Remove Unused Grub2 Entries

I had to reinstall my Linux Mint 9 Isadora after messing with a new copy of Windows XP. Once the whole thing was complete. I ended up with two extra kernel versions that weren’t really installed but were still listed in the boot menu. I ignored it for the longest time until I asked myself today.

How do I remove unwanted Grub2 entries?
What happens if the entries are there but the kernel is not actually installed in Synaptic?

I looked around the web and found that most sites say the same thing. I did not want to manually edit the Grub2 configuration file because that would still leave the headers in my system. And I’m a bit OC when it comes to my toys. So I played around with it a bit and found a simple solution.

1) Find out the current kernel version by opening the Terminal and running: uname -r
2) Take note of the result. This command gave me “2.6.32-25-generic”.
3) Open Synaptic and then search for the 4 digits. For example, “2.6.32″.
4) Install the “ghost” kernel versions : Check the “Mark for Installation” box and hit “Apply”.
5) Opened terminal and run: sudo update-grub2
6) Uninstall the kernel versions : Check the “Mark for Complete Removal” box and hit “Apply”.
7) Go back to the Terminal and ran: sudo update-grub2

Linux Mint 9 Isadora is based on Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I am pretty sure that the same set of instructions can be used for it too. Using these steps, I’ve removed everything from the Grub2 menu except the two latest kernel versions, the Memtest and the Windows entry. I hope this works for anyone else with the same issue.

 

Making Java Work On Firefox and Mint 9

I play a browser based online game and after installing Mint 9 Isadora, it stopped working. One part of the said game uses Javascript so I decided to check on that first. The following code is what I used to fix the issue:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

After running that in the terminal, i just opened my game again and it went through without a hitch!

 

How I recovered my corrupted partition

I have a Western Digital USB Drive that I use for data and testing new Linux releases. It had one NTFS partition for files I could share with Windows systems, one big data partition that I use to designate /home and several smaller partitions where I install varied Linux distributions. I had just deleted a couple of partitions that contained older Linux Mint versions and moved my /home partition to the outside of the disk using Gparted when an error occurred. After refreshing the application, it showed that my /home partition was unreadable. If I had been using Windows XP or Vista, my first instinct would be to wipe out the corrupted data and start from scratch. Not so in this case, I searched for a recovery utility that worked with EXT3 filesystems and discovered Testdisk.

The creator of this nifty tool provided sufficient information for me to install, operate and succeed in my task. I only used two commands in the terminal: sudo apt-get install testdisk and testdisk. It did not even take 5 minutes for the program to be installed. In a few keystrokes, Testdisk was able to fix my partition table and I got all of my data back. There are no guarantees in recovery. The best course of action is still to back up your data before you move or make big changes.