Category Archives: OS

I run an Ubuntu VM using VMware on my windows 7 machine and I find it very useful to be able to access files on the windows machine from inside of linux. This is actually quite easy to achieve and you can be up and running in about five minutes if nothing goes wrong.

First, in windows, share the folder that you are trying to access from your linux box. Make sure that the user you want to grant access to has read and write permissions (by default this the the current admin user so most likely you wont have to worry about this)

Now create an .smbcredentials file somewhere on your linux machine. I just used :

/home/andrew/.smbcredentials

but you can put it wherever floats your boat.

Now edit the .smbcredentials file and add the username and password for the windows machine in this file in this format :

username=andrew
password=andrewspassword

Next you need to create the entry in your /etc/fstab which will mount the directory on startup.
Add this line to your /etc/fstab file (filling in your details where necessary) :

///dev /mnt/ smbfs iocharset=utf8,credentials=/path/to/.smbcredentials,uid=1000 0 0

Next you need to create the mount point and make sure you can access it as a non root user :

sudo mkdir /mnt/
chmod -R 775 /mnt/
chown -R :root /mnt/

Finally ensure that smbfs is installed on your system. In Ubuntu just use :

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Now just mount it

sudo mount -a

If you get an error like this :

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on ⁄⁄mywindows⁄myshare,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might....

You probably havent installed smbfs correctly so run :

sudo apt-get install smbfs

again.

A simple “treesize” shell script for Linux

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One of my favorite pieces of software on windows is a little app called treesize free by Jam Software. It basically gives you a simple list of how much disk space each directory is taking up. This is really useful when you are trying to work out where all the space on your 500gig disk is gone.

I am always finding myself looking for similar piece of software for linux which can be run simply from the command line, but alas none exists so i decided to create a simple shell script to do a similar job, and here it is :

#/bin/sh
du -k --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
        print $0;
     }
    '

Just put this code into a file /bin/treesize and make it executable. Then any system user can get a list of directory sizes within a directory by just running treesize from any directory.

Windows 7 first impressions

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Category Archives: OS

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Windows 7 first impressions