Category: IT

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Ubuntu server and desktop … and so starts another project

This could be a long post as I record my “adventures” into re-building my Viglen Genie 920 Tower system as a Linux Server running Ubuntu 20.04. Along the way I’ll also describe how I refashioned an old Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop into a Ubuntu machine looking as if it was running MacOS, as well as showing how even a small msi Wind notebook can be re-born with a change from WinXP to Ubuntu. That’s the design brief.

I’ll describe what I did with the three systems separately, although I did a lot of this concurrently.

The Dell Inspiron 1545

I found that the Dell Inspiron 1545 had a 64-bit architecture (but was it a 64-bit processor), it had 3Gb RAM installed and was running Windows Vista – it was a good candidate for a Linux installation and re-birth as a usable system.

Before I started I did a flash upgrade of the BIOS as I was unsure whether I could still do that after I’d removed the Windows Vista from the machine. I then created Bootable installers using balenaEtcher to create disk images on the iMac, a great piece of software, and produced a number of bootable USB LiveDisk images so that I could trial varieties of Ubuntu without installing them on the Windows Vista machine. I found this  article –  which Ubuntu to install – very useful, and following reading it decided I’d try Mate and Budgie. I didn’t like Budgie – too flash; but then (having determined that the laptop indeed had a 64-bit processor) went on to create a 64-bit disk image of Gnome with Ubuntu 20.04 which loads on the machine but I’m concerned that it may not be very responsive, so am thinking I may revert to an earlier (i386) version (16.04) of Ubuntu, once this exercise has finished.

There are a number of articles written on making Ubuntu desktop look like a Mac – I will try this approach first, and then this one –  “How to make Ubuntu look like Mac”,  and add a Taskbar using Plank. [Links to be inserted]

I also shelled out £16.50 for a replacement for the 1Gb RAM in one slot to upgrade the RAM to 4Gb …

and I was amazed to find that theoretically I could upgrade the machine to 8Gb (if I could source the 2x4Gb DDR2 kit RAM – which is obsolete and very expensive, so I didn’t) but I could install a small SSD as well for about £20 …

This could turn out be a great little project to create an internet machine running a limited set of software like LibreOffice.

The Viglen Genie Tower was purchased in 2009, it has a 2.66GHz i7 Intel processor, 4Gb RAM and two HDDs – one 500Gb which has Win7 and XP installed on it; and the other a 1Tb removal HDD which will be the target for the Linux server installation. Configured this way I’d hoped to have a dual-boot into either a legacy Windows environment, or to the Linux server.

Why am I doing this? A good question. The answer … if I switched the machine on, it would work – I think it had Ubuntu 14.04 installed on it –  but I’d forgotten the Linux admin passwords so couldn’t configure it – silly me!! So I think it’s about time I restored its capabilities as my back-up and development Linux server. Until I switched it on, I’d forgotten that it also had both Windows 7 and XP with software installed on it in a dual-boot configuration – so I was keen to keep that as well. It has Office 2007 installed on it – the last version of Office I could use easily and very similar to the Office 2011 I have on my iMac – still running MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) because of 32-bit compatibility issues. Having the Win installation means I can possibly upgrade the MacOS in the future – but I’m really not in a hurry to do that! [I do know about LibreOffice by the way!]

Why do I need a Linux server? Well, I could do more testing for the websites I run, I could also host websites on it – if I wanted to archive (retire) websites, and of course I could back-up my sites to it as well.

To create a server you need to install additional software to the Linux distro – I’ll be using Ubuntu – and you need to be mindful of the System Requirements. So you need to work backwards from what you want to do, to establish the minimum Ubuntu release you need to install. As essentially the machine was just going to serve files to another machine running browser software, and as there was only ever likely to be one user, the hardware requirements were going to be very low.

Ubuntu server itself has very frugal requirements, 500Mb RAM, 1GHz processor and 2.5Gb Hard Disk . It’s command-line driven, and has no Graphical User Interface (GUI). My problems with the current 14.04 installation came when I tried to create a dual-boot installation with a GUI and Server install and then forgot the passwords! So I couldn’t upgrade it, or do anything with it effectively!

The additional software I wanted to install was Samba – to allow me to transfer files from the other machines on the network to the Ubuntu server and LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP – all components needed to create a web-server. I will also be installing WordPress on it, which requires the LAMP components.

Building the Ubuntu 20.04 Server

This was straightforward in one sense. I just booted from the USB LiveDisk I’d created on the iMac using balenaEtcher and chose the Install option which is described in this article. Once I’d done that I had some problems with the GRUB loader which seemed to have been damaged by the installation of the server software, but eventually I got round these using an old 14.04 LTS LiveCD disk to Boot into Rescue mode and from there followed the instructions from this article, a real life-saver. Before reading this I had been tearing my hair out and thought I’d completely trashed the machine. I’d not anticipated that the Windows partitions would still be there – but they were!

By doing the Grub Rescue this way I found I still had the legacy installations of Windows 7 and Windows XP on the machine. A real bonus because I could try and restore some of my Windows knowledge. It was surprising just how much I could remember, as opposed to Windows 10 which I just can’t get my head around.

Samba – the next step

 

And on to LAMP

 

And finally WordPress

 

 

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How did it all start for me?

It was one of these three, I think probably the middle one …

… that kicked off my interest in computing. Of course these were very much analog mechanical calculating machines, and I never got the hang of how to use them however hard I tried in the Statistics Practical labs at UCW Aberystwyth in the period 1969-70, but they did revive my interest in mathematics which I’d had to drop as an ‘A’ Level subject, and soon after, multi-variate statistics became my focus for much of the next 10 years as I struggled to complete (#fail) a PhD.

However, when we went through the induction course and were told that we should sign-up for a course on programming in Wirth’s Algol 60, I didn’t delay. The die was cast, my future was sealed. I spent the next three years learning Fortran IV, then Dartmouth Basic (used on Teletypes) to submit jobs to the Elliot 4130, later a ICL 190x that the Computer Centre had. My data sets were so large I had to submit jobs to the Regional Computing Centre at Manchester which meant I had to work every evening to get the data set correct, then submit the job through a landline (modem connection) so that it ran through the night and returned the job the next day for me to print out the results and prepare my data set, or change the algorithm, for the next nights job. Oh happy days!!! Oh to be so young and energetic again!!!

Later when abandoning my lecturing role at a College of Education I did a MSc Computer Science conversion course at Bradford where I was given a Digital Equipment PDP 11/60 to play with and build my own Disk Operating System (Modos) using another of Wirth’s programming languages – Modula. He went on to develop Ada which was widely adopted in the defence and general scientific community. So that led me into Systems Programming.

I returned to Cardiff in 1981 at what was then South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education as Systems Programmer for their brand new Prime 500 computer and had to learn a new operating system – Primos, and new programming languages – PLP (as well as using my Fortran experience).

Latterly as computing developed and fighting for time-share and batch-processing came to be a thing of the past – much as mechanical calculating machines had disappeared – I embraced the internet in the early 1990’s. I created the first website for what had become UWIC, and had learnt a fair bit about HTML, and scripting.

It all went downhill from then on as management responsibilities took over and programming became a thing of the past. Of course I do still dabble, but really – it’s way beyond me, as my eldest son tells me on more than one occasion.

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Your first/funniest/most awkward/useful encounter with computing, and/or matters digital.

I await your contributions, which I’d like to record. We did something like this once before during Covid times on Zoom, in 2025, and several of us wrote “our encounters” up for Thought grazing.

I wrote the following post …

My first encounter with computers

We had a number of other contributions, from Margaret …

My first encounter with computers

… from David Hughes …

My first encounter with computers

… from Paul de Guess …

My first encounter with computers

… and from Renee …

My first encounter with computers

There were many other amusing and interesting contributions, so we felt it worthwhile to kick the new year off with a trip down memory lane. Enjoy.

Here’s the audio recording. I’m afraid the transcript is far from perfect, and life is too short to go in and edit it …

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Apple Trade In Scheme

I had an Apple MacBook Air. I bought it early in the lockdown year 2020. At the time, I bought the base model with just 256 Gb of storage. I decided that I could probably get around that limitation simply by storing things in my Apple Cloud. For a while, that appeared to work. Then a few weeks ago I decided to find out how much actual storage I had left available. I’d actually used nearly 200 Gb.

It was then that I discovered that Apple operated a trade in scheme. It works like this. You log on to the Trade In website and provide the details of your device; serial number and the state of its general condition. The then give you an indication of the estimated value. I was offered £275. Considering that I’d made good use of this laptop for about five years, I felt that was a good deal.

Problem was, until then, I really hadn’t thought of getting a new computer. Perhaps about two years in the future was my thinking. However, if my laptop was worth £275 now, I really didn’t think it would be worth that much in two years time.

I’d heard so many good things about the Apple Mac Mini that I decided that this might be for me. It dawned on me that although I’d bought a laptop five years ago, I had never ever taken it out. I had it connected to a large monitor. I also had Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I really didn’t need a laptop.

You start the Trade-In process by filling in an on-line form. Basically, you get asked about the device’s condition. Any scratches, bumps or bulges, that sort of thing. From this, you get awarded a valuation. If you accept, in a few days time, you receive a delivery; a box to pack your device and some instructions on how to proceed.

This isn’t just limited to Apple devices. They accept other brands but they only pay out in the form of an Apple gift card.

I had to create a back-up using something called Time Machine. This, supposedly creates a file containing all of your documents and settings from your old machine. This can then be plugged in to your new machine, which will then set itself up just like your old machine. Well. We’ll see.

I then had to re-set my laptop to day one, thus deleting everything from my old laptop. After that, I packed up the laptop using the provided box and took it to the post office.

I’ll be honest, I found this process a bit emotional. Watching the laptop delete all of the data, then handing it over to the post office, it was a bit like taking an old dog to the vet for the last time. But, hey ho, we must move on.

I made one mistake. Apple devices have a feature called Find My. This is a security device. If your device is lost or stollen, Find My helps you to locate it. It has to be turned off before you start the procedure. They can’t proceed until it is turned off. Eventually I found that you could turn off this feature ‘in the cloud’.

Be prepared for a wait. This isn’t a fast process. It appeared to me that every step along the journey takes 3-5 days. 3-5 days to receive your box. 3-5 days for your device to be delivered to Apple. 3-5 days for them to confirm your valuation, 3-5 days to receive your Apple gift card. Only then will you be able to order your new device.

I suppose you need to think long and hard before considering this service. You could find yourself without your computer for three to four weeks. Also, I estimate that I’m going to get about 25%-30% of my original purchase. Maybe I should have delayed or found another way to fund my new computer. However, I console myself by looking at YouTube videos that tell me that the new Mac Mini is indeed the best thing since sliced bread.

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Prevention and protection from Scams

And so we turn to passwords and online security. I’ve dealt with this at some length previously in a post entitled “Keeping safe online” which I last updated in May 2023, and although much of it is still relevant and most, if not all, of the links are still working, I thought to write something from scratch, rather than do another edit/revision.

I’m going to skip to the content at the end of the article referred to above and pick-up the theme of Passwords, Passkeys and Two-Factor Authentication (TFA).

First-of-all – you want a fright? Try typing your favourite password(s) – you do have more than one, don’t you? – into this website.

Secondly, check to see just how vulnerable your email address might be, using …

Screenshot

… go to haveibeenpwned? – and if you want to know what pwned means, and how to pronounce it, look here. If a service you use is in this list, you seriously should change your password!

Another approach is to use a tool that looks at your “digital footprint” to examine where you might be exposed. Such a tool is this one from Malwarebytes.

So that’s got your attention, right? You really need to deploy/use a Password Manager to hold your passwords – preferably one that is usable/consistent across all your devices. Two such products are 1Password and Dashlane. Both of which get very good reviews.

The alternative to using a Password Manager application is to use the password security offered by your browser. In Apple’s case this is iCloud Keychain – which stores the passwords – with its associated Passwords app; in Google’s case this is Google Password Manager. Both of these now offer support from one ecosystem to the other – so multi-platform users can choose one or the other. Microsoft also offer a Password Manager using the Edge browser, but its features are possibly not as well developed as those of Apple or Google, nor of dedicated password manager applications such as 1Password or Dashlane which score best with users who have a mixture of Microsoft, Apple and Google devices and applications.

And now we have Passkeys. When assessing whether you want to move to a Password Manager, you MUST check that the chosen one supports Passkeys as defined in the FIDO Alliance …

… and the key to its success and inter-operability is its integration with biometric signatures. So Passkeys are the platform for increased and improved internet security and should be welcomed with open arms – for Apple, for Google and for Microsoft.

If a Passkey can’t be employed on your favourite website, or even if they are, you may be asked to use 2FA (two-factor authentication). Using this means that when you’ve typed in your username and password you’ll be challenged to provide a code from a mobile phone, an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator, or go to another app (particularly if its a Google app), and do that extra second step (hence 2FA) to authenticate you are who you are.

We’re entering the passwordless world. It’s long overdue!

Finally, some other links to help you navigate the digital security world.

7 phone apps you need to secure right away – if you value your privacy – this could have formed the basis of an article in itself. It’s important to just check you’re doing the best you can to secure your favourite apps.

Best antivirus: Which? Best Buys and expert buying advice – a review for both PCs and Macs of anti-virus software – of course you could just be relying and using Windows Defender (for Windows) or nothing at all (if on a Mac), both of which are acceptable decisions, which then leads into …

Everything you need to know about cybersecurity basics – an inventory of terms, some with links to free tests, and the option to purchase tools. The definitions of terms are good.

Online learning events from the u3a – especially a recurring event “Staying Safe Online – A u3a Presentation with Q&A”

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I’ve been scammed – what should I do next?

So you’re an unhappy victim of a scam, apart from resolving the problem which was covered in the earlier post, what else should you do, and are there any other scams you should be aware of. Let’s look at the latter first.

Scams are not restricted to your computer, they can be “served” to you by phone or by text as well. [They can also be enacted face-to-face with vulnerable people.] The advice is constant and clear …

  1. Don’t give your details to anyone you don’t know – if in doubt say you’ll ring them back
  2. Don’t click on links in text messages (and emails of course) from people/organisations you can’t verify
  3. Don’t immediately answer a call from an unknown number, or a number withheld, if it’s a genuine call the person at the other end will speak; if they don’t, the connection will be dropped.

Then help stamp the practice out by reporting the matter to Ofcom. There are further details on how to report a scam on this page from Which? and this one from Citizens Advice.

Then there’s a UK website “Stop scams” – where you can report a scam by ringing the number 159. It works in exacgtly the same way as 101 (for the police) and 111 (for the NHS).

I would also suggest sharing details of the scam with Which? using their Scam Sharer Tool

By doing this – if you subscribe to their free newsletter – you will help others, and you, become aware of the scams that are current at that time. Here’s an example of what you’ll see delivered to your Inbox.

A couple of useful tools to check the veracity of a caller …

Who called me – a service that returns details of the likelihood, or otherwise, of the caller being a scammer …

Screenshot

… and Hiya available as an Android and iOS app – which I have to admit I’ve not tried yet …

Screenshot

So what were the “top” scams of 2024, and what should we expect in 2025? Which? in these two posts reports the past, and predicts the future …

The biggest scams of 2024

Five scams trends for 2025 – unfortunately it’s totally predictable that AI will become part of the scammer’s armoury of tools.

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Scams – Part 2

Almost exactly a year ago I posted on this site, and on the Cardiff u3a Digital Matters webpage, an account of one of our member’s encounter with the Windows Defender pop-up scam.

It was indeed pleasing to be able to report that the member resolved the problem and it didn’t re-occur – as far as I know – but pop-up scams are a concern and this short post just gives some illustration of what the issue is, plus some advice on how to resolve the problem if you find your machine has been “taken over”.

I like this US video from the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) which explains the issue really well …

… and their are many more videos on scams, identity theft and the like on their website.

Perhaps the most common scam is the Tech Support Scam – which is what the Windows Defender one mentioned above was. The objective of the scammer is to get complete control of your computer by persuading the user they have a problem which can be resolved by you letting them “repair” the problem remotely – so please let them have your userid and password. Quite the opposite of course – the result will be either you’re locked out of your computer whilst the scammer harvests your personal details (bank accounts, etc), or they are going to implant malware so that they can record what you’re doing online, or use your computer as a relay (an intermediary) for other attacks on other services. Not a happy place to be then!

So read this article carefully. It describes in far greater depth and detail what these scams are and how you can remove pop-ups.

A more extensive article which explains how to reduce and remove malware from a Windows PC is provided here.

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Google Photos & Snapseed – an update

I’ve posted articles on using Google Photos a few times. Of course with the passage of time, features, and interfaces, change, so it is always useful to just review “what’s occurring”, and see whether there’s anything that needs correcting, or adding to. I will try and go back and edit the posts listed below to reflect changes that I’m aware of.

First and foremost it’s important to note that I don’t tend to use Google Photos for anything other than sharing photos with family and friends, so my use of the editing features is a bit limited. I am however a strong advocate of using Snapseed (available from both the Google Play, and Apple App Store) as a photo editor, but as it works best with the Google Photos app, it’s necessary to install Google Photos as well. [Snapseed is not available as a native desktop app on Windows or MacOS; it’s only available on mobile devices (Android and iOS/iPadOS).] So the first link that’s important to be aware of is this one …

Google Photos and Apple revisited – if you’re an Android user you can skip this article and move to the next paragraph – all your photos taken with your camera will be safely housed in the Google Photos app!!! If you’re an Apple user it’s important to understand how synchronisation works with Google Photos and the Photos app on iOS. If you’re not careful you can either end up with duplicate photos on both platforms, or worse still deleting photos from a device thinking that there’s a copy “in the cloud”.

The next bit of housekeeping is to understand what happens if you want to delete a photo from Google Photos – it’s not entirely straightforward (but it is easier than in the Apple world!!!). This article I wrote – “How do you delete photos from Google Photos?” – attempts to help you delete what you want to delete from your device, or from Google Photos on the web. This is particularly a problem if you’re an Apple user with a Camera Roll, rather than an Android user with Google Photos – so you’d be advised to read it.

So we finally get to editing our photos and using Snapseed. This article – “Snapseed and Google Photos” – is a good overview and will take you quite a way down the road of installing Snapseed, it covers the basics of how to get photos from a camera (rather than a smart phone) into Google Photos, and some basic editing of a photo. There are also links in the article to earlier posts on using Google Photos as well as a video on “getting started” and some additional references that I found useful.

The new stuff!

How To Use Google Photos: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide [2023] – if you want to just stick with what’s possible for you to do in Google Photos this is just about as good a guide as you’ll get. It goes through all the features of the app, but doesn’t cover editing photos in any detail. If you want a video that covers the same ground, you might like to watch this [I’d like to remind you of the point I made about his reference to Backup and Sync if you’re an Apple user – my earlier comments apply!!! He has decided to use both iCloud and Google Photos on the web for two backups.]. Google’s help guide to editing photos is provided here.

So we turn to Snapseed – here’s a beginner’s video on how to use Snapseed for editing, you should also refer to the article quoted in the earlier post – Complete Guide To Using Snapseed To Edit Your iPhone Photos – from which I also recorded the video from my computer screen, but it’s obviously better using the link from the article. Also please note that although iPhone is mentioned in the title, it’s 100% applicable to Android phones as well. Finally you might probably want to look at this – SNAPSEED: ULTIMATE USER GUIDE + TIPS (2024 UPDATE) – if I’ve convinced you that Snapseed is the “goto” app for photo editing on your smart device.

Google is always updating its apps, and this is particularly true now that we have AI. So a recent update introduces the possibility of background blur – which can make a portrait of a person stand out more, by weakening the effect of the background. Google writes about its new AI features here, and here,

Finally … this article has been all about using Google Photos, which might have let you think that Apple’s Photos app is not so good. In a forthcoming post, I will be examining how Apple Intelligence (available in the autumn) will quite possibly revolutionise Apple’s photo applications, and will for some, if not all, Apple users mean they might be less likely to use Google Photos going forwards. They’ve already moved to allow the sharing of albums stored in iCloud to anyone via a link. That’s progress!!!