Delete, erase, shred, goodbye

I'm planning to sell off my old computer, and I wanted to find a way to make sure the hard drive is completely wiped clean.
Here in this short post is the quick way to accomplish this.
Warning to any reader. The following commands will completely wipe a drive clean. Use with extreme caution.
Boot up the system with the Ubuntu live DVD.
Find the name of the drive using fdisk by typing in fdisk -l (that's the letter L not the number 1)
My drive is called sda. If you have more than one drive connected, it may be a good idea to turn the pc off and unplug the other drives. Double and triple check that you have chosen the correct drive to format.
Enter the following to format the drive.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
To make completely sure that the drive is erased run the shred command next.
sudo shred /dev/sda
The drive will be wiped clean and ready to be partitioned. Simple and quick.

POST EDIT:
Thanks to the comments of an anonymous reader, I have been further educated on the use of the shred command. I did a bit more research and found that although shred is effective under normal conditions to clean a hard drive, I did not take into consideration the fact that this would not include the empty areas of the hard drive that may have had information previously stored there. There could also still be copies of data in RAM and the swap area as well to would not get erased.
Secure-delete, which can be found in the Ubuntu repository, will truly guarantee that your data will be wiped totally clean.
There are four commands that can be used with this tool.
srm -secure remove Removes files and directories from the hard drive
smem -secure memory wiper Goes after the data in the memory/RAM
sfill -secure free space wiper All data from free areas on drive will be erased
sswap -secure swap wiper The SWAP partition will be purged of all data with this command

Thank you to one of my readers who helped to educate me a bit more on this topic. Feel free to add a comment if you have anything else that you can add to help out.

Web Stats and desktop update

PC desktop update: I recently purchased a replacement desktop that I expect to receive next week. In the meantime, my laptop has been keeping me online and up to date with family and friends over the holidays.

I took a look at this site during the Christmas break and I was surprised by the large number of visitors that have found my site. I also see that the Statcounter stats shows several people drop by the site each day. Sorry that I don't update that often. I had originally started this site as a personal page for me to post my experiences that I wanted to document with installing and using Ubuntu. I myself have refered back to several of my own posts to remind myself of things that I have done in the past. (I must be getting older, as my memory seems to be going.)
I'd love to read some comment from any readers and visitors to this site. Has this site helped you with using Ubuntu? I'm not much of a blogger and write more for myself than anyone else, so I'd love to hear from you. I'm not sure what direction this blog will take in the future, but I would love to continue posting more often if people enjoy reading the posts that put on on this humble blog of mine.
Cheers and a Happy New Year to you all!

Death of the P4 Ubuntu desktop

My main computer, an old P4 desktop has finally died for the last time. It's been slowly failing me over the past year, with various parts being replaced, but yesterday it finally quit for good. The motherboard is fried and I won't bother repairing it. I'll be looking for a new system in the new year, so I'll have to get by with my trusty laptop. It's currently running Ubuntu Intrepid, and the only glitch is that the lcd backlight is slowly fading away. I've already replaced the lcd inverter, and now the backlight goes dim ever so often. I just have to partially close and open the laptop cover for the screen to come back on.
My desktop has 2 hard drives on it that I'll need to salvage before I get rid of it. I'll need to do full backups of both and reformat them to make sure there's no longer any personal data on them.
I was running Ubuntu on the one hard drive for quite some time now, and had it configured just right with everything running smoothly on it. I used the laptop to experiment with and to tweak settings. I'm using the laptop to log in to my blog via scribefire to post this update.
I'm glad that I discovered a great Firefox addon called Foxmarks that has allowed me to import my saved bookmarks to my laptop. I wish that I had done something similar with my passwords. I did use keepass on my computer, but unfortunately, I didn't save the backup file to a disk, so I can't access that yet. I may pick up a cheap hard drive enclosure kit so I'll be able to get at those files on my hard drive.
I'd suggest that anyone with personal files on their computer to not wait till 'tomorrow' to perform a backup. Those photos and documents can be gone in a flash, lost forever. Luckily for me, I can still access my files, but it may be a while till I can plug those drives in and backup my precious data.
Technorati Tags: ubuntu, ubucrates, p4 desktop, backup, foxmarks,

Recipe for Success

This month saw me in hospital for an unscheduled surgery. If you've never experienced a gall bladder attack before, I can only describe it as an incredibly painful experience I would never want to repeat.
Now that I'm out of hospital, I've decided to start eating a bit more healthier to avoid another hospital stay.
I've found an excellent program called Gourmet Recipe Manager that will help me achieve that.
This program has everything I'd want in a recipe storage program with more added features as well.
Gourmet allows me to import recipes from various other programs like MasterCook and Mealmaster. I used to use MasterCook with windows and have lots of recipes stored in that format, so it's great to see the import feature implemented and working well.
There is even an added bonus feature that allows you to import webpage recipes. This is an excellent feature that gives you the option to import the recipes directly from the website that you find it on. I didn't have much luck with this way of importing and found it hit and miss most of the time. Too bad, but this software is still evolving, so I'll be keeping an eye on this addon.
There are additional options that allow me to monitor nutritional data on each item and menu so that I can keep track of calories and individual stats of each item. I can customize the data by choosing from several menu options to help me fine tune the accuracy of the nutritional data being listed for each recipe.
There is also a handy shopping helper that lists items already on hand in your pantry and those items that I need to pick up on my next trip to the store. I just open up the shopping helper and drag and drop the items I already have to remove them from the list then hit print and I have a handy shopping list ready to take with me on my next shopping trip.
Adding new recipes is a breeze. Just enter each item one by one as well as the ingredient measurement and the recipe will soon be entered into the database. A photo can also be included to help make choosing recipes later.
Once your recipe database has started to grow ,there is a search feature that helps you track down to elusive recipes with options to search by title, category, cuisine, ingredient or even instructions. You can rate each recipe as well on a 5 star basis, so that you can even search for your favorites this way.
If you don't feel like typing in all your recipes by hand, and want to get started right away, do a google search for Mealmaster recipes. There are tons of recipes already online, so start those that download, import and start cooking.

Getting things done...one day soon

I've been so extremely busy this past month, that I've let this blog sit idle.
Here's a brief update of what I'm up to and what I'm thinking about for the future. I'm still using Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop, which is running extremely well and I haven't encountered any glitches at all. Tomorrow is the day of the final release.
Download and enjoy!
I'm debating making the switch from 8.04 to 8.10 on my desktop computer. I don't want to risk breaking anything and losing the data I've got stored there. I'll eventually attempt it when I've got time to do a thorough backup.
There are a few ideas and projects that I want to accomplish with Ubuntu in the near future.
I have some high definition video archived on my hard drive that I want to convert and burn to DVD one of these days. I'm not sure how easy this will be since the hi def video format is still relatively new and not so easily recognized by main stream players/editors.
I also would like to scan the transparency slides that I have stored all around my house that I took before I made the switch to digital. I'll have to reconnect my old slide scanner and capture them at the best resolution that I can for backup and for future use.
I'm working on a website for my daughters soccer team and am testing out the various html editors available in the repositories such as screem, quanta and bluefish.
Also, I'm debating taking FreeBSD out for a test drive as a friend doesn't stop taking about it. Sounds interesting and I've downloaded the iso files, but I'm still having fun with Ubuntu for now.

Happy Birthday Tux!

On October 20th Ubuntu will celebrate the 4rth anniversary of its initial release.
This month also marks the 17th anniversary of Linux. These are two small milestones, but I thought it was worth acknowledging them regardless.
This post gives me a chance to have some fun with using Gimp. I've created a simple graphic of Tux celebrating both events by hosting his own party where he spins his favorite Linux tunes. Not the best graphic that you'd be able to create using Gimp, but I'm far from being the artistic type.

Countdown to Eight-ten

 

The month is flying by quickly and it won't be long before the next version of Ubuntu will be released.
It's currently available as a beta, and I did test out Ubuntu when it was still in alpha release.
Currently, I have the Kubuntu 8.10 amd64 beta running on my laptop.
I've never been too fond of Kubuntu or KDE in the past, but I've got some new respect for this new and updated version of KDE. It really makes me seriously consider switching over to Kubuntu for the next release.
I never felt completely comfortable with previous versions of Kubuntu. Maybe at the time, I expected it to look and run more like Windows. I was told that it was more "Windows-like" than Gnome.
The new version using KDE 4.1 really impresses on first bootup. Although still in beta, the interface is very pleasing and is easily navigated. I would have prefered to see Firefox as the default browser rather than Konqueror and Thunderbird rather than Kmail, but those are personal options and easily installable.
I suspect that there will be many Ubuntu users making a permanent switch to Kubuntu once the word starts spreading about this release.