Downloading files remotely using PuTTY

Recently at work I found myself in a situation where I needed a file from my home server and I had just replaced my work laptop and still didn't have a linux installation available. After doing a bit of searching I found out that I can use PuTTY under windows to directly download this file through an SSH tunnel. Here is how you can do that.

Open the windows command prompt by typing "run" in the search box and pressing enter.

Once you have the terminal open find the path to the folder where putty is located, on my windows 7 install that equates to C:/Program Files x86\Putty

from there just make sure you have the file pspc.exe available (if you don't know, the command "dir" shows files , but I'm assuming if you know how to use PuTTY you also know how to navigate windows using the terminal.

Run pscp by typing the command

pscp.exe 

now enter the command

pscp.exe username@x.x.x.x:/file_path/filename c:\directory\filename

where username pertains to your credentials to log into the server via SSH remotely. x.x.x.x is obviously the ip address of the server you are trying to download the file from. The first path pertains to the path of the file you want to retrieve (yes you have to know this in advance, if you don't just SSH normally and figure it out first). Then the last path is the path of where you want you new file to be downloaded into.

I hope this is helpful for when you can't just use sshfs under linux. If you don't know what SSHFS is look it up, it's basically an SSH method of mounting a samba directory remotely. I may post more on that at some point.

Linux distro sampling pt3 - Debian Xfce + Xubuntu 14.04

Debian 7 Xfce edition (VM)

Next I decided to give Debian Xfce a try since I saw that I had already downloaded the torrent for it a few weeks ago. I have had quite a bit of experience with xfce from my previous Xubuntu installs. Once again, using a non-Ubuntu distro makes it so I have to learn quite a few new things, however using Xfce does seem to make it a bit more familiar to me. I think just changing from GNOME to Xfce has the potential to make this experience much better. It appears just as stable and consistent as the other DE, while being much more lightweight and looking much much more pleasing in my opinion. Judge it yourself.

Xubuntu 14.04 (VM)

Next I decided it might be a good idea to see if Ubuntu 14.04 would work well on my ASUS P550C laptop as a VM since I'm too chicken to try dual booting it on this machine. After trying it I realized it wasn't going to happen. Not only unity is extremely sluggish and buggy in this machine as a VM. Besides that the mini toolbar for Virtual box keeps leaving this dark bar where it comes out to, which makes it look pretty sloppy. Removing this black bar seems to require removing the mini Toolbar which I don't want to do either.

Due to these reason I tried Xubuntu 14.04 the Trusty Tahr next. I'm used to Xubuntu from all my other VMs and once again I must say Xubuntu makes for the best VM experience I've had so far. It can look beautiful, it works, it's fast and good on resources. Just perfect really. Plus have I mentioned how pretty your OS can look?

At some point I might put together a nice looking Xubuntu setup and maybe post something about all my setting for folks interested in what I did.

Linux distro sampling pt2 - Debian 7 on ASUS P550CA

Recently I got a new ASUS P550C laptop from work. As with most my machines nowadays I try to run some form of Linux on them to accomplish some of the tasks in which Windows is handicapped at performing. Well I will begin this post first talking about my experience with the actual computer first.

Laptop Review: ASUS P550C (also called ASUS P550CA on the website)

First of all, this laptop is fairly impressive at first glance. It has a nice 15" screen, it has a relatively nice keyboard that features a keypad which I'm very thankful for (no backlight though... I'm spoiled, I know!). It has a nice finish and it is very light in my opinion, which may be a bad opinion since I'm used to my alienware (performance and weight are often mutually exclusive). Right from the get-go I notice some issues with my wi-fi adapter. It would disconnect under windows every 5-10 minutes. I started using a cable because of it. The wifi is also completely not supported by ubuntu so I also had to use a cable under my dual boot Ubuntu 14.04 install I started with. Eventually the wifi completely gave up which I alerted to the it people. After they contacted the Tiger Direct they mentioned that this particular adapter has been giving users some headache. For those curious I'm speaking about Mediatek MT7630E 802.11bgn. Long story short, I just received a new machine.

The other major complaint I have regard the UEFI/booting rubbish that made it extremely difficult to dual boot Ubuntu on my first machine. My new machine so far has been even worst. Every time I try to install Ubuntu 14.04 it basically tells me I can only overwrite Windows. It does not display the "install alongside" option which is a bit scary. For this reason I don't want to do the partitions on my own since I don't want to have to fix the windows booting garbage that is now standard in so many machines.

In summary, I had a great first impression of my ASUS P550C laptop which soon turned into frustration. This ASUS laptop is very Linux unfriendly as far as I'm concerned, so I must give some thumbs down to ASUS for manufacturing a laptop in the year 2014 that simply can't play nice with other operational systems.

Debian 7 (VM)

Anyway, done with my rant on ASUS. Now that I've been scared enough I decided to just install VirtualBox and use linux through a VM on my work machine which is what I was doing before anyway. I decided that before I settle on one distro I wanted to sample a few to see what is the most practical and useful to me for the types of needs I will have at work.

Well the first thing I have to say is that trying to use Debian was the first time I realized how Ubuntu centric my Linux experience has been up to this point. There are so many choices and small differences working with Debian coming from Ubuntu based distros. The most striking for me was the fact that I didn't know how to work under root. As a lot of you know, in Ubuntu you can simply use sudo on everything, apparently Debian requires you to log in as root in order to perform a lot of different admin tasks. Anyway, there it is, I'm a linux noobie outside of ubuntu.


Unfortunately for me there is a pretty good learning curve to migrate to this version of Debian. I can definitely see the appeal of this distro as it seems very stable and full of great admin tools right from the clean install. Unfortunately, it is a tad too new for me at this point. I will certainly consider it when I have a bit more free time to learn how to get the most out of it. The other reason I am hesitant of using this distro on my laptop is the desktop environment, I do not like Gnome very much. For this reason I decided to see if Debian Xfce is a bit more friendly to someone like me... (continued on pt.3)