Download your facebook account entirely [let's have a copy on the harddisk too]

Facebook now provides a feature to download all the information that you have put on your account so far. This is a copy of all the personal information you've shared on Facebook. Many of the photos might not be there in your local harddisk. So this will help you to download all the informations that you shared, and someone tagged you. Also incase your account is blocked by any reasons it isn't possible to take  back all the data at that instant. So better is to download your informations frequently so that you can avoid loosing your favourites...

When you download the information you get following list of information that you have shared on Facebook.

• Your profile information (e.g., your contact information, interests, groups)

• Wall posts and content that you and your friends have posted to your profile

• Photos and videos that you have uploaded to your account

• Your friend list

• Notes you have created

• Events to which you have RSVP’d

• Your sent and received messages

• Any comments that you and your friends have made on your Wall posts, photos, and other profile content

At present it is not possible to select particular items from the above list, entire information will be completely downloaded.

Steps to download the facebook information

Select Account > Account Settings . Navigate to the bottom of the page and click on the link labelled as learn more corresponding to Download your Information . Check the figure below. 

You will be redirected to another page where it asks for your facebook password. Press the continue button after providing the password information to move on to the next page.  

Click on the Download Now button to begin the download.

After downloading you will get a zip file.  Extract it in some directory and click on the index.html to view the contents.

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Download your gmail inbox to harddisk for offline usage in Ubuntu

I don't know when i have started using gmail. But now, i am wondering why it doesn't makes me bored eventhough i am watching the same appearence and 'looks of gmail' for more than five years. Gmail is something more than the 'appearences' since it provides a secure and fully fledged mechanism to communicate your personal and business affairs. That may be the reason why i haven't googled for something like 'best online email service' for those past years where i experienced the power of Gmail. 

Here i am introducing an application named 'Gmail Backup' that helps you to download and back up all your mails from the Gmail inbox to your computer's hard disk. The collection of mails that you backed up can be viewed and read offline with the help of some text editors, browsers or email applications such as thunderbird without going online...

 

Setup and Installation

Since the Gmail Backup is a python based application you may need some additional python libraries for running the gui. So first  install the latest version of wxPython on your ubuntu box with the help of Synaptic package manager or apt. The installation  with apt pacakge manager using terminal is given below.

#  First import the key into your apt's list of trusted keys (we both hate warnings !! and this is how we remove the warnings about the digital signature)  

$ curl http://apt.wxwidgets.org/key.asc | sudo apt-key add - 

# Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Change 'natty' to the suitable one if you are using an ubuntu distribution other than Natty narwhal. 

  #wxWidgets/wxPython repository at apt.wxwidgets.org
  deb http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ natty-wx main
  deb-src http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ natty-wx main

  

#  Run the this command to update your local copy of the packages meta-data. 

$ sudo apt-get update

 

# Now install the wxPython packages using the following commands.

  $ sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 python-wxtools wx2.8-i18n libwxgtk2.8-dev libgtk2.0-dev

The packages libwxgtk2.8-dev and libgtk2.0-dev may need to be installed if a 3rd party application requires wxWidgets when building from source.
 

# Inorder to access the gmail with such an application you need to enable the IMAP option on the gmail settings. Go to your gmail inbox with your browser. Navigate to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP section on the gmail settings page to enable the IMAP as shown in the figure.

 

Now download the gmail Backup application from the link here. Extract the zipped file. Using your terminal navigate to the location of the zipped file.
 

#  Use the ls command to list all the files 

$ ls -l *.sh 

#  Run the file named gmail-backup-gui.sh to start the gui interface of the Gmail Backup application shown below.

$ ./gmail-backup-gui.sh

 

# Enter the required information and press the backup button to start downloading the mails. You can view the mails with the help of a browser/text editor/email application[kmail,mozilla thunderbird]. All the mails are stored in the specified folder seperately as eml files.

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How to share /home directory between two linux installations

            Frequent re-installations of operating system due to crashes  is always been a problem for many of the linux users, and my case is also the same.... Everytime i start with doing something like trying some new commands or editing some configuration files and finally ends up with an 'OS crash' and a fresh installation thereafter. Now it's been a very usual matter that i may have to install a fresh copy of linux distro probably once in a month. Sometimes the crash may occur due to installation of a new theme (last week editing some theme files manually after it's installation made my 10.04box stand on nails...), sometimes the crash may be the by-product of installation of an incompatible version of application etc...

While fighting with all these crashes and re-installations the major problem is related to backing up of the data and personal files stored in the /home folder. Usually the contents of the /home contains files and directories including apache's root directory, downloads, files received over bluetooth, joomla/html/php projects etc. So it's very important to back up data all the time Ubuntu is reinstalled.

Solution

One of the best solution to avoid this kind of frequent backup-restore problem is separate the /home directory from the root directory during the installation. The advantages of this separation comes in two ways

1. When a crash occurs to the OS the /home directory remains intact because it is a separate disk partition. So on reinstalling after the crash we can map the old /home partition of the crashed one as the /home of the new linux. This makes it possible to access the files as if before the crash occured.

2. It's easy to share the /home folder between any no of linux distributions installed parellely on your machine. During installation of each of the distro, we can select the partition to be shared as its /home. Better keep the filesystem type (eg:- ext4) same while selecting the /home of other distro as it's new /home. This can be useful even with linux distributions of different architecture using similar filesystem types(Ubuntu and fedora can share a common /home if the /home is mounted as ext4).

On the ground...

Select the manual partitioning options

Setting up the root partition 

 

Selecting the /home partition of the previously crashed or parellelly installed linux.

 

Mounting the /home partition of old linux as /home of new linux. Don't check the format box. If mistaken you may lose all the data due to disk format

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