Any fellow Linux users on here?

[Outdated]

now I'm trying to learn TestDisk so I can recover as much as possible.

It's a sweet little program, and it's packaged with a partner program called photorec.

Testdisk is pretty good for restoring old partitions, photorec is great for recovering individual files. Photorec will also recover files that have been deleted, and in some cases will also recover shadows of old files from earlier partitioning of drives.

I used it on quite a few people's computers, it's always embarrassing because it always recovers all the porn they thought they had deleted.

 

[Jacks Brain]

I've had TestDisk running on a folder full of images for 16 hours now. So far it looks like it's recovered everything but what I need. FWIW it's car stuff. I'm restoring an old car, and I took a bunch of reference photos so I'd know how everything goes back together. Naturally, those are the ones that haven't recovered (yet?).

Right now TestDisk says "Copying, please wait . . . 290338 ok, 561 failed" What is it referring too? I had a bunch of pictures but I didn't have 300k pictures.

 

[Outdated]

IRight now TestDisk says "Copying, please wait . . . 290338 ok, 561 failed" What is it referring too? I had a bunch of pictures but I didn't have 300k pictures.

You're not trying to copy to the same physical drive that you are copying from, are you? Then testdisk will be simultaneously overwriting what it is trying to read.

The numbers you are seeing are physical addresses on the harddrive, the sector number where the beginning of a file starts. Depending on what instructions you gave testdisk, the files you are saving won't have their original file names but instead will have that physical address as a file name, eg 290338.jpg

Personally I would have used Testdisk to try and restore partitioning and file system directories before trying to copy all the files out. If you can do that the drive instantly becomes fully usable again. This is normally 100% doable on a Linux ext4 file system, about 30% doable on a Windows NTFS file system, and completely hopeless on FAT file systems.

 

[Jacks Brain]

It looks like I did, accidentally, restore the partition. I didn't follow the instructions for recovering images correctly, and did some other things that resulted in "file system o.k." Then I copied the pics I wanted to a different hard drive. I believe everything is o.k. now. What a relief!

 

[Outdated]

I had lots of fun learning how to do all that, and I made my fair share of mistakes too. Thanks for sharing your story, it brought back many happy memories.

 

[Jacks Brain]

Thanks for your help. I'm not new to Linux but I haven't had to recover files before.

 

[Outdated]

It's funny the way the world works sometimes. I only started playing with it out of curiosity, and I still didn't really know what I was doing yet when a friend's harddrive fell over. So all of a sudden I had to learn quick.

I found it very useful, especially for older people with laptops that overheat and burn their drives. All the pictures of their grandchildren are terribly important to them and none of them ever have backups. So I had a bootable thumb drive with Ubuntu and testdisk on it for doing that.

 

[Outdated]

I recovered files for a lady once and she was horrified by the pictures her teenage sons (if it was them) had been looking at and deleting again. She said "That's not Normal!" and I tried to explain that that is very normal for boys. Then I said "Look on the bright side, at least you know they're not gay.".

Her husband lost his cool then. He had been hiding his face behind a magazine and trying not to laugh but that was too much for him. He burst out laughing and the wife was even more confused.

 

[Jacks Brain]

At the risk of getting off topic, I'd like to say that momma's romance novels with topless Fabio on the cover definitely aren't woman-porn. And there's nothing wrong with Yaoi manga. Your fault if you don't know and Google it.

 

[Judge]

The day finally came on Saturday that signaled my permanent separation from Microsoft Windows.

That day I finally figured out why I was having so much trouble properly printing color and black/white .psd (Photoshop) graphics through Gimp 2.10. Having been so used to Windows and Photoshop's elaborate printing menu, I had to get used to an entirely different printing interface in Gimp 2.10.

The problem I kept having turned out to be just one little box I needed to check in Gimp's printing function, "Ignore Page Margins". Once I checked the box, the precise width and height (in inches) and DPI (dots per inch) settings finally showed up. In essence, I can now print as accurately in Linux as I could in Windows. And while the Gimp 2.10 printing interface is quite different from that of Windows, it is easier to use.

The only caveat seems to be that as you can see, there is only a portrait orientation offered to preview whatever graphic is being printed. So when I save a graphic in Photoshop, I have save a landscape oriented picture as portrait orientation so it shows up properly in the Gimp 2.10 printing interface.

The point? Printing photos was the only reason I had left for still using Windows 10. Given achieving the exact same results with printing in Linux Gimp 2.10, I no longer need Microsoft Windows for anything.

Now I can truly say Gimp 2.10 rocks! But would I use it exclusively for bitmap graphic design? Hellno. As long as Wine develops software that allows me to use an ancient version of Photoshop in Linux, I'll stick with that.

Bon Voyage Windows. But Photoshop remains my personal brand of heroin. My bad!

It's still wild to think that Linux doesn't use printer drivers. That you just turn on your printer and the CUPS program miraculously finds and configures your printer. No fuss, no muss...no HP BS. Amazing!

 

[MildredHubble]

The day finally came on Saturday that signaled my permanent separation from Microsoft Windows.

I wish I could fully ditch Windows too! I have had to boot into Windows on my MacBook to use a particular piece of hardware recently (I will be starting a thread on what I've been doing soon ) Windows just feels so clunky to use drop down menus seem to be programmed to immediately close when attempting to select with the trackpad.

Also drives seem to take an age to basically never show up. You click on something and nothing happens, you click again and nothing, you click again and it finally responds properly. I just don't understand how such a mature OS can be so terrible!

 

[Judge]

I just don't understand how such a mature OS can be so terrible!

A business that smugly rests on its own laurels. Not as a superior technology, but simply a perceived monopoly. They don't have to prudently innovate so much as simply retain their percentage of the marketplace to pacify shareholders. Perpetuating only an illusion of inelastic demand.

But yeah, whether it's hardware or software there will always be certain products that demand the use of Microsoft Windows. Don't see that dynamic changing anytime soon.

Took me nearly two years of using Linux to finally get to this point of dumping Windows altogether. But using such an old version of a Windows program in Linux....it's a real rush. Not to mention that Photoshop 5.5 runs better in Linux than in Windows 10. Almost like cheating death!

 

[Jacks Brain]

I've been using GIMP for illustration work for nearly a quarter of a century. It's hard to believe GIMP is still doing floating layers in 2023/4, but other than that it's worked well for me. It may still have color management issues if you have to go to print.

I really hate that Pshop is the "industry standard." I'd like to see some monopoly-busting applied to Adobe.

 

[Judge]

I've been using GIMP for illustration work for nearly a quarter of a century. It's hard to believe GIMP is still doing floating layers in 2023/4, but other than that it's worked well for me. It may still have color management issues if you have to go to print.

I really hate that Pshop is the "industry standard." I'd like to see some monopoly-busting applied to Adobe.

At least Gimp is still free. I paid a small fortune for Photoshop back in the 90s and am in no mood to rent it from Adobe! (I find that repugnant) But even version 5.5 (circa 1998) still fits my needs. Gimp is nice, but I'm set in my ways as an old guy raised on Photoshop. But I do find Gimp's printing interface better than that of Photoshop in Windows. At least now there's no urgency about learning Gimp, though I'll continue to play with it now and then. I know any number of computer geeks have switched to Gimp along with Linux. That Gimp continues to be touted as the next best program to Photoshop.

 

[tkcartoonist]

A lot of the features that I used in Photoshop I've found in Krita. Between that and GIMP, I'm never going back.

 

[Judge]

A lot of the features that I used in Photoshop I've found in Krita. Between that and GIMP, I'm never going back.

Yep, I have Krita 5.0.2 too. Nice program, though I wish I could print directly from it. I like having Gimp and Krita just to stay abreast of current graphics software. My Photoshop 5.5 certainly gets the job done, but it's still with a 90s interface.

LOL..don't forget Inkscape as well.....great vector graphics program. I could use Adobe Illustrator through Wine, but prefer Inkscape. Don't want to depend on any Windows programs using Wine beyond Photoshop.

 

[Outdated]

I really hate that Pshop is the "industry standard." I'd like to see some monopoly-busting applied to Adobe.

I was an Offset Printer and back when print was the most dominant form of media photoshop ruled not because it was the greatest program but because of the way MacOS handled printing, the same as in Linux. That's because it actually is Linux and uses a uniform system for printing - CUPS, as opposed to windows's style of using the printer's driver to format the printing.

Because windows relies on the printer driver for formatting, when you send your files to someone with a different printer all your spacings and margins shift and fonts change, where as from a mac or linux machine you get the same result no matter which printer you have plugged in.

It's been 20 years since I had to play with any of this software in a serious manner but when doing the colour separation for 4 colour process printing photoshop was no where near as easy to use as the Gimp. By default photoshop would use all four colours for areas that were intentionally black, this puts too much ink on the paper, more than the paper can really hold and makes jobs almost impossible to print.

 

[MildredHubble]

By default photoshop would use all four colours for areas that were intentionally black, this puts too much ink on the paper, more than the paper can really hold and makes jobs almost impossible to print.

Ah! I had a feeling that was the case! When I was about 18 I printed CD covers for my bands CD Demo. I thought "once the paper is in the case it looks glossy" so I used normal cartridge paper. But I noticed that the paper started to sag in black areas and even disintegrated when handling it. In the end I changed the black areas to a dark purple. My band mates didn't like that, even though it basically looked black once in the case.

It didn't really totally solve the issue of soggy paper so I ironed each print out and using some baking paper as a sort of preventive measure to prevent marks and smearing.

And then we spectacularly failed to do anything with them anyway. So that was a waste

 

[Jumpinbare]

The day finally came on Saturday that signaled my permanent separation from Microsoft Windows.

Congratulations!

I use a dual boot laptop. Linux Lite one partition, Windows 10 on the other. I boot into Windows so infrequently that I have the wifi disabled by default on the Windows side so that it doesn't try to do updates. Otherwise, it's bogged down for 20 minutes or more updating. Fortunately, I only have to use Windows to run a couple of specific programs to program radios.

I actually have several versions of Linux available on thumb drives that I can boot from instead of the internal hard drive. Sometimes it's nice to play with other OSes.

 

[Slime_Punk]

Quitting Windows sounds like a pipe dream to me, because I'm still hooked on so much software that won't run on Linux. But really, just getting decent at shell scripting or something is probably about as deep as I'll really go in my current lifetime, unless something calls for me to actually start using Linux on a regular basis.

(Single-board computers could end up changing my mind, and I'm very open to that possibility)

The thing about Photoshop is that it's virtually unparalleled. While some people can get away with using Krita, Clip Studio and others for very basic tasks, the unfortunate truth is that for designers working on the raster end, nothing actually comes even close in terms of functionality and flexibility. Not Affinity Photo, Corel Paintshop, etc, etc.

(I'm also aware that GIMP has distanced itself from considering itself a PS clone, for the same reason)

I have heard some success stories on the vector front with Inkskape, however. Supposedly that actually cuts it pretty close to Illustrator, and likewise the Affinity counterpart 'Designer'. But this is probably largely due to math being math across the board, and it's equally easy to draw vector shapes in something like p5.js, even for a beginner.