PC.  But what if you wanted to be able to do this with multiple PCs on a home network and not have to relay through one PC in order to access another one?

You can do this by setting Ubuntu’s default VNC server (vino) to listen on an alternative port number.  Up until recently, changing this port number was as easy as clicking on an Advanced tab in your Remote Desktop preferences window.  For some reason, this new panel was removed after a more recent update so changing this port number became a bit of a mystery.

I’ve not done any hard digging to find out why this panel was removed, but my guess is they actually rolled the version of vino back to something older to temporarily avoid a known bug encountered with vino on servers that had Compiz enabled.  I’m sure they’ll get it fixed eventually.

In the mean time, this setting is still easy to change if you know where to go.   Here’s what you need to do:

1. Open your Gnome Configuration Editor.  You can do this quickly by pressing Alt-F2, then typing gconf-editor into the box and pressing Enter.
2. In the editor, click Desktop>Gnome>Remote Access.

Once you get to this point, you’ll notice several VNC related settings on the right half of the Gnome Configuration Editor window.  Edit the mentioned values as follows:

alternative_port: In the line that says “Alternative Port” near the top double-click the 5900 to edit and change it to the desired port number you’d like to use.  After you’ve changed this,  right-click on this value again to make a pop-out menu appear and then click “Set As Default”.

authentication_methods:  This value should say (or mention) “[vnc]“.  It might say [none] and that’s okay, but you still need to add “vnc”, so double-click on the value to bring up an edit window and click the Add button.  It will ask you to supply a name/value, so just type in “vnc” (no quotes) and press enter.   You’ll end up with a value of [none,vnc].  I don’t know if it matters or not, but at this point I edited the values further so that vnc was listed above none, so it ended up looking like [vnc,none] in the end.  My thinking behind this has to do with the way some blacklists (TCP/IP for example) delimit their endings.  That’s a whole other blog post…

enabled: There is a solitary check box by this parameter.  Make sure its box has a check-mark inside of it.

use_alternative_port:  Also make sure this parameter has a check mark in it’s box as well.  Also, right-click on this value and then click “Set as Default” for it as well.

Now close Gnome Configuration Editor.

That’s it!  Restart the computer to get the settings to take effect.

You should also do one or more of the following:

• Use Firestarter to add a rule allowing inbound traffic on the new port number you specified above so that your host firewall doesn’t block it.  (Click Applications>Add/Remove and search for Firestarter to install it if you don’t have it already).
• Set a new port-forwarding filter up in your router to direct inbound traffic on that new port towards the PC you just modified (duh!)

To connect to a VNC server on an alternative port, you just add a colon and the new port number to the end of the host address.  Lets pretend the new number if 5901 instead of 5900.  You would type the host address like this:

• 192.168.1.10:5901
• dyndnshostname.homeip.net:5901
• ubuntu.local:5901
• I’ve also used a 1 instead of 5901 and it works.  For 5902 you could probably use just the number 2 by itself, and so on.

And that’s all there is to it!

(Special thanks to this blog post for showing me how to get this working finally).

About 2 months ago or so I read the tutorial in the above link to help get my fingerprint sensor setup in Ubuntu.  The problem was that it left one simple instruction out:  Paste a line of  text AT THE TOP of a config file (and not at the bottom like I did).  The mistake has been corrected and I’m happy to say my finger print sensor is working in Ubuntu 9.04.  Based on the directions from the the link above, here’s how to set it up (these instructions are meant for version 9.04; see the above link for instructions for 8.04 and 8.10):

Step 1: Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal and paste in the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install aes2501-wy fprint-demo libfprint0 libpam-fprint

Step 2: Still in Terminal, paste in the following text:

sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/common-auth

This will open a text file called common-auth in Gnome Text Editor.  (Here’s where I screwed up last time).

Step 3: If you want to use both the password and the fingerprint to authenticate (more secure) add at the bottom:

auth required pam_fprint.so

If you want to use either the fingerprint or the password to authenticate (i.e. completely bypass the password through the fingerprint) the following string must be placed at the top of the file:

auth sufficient pam_fprint.so

Once pasted, save and close the file.

Step 4: Press Alt-F2, type “fprint_demo” without the quotes and press enter.

This will launch the fingerprint utility that you can use to enroll the finger you wish to use for future authentications.

That’s basically it.  Special notes:

• If you happen to screw something up in the config file by mistake and lock yourself out of your PC by accident, you can boot into Recovery Mode from the GRUB boot menu to access a root command prompt and edit the above config file using nano (nano /etc/pam.d/common-auth).
• Not all login screens are compatible with this feature.
• To test your finger print in fprint_demo, click on the verify tab at the top and use the verify button to compare an enrolled fingerprint to another finger (or the same finger) and you’ll see the difference.

As of Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve noticed the following quirks:

• Often you will not see an on-screen prompt asking you to swipe your finger across the sensor if the system is waiting for it.  Examples include the login screen, running Update Manager or Synaptic Package Manager, and otherwise most other programs that required your password to run them.
• The only actual on-screen requests I’ve seen so far is when you are unlocking a screen-saver, or are running a program with sudo privileges in a terminal window.

About two years ago I went looking through Ebay trying to find a cool sticker/case-badge with the Ubuntu logo on it.  I had just purchased a new laptop, had installed Ubuntu on it with Compiz Fusion effects running, and was quite happy and proud about it.  So I wanted to get a sticker to replace the “Built For Microsoft Windows XP” sticker that was on my laptop.  I was fortunate enough to find this little guy, on sale from China, for about $5 dollars after shipping:

That’s the original auction photo, and not only did it arrive looking as good as it did above, but a second sticker with the Linux penguin mascot also came along with it, which I didn’t expect.  So I was quite happy with what I purchased.

That laptop bit the dust about 3 weeks ago and I’ve since replaced it with a new laptop.  Again, I wanted to get a cool case badge like the one above.  But had some trouble finding it.

A lot of people would tell me, “Go to System76.com!  They’ll send you a few badges for free.”  I did that.  Here’s what I got:

It’s thin, cheap looking and with a solid white backing instead of a thicker, shinny alluminum backing.  I’m not really complaining though; it’s nice that System76 will send these to you for free by just asking for some.  But you get what you pay for, and they don’t offer nicer quality stickers either.  So the search continued.

Then I recently discovered another place online.  I think I was using google’s formerly named “Froogle” online shopping search engine, and discovered a site called ZeReason.com.  And to my delight, I found they sell good quality stickers at one hell of a discount (10 badges for $5.00 shipped)!

Well those stickers were ordered about a week ago and they just arrived today.  Here’s what they looked like:

And here’s one on my laptop after I ripped off the XP sticker and replaced it with the new Ubuntu sticker:

So if you’re looking to totally nerd out your Ubuntu laptop or PC, then stop on by www.zareason.com.  I’m quite pleased with the quality of these stickers and you will be too. Сайт знакомств