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The perfect balance of RGB and style
Avoid a reinstall
I was inspired by your Hydra Mini ITX Chassis build (Feb 2024 issue) to go out and spec a similar system to replace my three-year-old setup (also based on one of your builds, namely the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X build from your March 2021 issue). However, having only recently reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch, I’m not looking forward to going through the same process again so soon. Is there any way I can avoid what feels like a colossal waste of time?
—Travis S Gardner
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Given your reinstall is relatively new, you’ll probably get away with fitting the hard drive to your new PC and simply booting from it. In the
Doc’s experience, you’ll likely encounter several reboots, driver updates, and potentially one or two blue screens of death before things hopefully settle down. You’ll also need to run through the activation troubleshooting wizard (Settings > System > Activation) to transfer your digital license, but it’s straightforward enough.
The Doc recommends taking a full drive image before you begin using a tool like Hasleo Backup
Suite ( www.easyuefi. com), so you can roll back if the new hardware fails to take to the installation. If you’re a Macrium Home Reflect ( www.macrium. com/products/home) user, you can go one step further: take a full backup of your drive, create rescue media, and boot from that after building your new PC. You should see an option marked ‘ReDeploy restored image to new hardware’ under the Existing Backups tab. Select this, and follow the prompts—for a guide to how it works, visit https:// knowledgebase.macrium. com/display/KNOW80 and search for ‘redeploy’.
Fix Nginx connection
I found your feature on Podman interesting, but have run into a brick wall trying to get Nginx Proxy Manager to work on my Windows machine. I can get it installed, access it, and set up reverse proxies, but if I try to use it to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt, it consistently fails with an unspecified ‘internal error’. It seems to be unable to make the connection—is there a step I’ve missed?
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS:
It appears that something has changed in a recent update to either Nginx
Proxy Manager or the way Lets Encrypt handles certificate requests has led to this error. It has resulted in a string of issues appearing on Nginx Proxy Manager’s Github pages with various workarounds being suggested—visit https://github.com/ NginxProxyManager/nginxproxy-manager/issues/3324 for one such example.
The Doc was able to resolve the issue both in WSL and Linux by ensuring that ports 80, 81, and 443 weren’t redirected to higher ports (9080, 9081, and 9443 in the original feature). While this is easy enough in Docker, Podman’s rootless nature introduces another hurdle: Linux only allows root users to access what it terms ‘privileged’ ports—all ports below 1,024.
Thankfully, you can override this figure if you’re happy to accept the security implications in doing so (in reality, they’re unlikely to be an issue for most users). This involves editing the / etc/sysctl.conf file. To do this in Windows 11, right-click Start and choose Terminal ( Admin). Type ‘podman machine ssh’ and hit Enter to access your underlying WSL instance. Now, type: sysctl net.ipv4.ip_ unprivileged_port_start=80
If you now follow the feature to set up Nginx
Proxy Manager (skipping the section on mapping ports, as it’s now redundant), you should be able to not just access the web interface on port 81 ( http://localhost:81 from your PC), but it should also be able to pull certificates from the registry to provide you with secure remote access to those services going forward.
Office alternative
I’m desperate to move away from Microsoft Office, but have failed to settle with the most obvious alternative, LibreOffice. It’s okay, but the user interface is too far removed from what
I’ve become used to. I see there are plenty of ‘ free’ Office alternatives out there boasting a more modern user interface, but
many of them appear to be ad-supported or featurelimited unless I pay. Is there a truly free alternative, or must I either put up with an outdated user interface or stick with Office?
—Russell Gilmore
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS:
As you’ve already installed LibreOffice, I’d recommend you try its tabbed user interface (choose ‘ View > User Interface’, then select Tabbed). This is much closer to what you’ve been used to in Office, and it may be that simply switching to this is enough to make LibreOffice more usable for you.
If you still can’t get on with LibreOffice, or want to try another option, the Doc suggests taking a look at OnlyOffice ( www.onlyoffice. com/download-desktop. aspx). It’s open-source, and the single-user desktop editor, comprising document, spreadsheet, presentation, PDF editing, and form creation tools, is free to use. OnlyOffice’s user interface is certainly closer in looks to Office, although it has fewer features than LibreOffice.
However, there are other reasons to give it a go—first, it’s less resource intensive than Office, so feels responsive even on older machines. We also like that it works as a single application rather than being split between separate tools as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are. OnlyOffice also defaults to opening each document in its own tab within that single window. This behavior can be modified via the program’s main settings, but we like the fact that it reduces desktop clutter while making all your documents easily accessible from one location.
It goes without saying that OnlyOffice is compatible with most standard file types, including Office and LibreOffice, but its spreadsheet tool does lack support for some of Office’s newer features. On the other
hand, a Plugins tab reveals extensions that you won’t necessarily find in Office, like a simple photo editor and OCR tool for JPG and PNG files. A plugins store reveals even more features that can be added, from AI helpers to translation tools.
Rounding things off are support for integration into cloud services, mobile apps for editing documents on the go, and the ability to host your own online iteration of OnlyOffice for access through any browser— choose the Community version to get this for free.
Read ext4 drive
A friend has handed me a hard drive and tasked me with pulling off files from it. The problem is, it came from a Linux machine, and after plugging it into my Windows PC, I can’t read it. What are my options for accessing the drive? Would a virtual Linux machine be able to do it?
—Peter J Cousins
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: You’d need live Linux media to be able to read the drive outside of Windows, Peter— virtualization wouldn’t cut it. Thankfully, there’s an easier option that gives you access from your Windows desktop. Diskinternals offers a free Linux Reader tool ( www. diskinternals.com/linuxreader), which is capable of letting you access ext4 drives on a read-only basis to browse their contents and copy any files you need to another drive on your PC.
Once installed, launch the tool, and you should see a window split in three: Volumes, Unallocated space, and Physical drives. Each volume is listed with a drive letter (if applicable) and file system—you’re looking for those marked ‘Linux ext’, which will come from the drive your friend gave you. Double-click the one marked ‘/’ and it should open a File Explorer-like interface from which you can browse the drive and preview selected file types (such as photos). Focus your search on the home folder, where most user files should reside.
Right-click any folders or files you wish to retrieve, and choose Save. Leave ‘Save files’ selected (the other options aren’t available in the free version), and wait for the wizard to count all recoverable files. Pick a folder on another drive to save the contents to, choose options such as preserving the original directory structure, and click Next. Review the files recovered, and click Next again to save them to your chosen drive.
Restore Nextcloud data
I’m moving Nextcloud setups. I want to set up the installation from scratch without having to upload the 90 GB of data from my installation. Is there a way I can move the files to the new Nextcloud data directory, and get the database to recognize that they’re there?
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS:
The files you’ve uploaded to Nextcloud are stored inside the data directory you configured to point to /var/ www/html/data inside the container. Inside this, you’ll see a folder named for your chosen username, which contains a further folder— Files—where all your data is stored.
If you were to set up your new Nextcloud instance, manually copy all this data across to the new data/ username/files folder, then nothing would show up in Nextcloud itself.
That’s because the folder isn’t actively monitored for changes, but the good news is that you can change this behavior by adding a single line to your config.php file.
The config.php file can be found inside the appdata directory you configured (pointing to /var/www/ html inside the container). Navigate to this folder, then enter the config folder inside it before opening config. php in your chosen text editor (say ‘nano config. php’). Insert the following line below the line marked ‘installed’ => true,: ‘filesystem_check_changes’ => 1,
Save the file and restart the container. Log into your Nextcloud instance’s web interface and navigate to your personal files page.
You should see the folders are in place, although it can take a while for Nextcloud to analyze them. Once done, you should be able to marry up the folders on your PC to the folders in your new Nextcloud instance using the client app—it’ll take a while for Nextcloud to compare the two folders to ensure they’re synced, but it’s a lot quicker than manually uploading all those files again from your PC to the server.
Once you’ve synced everything up, delete the ‘filesystem_check_changes’ line to stop Nextcloud monitoring the folder.
OVER THE LAST FEW ISSUES, we’ve built a cornucopia of different styles of PC. Whether that’s high-end glamorous RGB monsters with enough displays and gifs to make your eyes melt, cooling-challenged ITX towers, or super stealth blacked-out builds featuring the best-value componentry around, all of them have pushed a particular theme in one way or another. They each present their own unique challenge—a way of testing hardware, sure, but equally a way of testing the journalist tasked with building them. That’s a big part of what we do, and a key ingredient of learning.
This time around, we decided to do something a little bit different; a little bit more refined. This, dear reader, is our attempt at building a relatively affordable, suave, and sophisticated 4K gaming machine—one that combines the very best in modern-day stylish lighting with some very intriguing and unique hardware to deliver an all-round perfect experience, regardless of whether you’re in-game, or rendering 4K content in Da Vinci Resolve.
At its heart, of course, the key selling point for us is seeing how that 4070 Ti Super behaves under different circumstances. At the core of this build lies the 7800X3D CPU from AMD, a fantastic and incredibly popular processor option—complete with Team Red’s impressive 3D V-Cache tech—to really leverage frame-rates in-game. Combine that with a beautiful new case from NZXT, and some stunning Light Wings fans from be quiet!, and let’s find out just how this kitty purrs, shall we?