It’s Monday and I’m sane again

So on Saturday I contracted my first virus in 4+ years of Windows computing. I obviously wasn’t careful enough and have no one to blame for myself. That said, these things have gotten REALLY annoying to remove.

The main infection was a Vundo Trojan – not particularly dangerous, just extremely annoying. Dialog boxes and pop-up windows everywhere. My first step was to pull up the Task Manager and do a quick scan of running processes. Any I didn’t immediately recognize, I Googled – most were new programs running because of my little Logitech/Bluetooth adventure from a couple days ago – but one I got zero results for: C:\Windows\System32\nyyyutbm.exe. Looks like a typical spyware file name, but since I hadn’t gotten anything, I figured I’d do a full sweep.

Now since system files can’t be removed in a normal instance of Windows, first I had to boot into safe mode in Windows, and cruise over to TrendMicro’s HouseCall. Running that determined I had Vundo and removed part of the infection, along with some other miscellaneous stuff. I followed that up by a full system scan with AdAware and Spybot, and returned to a Windows desktop free of nasties. Still not sure why Google came up with no results – maybe I just got lucky enough to find a new mutation of the bug.

Anyway, that got me thinking about the fact that I was still using Windows for most things when I told myself I wouldn’t after my last installation of Ubuntu Linux. So I switched over and started playing around with it. I’d left it because of some little bugs that I didn’t feel like messing with at the time, but I was a little bit more determined now. First thing to solve was my issue with Ventrilo in Linux. It’s buggy at best, but I found a suggestion to manually replace Wine’s sound card driver with a version used in Windows, msgsm32.acm. This fixed everything. Three cheers for community support.

Next up was making it look the way I wanted it to. I enabled the Compiz and Beryl effects (now run jointly under the name Compiz Fusion) and downloaded ccsm, the effects configuration tool. After that I installed Emerald, a themes manager for CF, and downloaded the WhiteMod theme. It was still missing something, though. After some Googling, I came across AWN and it’s sexy twin, AWN-Curves. This walkthrough, again from the Ubuntu community, got me up and running with that. So I ended up with really a very nice-looking desktop that ran WoW and Ventrilo, and gives me all the wonderful functionality and power of Linux in a too-sexy-for-my-shirt package:

Desktop

Not too shabby. Hopefully I last this time!

12 thoughts on “It’s Monday and I’m sane again”

  1. Vundo removal can be hard that’s for sure. A quick tip is to do a system restore. restore your computer back in time to when you were not infected with vundo. then run a full scan.

  2. It’s a photo by Oleg Volk. Model is Kitiara. I resized and cropped it a bit, and I think did a little editing to get it into a wallpaper resolution without reducing the quality. I can upload it when I get home.

  3. Hi Dan, would be great if you could upload it… or mail it to me.. I have tried to find the picture on Oleg his webite however I have been unable to locate it.

    Regards,
    Johan.

  4. Glad you found it :) I edited it a bit to bring it up to 1280×1024, I can upload that tonight when I’m back at home.

  5. I run it via Wine – just install it through there like you would any other program. For the sound to work properly (namely, for you to be able to talk and listen simultaneously) you’ll need to manually add a codec from Windows called msgsm32.acm.

    This UbuntuForums link seems to have pretty much the same steps I took, but the one bug I haven’t been able to resolve (and haven’t really bothered playing with much, tbh) is that the PTT hotkey only works when Ventrilo is the active window, meaning I have to tab out of my game to be able to talk.

  6. hey… im just looking for the background image.. so cool!… can u give me the link plz.

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