The world of Linux. I found Linux Mint! First Week

Well with the passing of XP I have been looking at a alternative to Windows 7 and so on for our computers at the school. We have a lot of good old working Dell Machines that just won't cut it on Windows 7 or even 8(if we could get the teachers to go for 8 even). So I looked into Linux. Mainly I started with Lubuntu a trimmed down version of the very popular Ubuntu version of Linux OS. While I am having trouble with getting Networking down I like using it so much I bought a used Laptop and put another type of linux on it for more powerful computers.
I have been using a distribution(a set of programs and software that make up a Linux package) called LinuxMint 17 Cinnamon.  I have been using LinuxMint a little over a week now and as a Computer Tech I would like to do a little review. Over all I really like it. It is very different but yet the same. I have set mine up to look like my favorite interface so far which is Mac OS X. I have a dock at the bottom which works the same way and I am still looking for a menu back to act like Mac. The menu they have work a lot the same way as a start menu which you don't get with Windows 8. All my hardware works with Linux and didn't take much to get working other than my Wifi card which required a extra install that came from Ubuntu side of things. I didn't have to do much to get it working though. I installed on a HP Compaq 6715b by the way. I did have to download my brother printer driver and install it via a debian package but I didn't even need a install disk to find my printer on the local wifi. It picked it up very easily.
As far as every day use most everything works good. I get on facebook watch youtube, and surf the web in most cases faster than my Windows 7 Laptop with better specs. LinuxMint is a little different as it has extras installed for helping with Flash video which is not fully supported by Ubuntu. 
The main problem I have had and it hasn't hurt me to too much is installing software. The Software Manager is great for installing most anything you need such as office programs and what not. I haven't been able to get Open office to work because I don't know how. Installing software other than that on the manager is not easy for New to linux people. There are things called .deb packages that are easy to install, just about any one that worked on a mac or windows computer will be able to do but files with a .tar or .gz must be done with help from the command line or some packages you don't even download the file the traditional way you do it via the apt-get command in the terminal.
That is a big thing in my opinion just for the fact new users and users with little idea of how to even use a command line will steer away from Linux unless installing software becomes easier.
Other than that I really love my little Linux Mint computer. It is fast even on my lower hardware and can work with just about anything. I would really recommend it to any one looking for a linux alternative and if you can have some patience to learn the commands which aren't that hard after you use the a a few times. I hope this helps some one and I hope to be doing some updates on this later on.

Kids Live Safe! WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW! Don't pay for something that's FREE!!!

I don't write like this often and you may never see this on this blog again. I really hope you don't because this it truly sad. I got a ad for this in my e-mail today and after thinking about it I clicked on it to just to see what is going on. I thought it might be a nice website to look this kind of thing up and it might be but I was not about to pay for their service for something that if you just take a little extra time you find out is free public records online!
Kids Live Safe is (or claims to be) a search engine for looking up Registered sex offenders. I got the part where it asked for a credit card and then just wanted to cry about the state of our world. They show you a lot of fancy loading screen about loading pictures, loading arrest records and so on but at the end of they day they are looking up public info that you can find on other sites. They use fear inducing words like "do you know if there is a offender near you" and are your kids safe. Heck the website is kidslivesafe.com !!!! They do advertise other services like background check and what not and maybe those services are good and worth it. The only thing is I have a problem with them using fear to sell a product that is FREE for public consumption. Yes they might have more detailed info and great pictures but at the end of the day all you really need to know is the address. I have that!
http://www.fbi.gov/scams-safety/registry is named poorly but on this site you will find a list of all 50 states links to their databases. The one for Texas my home state can bring up a list and a map view based on zip. In the map view which I used after clicking on a few legal agreements to use this only for public and not private use(like business endeavours) then you can view all this for free. I assume most states have the same set up. I get a pic, know address, weight, height, and some other stats. FREE!! the law requires this to be FREE. Kids live safe might have a easier website and some extra features and thats cool but don't try to scare people into thinking that you are the only way to get this info. That is all sorry but this is my rant I want safe kids as much as the next guy, I work for a SCHOOL. I pray that this never happens to you, or your family so please by all means stay informed. Fell free to repost this, or share with others.

Dell Optipelx Gx 755 unresponsive usb after restart no keyboard or mouse?

Had this one happen today in our computer lab of all places. This is a Gx755 Full tower. This is more a business machine but some home consumers might have one so this is for every one that might have one.
They turned all the 755s on this morning and one of the had no keyboard or mouse. Did the standard unplug and plug into a different usb port to no avail.
Restarted the computer which did nothing.
Was able to use keyboard to hit f2 to get into bios and confirm that all usb ports were turned on.
I did some research and found out that Dell sets a side the two ports beside the Ethernet adapter to use primarily for keyboard and mouse. I plugged them both into those ports. Shut it down again, then unplugged it. I pressed the power button for 15 seconds to drain any phantom energy(energy that was collected in computer and can help save bad settings some times) then plugged it in and powered it on.
It booted up to windows 7 and keyboard and mouse worked just fine like there had never been a problem before.

I hope this helps if you are having this issue and its confusing to you as it was to me. Thanks for reading and keep geeky.

GX Optiplex 760 Green Blinking lights no power info!

Hi again;
This is going to be for the more advanced people and any one that might have a GX 760 Small Form Factor.
I am writing this because after THREE bleeping 760 have just died in the last month. Thats a lot for our campus and I am afraid more will follow. I am writing this to let tech and people know what I found out.
The symptoms:
You come in in the morning  (always seems to happen at night) and the 760 is off. You hit the power button but nothing. You kneel down to look at it and see 2 leds blinking on the bottom bar. Network and HD I think.
Possible Temporary cure.
If this happens with all 3 it has been the power supply. I am not saying this is the only thing but with ours it was PSU. A temp trick that worked on two of them(didn't think to try it on the first one) is the 760 SFF has a PSU test button on the back next to the power plug with a LED light above it. Little black button, Pressing this will test the power supply if green it "should be ok"
Press it and if you are lucky after holding it down for about 20 seconds the computer will stay running and boot up like it should. After doing some research I found it can be other things like the DVD-R driver or hard drive that set this off and just by changing the hd or unplugging the Disk Drive will allow the computer to come on and work normally.
Ours didn't do that so there is that.
If yours does come on back up what you can. The first one that we did this on lasted 3 days and then died again for the last time. The first 2 we have replaced the power supply in and they are working just fine now. This last one we are hoping to get a power supply in before it keels over.
I really hope this helps some one and I hope you have more luck then us but ours died or are more than likely going to to die. If you have some of these watch them. I don't know what causes it because they have been from 3 completely different places. One was a librarian's computer that did internet and scanned books, another a secretary, and the last one was from a classroom where the kids rarely get on the computers. They just go and dell doesn't seem to have a answer for it right now.

I really hope this helps some one out and good luck to you.

My view on clean up utilites for Mac and Windows.

Hello again;
I got asked this question by a friend the other day and thought I would share what I told him with you.
What clean up program for mac should I use on my Macbook Air? The answer really is you shouldn't need one at all.

For the most part Macs run perfectly. They don't have a lot of problem with getting junk files and what not and really if you do any research most clean up programs for mac are smoke a mirrors. They tell you these wonderful things they do but in reality they only do what any normal person could do any way. There is really only 3 things you can do to speed up a mac and if those don't work sorry to say there is might be a hardware issue if those don't get the results you desire.

Windows on the other hand does need these programs. Windows by is own creation is not a very efficient system. It leaves files around after a uninstall and doesn't delete old registry errors. And if you don't know what you are doing or deleting in a registry you can be asking for some trouble for sure. So by all means there is a need for these programs for Windows.

Thanks being said you do need some sort of antivirus for Mac. You maybe thinking wait that is one of the selling points it doesn't get viruses. This is some what true. Virus are rare on macs but right now its only because they aren't as popular as windows. And you can look it up online if you want and you can see reports made for the rare Mac bugs shall we say.

I am also working on a easy guide for how to maintain your mac for those mac owners and hoping to put that out pretty soon. Only few things you can do but they are kind of hard to get too but easy to do once you find the area you need to be in. Thanks again for reading and stay geeky my friends.

How to make default Icons for all users on Mac OS X 10.6 or later

Hello;
This is for the more advanced users I am afraid. I ran into this problem at my campus. I needed to have a set of Icons ready for for students so they could log into a program called Reading Counts. They could navagate to it via web but getting 5th grades to do that 20 times over 8 times a day was a bit to much i should think. This is a guide on how to make icons available to every student aka user on your mac. This is also by no means the only way it is just the way I found and figured out and it works for me. I hope this will help any one looking for how to do this.
This is also from my personal notes so formating may be a bit rough I will try to clean it up some.

First: You need to get the icons you want to give out and copy them such as shortcuts and web short cuts. 

Then in finder click go and go to folder and type /System then click library, then go to userTemplates select it and hit command+I to get info. Drop down permissions, and by putting in admin password give your self permission to read and write. 

Then after that go into it and look up english.lprog then go to desktop and do the same thing as before to give your self permission. 

Now you are at the default desktop. Any icons or shortcuts you put in here with show up on the desktop of any new first time user. 

To make sure this works with all new users delete all user files by going into finder, clicking macbook hard drive click users and move all user files to the trash except any that need to be saved, shared, administrator, and the current user. 

The next time some one logs on it will show those icons.

I really hope this helps it took me about 1.5 hours to do this on 25 mac book unibodies. I am not the fastest person in the world either and I could only do 2 at a time in front of me. I really do hope this helps some one it sure did me.

MobiView from eInstructions Pen Not working

Hello all as I promised something for the more tech inclined people. I wanted to write a short post about a issue I had with a teacher at my campus using the MobiView annotation pad. These things are really cool when used with a projector and our macs they allow a teacher to remotely control the screen as if she had it in her hand. But you most likey know that and why you are reading this is because it is not working and you want it to. Well we had this happen to 2 pens at once from two of our systems. We were on with customer support and after 2 hours they said it must be the pad sorry it out of warranty please send it back and we will charge you to fix it. My director wouldn't tell me how much so it was bad lol.
Long story short in both of them it was the battery in the pen!!!. Its a AAAA battery! Yeah I didn't know they made that size either. What had happened is the had mildly corroded and wouldn't make contact. I noticed that the pen would sometimes charge and then wouldn't when on the charging pad for it.
To get to the battery of the pen you have to push in the tab on it and then slide the back park that connects to the lanyard off  then you will see the electronics part of it. You can take the battery out and either clean it or replace it if you know where to get it. I know ebay sells them. I just cleaned this one with a screwdriver I had to scrape it clean. Put it back in and then plug it into the charging dock and it should start charging if not you have something else going on sorry:(.

I really hope this helps someone this drove the teacher, my director, and I nuts for the better part of 3 days trying to figure this out. Thanks and good luck.

Been A while

Long time. I have been very busy getting my campus ready for the start of school and ending school last school year. But I am back I am hoping to be able to post on this more regularly and keep up the good info and keep it coming. I have also had a bit of a AH HA moment and realized I may have been a bit to narrow with this blog to start with. As such I will still try to keep up my post for everyday computer users but also I think I will start typing some about my day to day at the school for those issues that other tech might be researching also. I don't want to leave any one out and as always I will allow comments to all my post. I welcome constructive criticism as well. What I mean by that if you flat out say i'm wrong but have buttkiss to back it up then that won't be looked on to well. By the same token options are welcome too. So welcome new and old readers and have a great day and enjoy!

PS I know my writing is not that great. I do make grammar errors and I am sorry but I work in computers and with English teachers but I am not a English teacher so please keep that in mind thanks.

Windows stopped support of XP! Should you be worried?

I have been getting this a lot at work. They have ended support of XP what should I do? Well here at work we are doing...nothing. Yep that is right not to worried here and I will explain why. It was estimated that 20% of current running pcs still run XP and here at my job I would say that we run about 35% over all campuses. Now the following are options and may not be truth but here is what I think. XP has been one of the most reliable operation systems in some time from Microsoft. And They don't even want to mention Vista so lots of people stuck with XP. I think there is some fear mongering going on because if you notice they have been very public on social media letting people know that they are ending support and I think that is to help sales of MS 8 which hasn't done as well as they had hoped according to investor reports.
Now as to why you shouldn't worry. It is like a lot of things with computers if you use common sense and don't go to places you shouldn't anyway you will be fine. If you are going to risky websites and I am sure we know what i mean by that XXX, or illegal software websites then you are taking that risk weather you have new security updates or not. A great example was the latest Internet Explorer bug. Yes it was bad and yes you could get your computer seriously messed up because of it BUT you still had to go to fake website that some one would have to set up and lure you too. Point is most holes and back doors are exploited when you take a risk any way.
Really with XP if you still wish to use it just remember to be safe. Don't go to those bad websites, keep your antivirus up to date, and run scans every now and then(reference my maintenance post 1, 2, 3) and you will be fine. I hope this helps you and thanks for reading. Please feel free to post if you fell differently.

Annoying Internet Explorer Trusted Site Pop Up and how to REMOVE!

Hello again. I have been having a deal of this at work and figured that there must be people out there also having this problem. The issue is that in Internet Explorer a box pops up and ask if this website is ok to allow access. This might also be confusing with those that know a little bit about the internet options because  it says that it is a trusted site but you of course don't have any trusted sites set up. Now you may want this site to never be shown or always be shown I will show you how to do both while taking down the pop up that seems to come up all the time.

First off you will need to open internet explorer and click ok on any pop ups that come up once the pop ups stop then we can begin. The directions are pretty much the same on all version of IE 8 and above with a few Graphic differences. 
1. We want to find a Gear looking Icon near the top and click on it once. After that menu is up click on "internet options" (if it is grayed out and you can't click on it ie just hasn't loaded up yet click the gear icon again and wait a few seconds then click it again to bring it up it should have loaded by then allowing you to click on the "internet Options" object).
2. A box will open and their will be tab looking things on the top that have titles. Click on the one that says security once.
3.Normally you will see 4 colored icons in a white box bellow the tabs. We want to click on the one that says "Trusted Sites"
4. There will be a button closer to the bottom the box now that says custom level. IMPORTANT for this to look right you must have "trusted sites" selected.
5. Another Box will come up with a bunch of little dots that you can change settings but we are only looking for one. About 3/4 the way down there will be one that says "Websites in less privileged web content zone can navagiate into this zone"  Prompt should be selected by default, this is why the pop up is coming up. If you want these sites to come up click the dot by "enable" if not click the one for "disable".
6. Once you have made your choice click OK at the bottom of that box to save and exit. Then click "OK" on the next box to save and exit and return to Internet Explorer. 

From now on you won't have that pop up come up any more. Thank you very much for reading this and I hope dearly that this has helped you out.

My view on Mac Books

       Recently at work we have been handed mac books for use with our campus. Being that I am school tech it is important that we start to play with them and understand them because soon all the teachers will have them and we will need to service them. I have always used pc but now I have a mac and and first I didn't know what to think but now its clear.
      Coming from a PC to a Mac can be very intimidating I understand if nothing more than the price difference.  It is truly staggering. A good starter pc cost you 300 bucks while a good mac will be nearly a grand. Why the difference well I think it is because of exclusivity. Mac doesn't give the MAC OS out to anyone. They oversee all the hardware that go into a mac and that is what you get. They don't have to worry about if it will work this or that because they know it will they already designed it to do so. So you have the keep that in mind.
      What do I think about it I love it personally.  It didn't take me long to get a hold of it. A lot of the same principles carry over. The networking is good and easy to use just like pc and wifi it just as easy as well. Also to me to UI is cleaner if that make sense. I can say on one program and look at just about anything while doing so. Most programers are doing programs for macs just as they do for pcs so I am not missing anything. Youtube plays well, my Facebook works just fine. They only internet issue I have ran into is with not having IE's activeX plugin(this plugin helps like flash to run certain internet apps.) but it can be worked around. I have MS Office which is now on mac. I could go on and on but really you just would have to play with one your self to find out what it is like. I would suggest if you can play with one at a apple store or some where that sales them or has them on demo so you can see if you will like it or not.  Also feel free to ask question to the sales people because they might know how to do the things you want it to do and adapting from PC might not be as hard as you think. This has just been a thought of the day but as soon as I save up I will be getting a personal mac for my house soon. Thanks for reading.