Free UPS monitor and graceful shutdown software for Windows 10

If you are stuck for decent free UPS monitor and graceful shutdown software for Windows 10, or a bit put out by the lack of software or enormous Java apps provided by many UPS manufacturers, you can’t do much better than these two apps.

It does depend on your UPS as to whether these apps will work for you, but they are very small and work fine on my SYNDOME/Mustek Cypress semiconductor USB-Serial UPS running on Windows 10 64 bit.

Winmust
http://winmust.sourceforge.net
Tiny download but nice status display and has shut down options. Very simple program with tiny memory footprint and minimal performance impact.

winmust-screen1

winmust-screen2

 

UPS Assistant
http://foxylab.com/UPSAssistant.php?en
Another tiny download. Does not look as nice but has SMTP/HTTP and LAN network message notifications as well as shutdown options. All the usual information is there. An obvious choice if power event notifications are what your looking for.

ups-assistant

Let me know in the comments if you found any other small free UPS monitoring software and I’ll add them to the list. Also let me know what other makes/models of UPS these programs work on for you.

Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial, AMD, Black or Blank Screen, Steam Will Not Launch

If your getting black screens on boot with your Ubuntu upgrade to 16.04 (Xenial) then probably ‘upgrade’ is the problem.

From Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 onwards, there is no FGLRX or proprietry driver support for AMD RADEON HD cards.

AMD are now focusing on the open source drivers. If your getting blank or black screen on boot, or other video problems, do a clean install. Do not try to install the proprietry drivers. Everything should be working fine without any messing about.

Steam wont launch? Damn this is still hanging around from 15.01!!

This is a Steam problem. Steam really needs to try keep up with the open source drivers. We simply remove the old libs from Steam so it is forced to use the newer libs.

cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak
cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak

Steam will work now 🙂

NTFS disk corruption, dual boot, linux (ubuntu,mint etc) windows 8, windows 10. Shared disk NTFS.

After prolonged use by Linux  of a shared NTFS drive in dual boot, Windows will report a corrupt disk, file system.

There is actually nothing wrong. Linux leaves the shared NTFS drive dirty on purpose to avoid file system corruption by windows fastboot.  Over time of dual booting and not fixing then you might get some corruption.

If you have been using linux for a while then dual boot into windows 8 or 10, then do a disk check of your shared NTFS drive.  Disk check will find errors, fix them, usually without any data loss.

You could turn off fastboot in windows to stop this happening. You could also disk check in windows regularly to fix the dirty flags, without disabling fastboot. That is up to you.

Comment if you need more information.

 

BaDbod

Windows 10, Install error, cannot open device or file, internal error 2755. 110, Shared dual boot, linux windows drive

MSI installers, failing signed key. No encrypted or compressed temp folders. Windows 10 and a shared drive with Linux?

internal error 2755, 110  ?

If your sharing a NTFS drive with both windows and linux, then you may well lose some permissions on folders in the shared NTFS drive.

Even i f you are not sharing a NTFS drive in a dual boot system with windows 10 and linux yet you have these symptoms..

internal error 2755. 110  or ‘cannot open device or file specified’.

If you have already done the google and noticed you have no encrypted folders or files, then probably your linux  is stripping some permissions from your dual boot shared drive.

Easy fix.

Where you download your files,

  1. Right click your downloads folder and -> properties
  2. Security tab
  3. Advanced
  4. Enable inheritance
  5. Apply

If your more with the security angle,  then  make sure SYSTEM has some access.

 

Easier fix?

Another option is to copy the installer files to your windows boot drive. They will install fine from there without you having to mess with your shared drive permissions.

Nod,

BaDboD

Visual tearing, stutter jerky video, Intel video card, linux, ubuntu 15.10, i915

Hmm, so your getting bad video playback fullscreen using an onboard Intel GPU. Maybe yor using something like Atom Processor D4xx/D5xx/N4xx/N5xx Integrated Graphics Controller?

hwinfo --gfx

you might need to install hwinfo, it is in the repo

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

Fix:
Get the Intel Linux drivers from the official Intel open source drivers center here

Follow the instructions on that page, especially the part about the signatures.

once installed, and rebooted, try adding the line

Option "TearFree" "true"

to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and reboot.

If your still having playback issues, then that will be due to the default video player ‘Video’ (totem).

do

sudo apt-get install mplayer smplayer

Right click your video and ‘Open with’ smplayer.

now enjoy smooth full screen video playback.

Some people prefer VLC.

Also of note is the GPU’s I mention above do not have any hardware video decoding so might still struggle with full on HD video. There’s nothing you can really do about that.

Please do leave a comment if you find a better solution, or this works for you on different hardware.