On exFAT, NTFS and SD Cards
One of the things that always irked me was the fact that NTFS partitions are not mounted by default when you login to your desktop – I usually run dual boot systems, so I have files on NTFS partitions that are accessible by both operating systems. So I need them mounted at all times – fortunately ntfs-config is a good tool that does exactly that; you install it, and you can configure how you want these partitions mounted. If you need a more in-built way of doing things, you have to load the Disks application and do it from there – I prefer the old fashioned way 🙂
One thing that was missing though, was exfat support – you know, the format all SD cards you use in tablets, smartphones etc. have. I wanted to copy some MKV files to my SD card, so I can watch them in my tablet, but the card wasn’t recognised when I tried to mount it. After googling it, I realised that the support isn’t there by default, you have to add it. So I did exactly that – opened up my trusty Terminal and typed:
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install fuse fuse-exfat exfat-utils
After that, it was all peaches; I could see the card just fine and add files to my heart’s content. I sure wished there was an easier way to configure this things though, I am not sure people with little experience would be able to pull it off.
Work and VPNs
While I was doing all that things, toying with Linux Mint that is, it was already late and I was about to call it a day. That’s when I got a call from work – a server had crashed and they needed me to login remotely and fix it. In order to access my work’s internal network, we use a VPN to access Watchguard Firebox, the company’s Firewall. Under Windows, all I had to do was to use a Watchguard application, which allows me to setup a VPN and connect to the corporate network via SSL. Obviously, such a thing does not exist for Linux, so I had to improvise. Where, improvise, see Google Search 🙂 Thankfully, I didn’t have to search much; it seems that all that I needed was to install OpenVPN from the repositories, and use the in-built VPN creation features of Gnome to make a connection. Of course there’s a how-to involved, and you can find it here, but thankfully it’s not very complicated and can be easily done.
So this actually went better than expected; meaning that instead of using the command-line openvpn client to connect, I created the VPN connection from the Gnome Network Manager, fired it up, and indeed, I was able to connect to my company’s VPN without any problems. Fortunately, Radmin Viewer also works fine with Wine, so I didn’t have any problems accessing several internal servers that require it. I was curious though, because Remmina, which is the tool preinstalled by Ubuntu to access remote desktops (either by using RDP, VNC or SFTP/SSH) was not installed by default here. That’s easily fixable though, so I didn’t give it much thought.
Sharing with Windows / Samba
You know what they say; sharing is caring, and in a home network with three PCs, a laptop running Vista (don’t ask), a Home Theatre PC running Windows 7 and a Home PC running Windows 8, I had to make sure the other PCs could read my MP3 and Video collection, which exists on my 3TB disk. I still have memories trying to configure Samba correctly on Linux PCs – some Windows PCs would see the Linux machine, some wouldn’t, some others would but wouldn’t be able to access any files. Fortunately, those days are long gone – all I had to do, was to add one line to the fine /etc/samba/smb.conf, and that’s because the OS told me about it. Meaning, I right clicked on a folder, selected Sharing Options, and tried to give full access to the Public folder to all users of the network, even those that don’t have a local account. I performed the change as root (sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf), restarted the service and voila!
Ok, almost voila. The other PCs couldn’t see my computer on the network. I then decided to check out whether there were some more configuration options for the networking to… well… work. So I came across Personal File Sharing (it’s in Preferences), and I thought, here we are! Not quite:
So I decided to NOT google it immediately, but give Mint the benefit of the doubt. Yes, I actually clicked on the Help button. The result was a page on Mint’s website, giving me links to download a PDF in various languages. Yes, you’ve guessed it, that PDF was a generic user guide for Mint, that had nothing to do with the problem I was facing. So Google to the rescue one more time. Apparently, that dialog has nothing to do with sharing files, it needs a light version of Apache web server to work, and it’s totally misleading – people in the Ubuntu forums also have that problem. You can find a very thorough walkthrough here of what I did and trust me, it’s not for the faint of heart. But then again, you are already used to getting your hands dirty with the OS, so don’t complain.
