8thString

We have a pretty much old, by today's standard, Sony VAIO VGN-N110G running on Windows XP. This machine was hit hard by a virus and MS Security Essentials was not doing its job. Not sure if Security Essentials is a good anti-virus but I am using it anyway (hey it is free). The virus was pretty smart and distructive. Though the data files were not deleted but it did  delete the menu entries in Windows leaving it almost unsable. Initial impression of the virus was that it hides all files making you believe that everything was gone. It even offers a solution, like buy an anti-virus. Anyway, as I mentioned above, I did try to do full scan using MS Security Essentials, it was able to identify several and it did mention that the virus was removed. But the system was still unusable after the anti-virus cleanup exercise. So I tried to fire-up VAIO recovery to no avail. It says it cannot find the restore drive. It was really getting so bad. Rebooting into safe mode does not help. So t

I have been trying to keep a log of the *nix distribution I am using. Mostly I take screen captures and post them as blog post. I have been slacking lately due to personal commitments. Anyway, so here goes Fedora 15 (released May 24, 2011). Boot screen GNOME 3 failed to load on VirtualBox Install to Hard Drive Keyboard selection Type of store device Confirm to wipe disk Set computer hostname Set time zone info Set root account password Storage allocation, use all space Install complete Welcome to Fedora License agreement Create user Set date and time Hardware profile Login screen Class GNOME menu Fedora 15 major software versions kernel: 2.6.40 GNOME: 3.0.1 Firefox: 6.0

I have been using VirtualBox for awhile now but I mostly use Windows as the host machine. I just had setup few Linux boxes as VirtualBox host and found a need to save files in the host as I normally do snapshots and clean 'em up. Mounting a shared folder is easy, what caught me was that I can't change ownership of the folder created under the shared folders. So my regular user account can't create files. I realized that mount actually accepts options as to who would have access to the mounted folder, so to mount with read/write access to a user, do: sudo mount -t vboxsf -o rw,uid=1000 userdat /mnt/userdat Where: uid=1000 is the user ID of the user. For example, I have a user named timus, to get the ID, you can do: timus@ubu1110:~$ cat /etc/passwd | grep timus timus:x: 1000:1000 :timus,,,:/home/timus:/bin/bash As can be seen, timus uid is 1000 and group ID is 1000 as well. userdat is the VirtualBox shared folder name. /mnt/userdat is the mount point Key

First off, I would like to congratulate Ubuntu team for releasing another milestone of a good Linux distribution. It is such a big project which requires great balance between schedule, functionality, level of polish and quality. On the polish, I really like the new theme, it fits well to my taste. Okay, the day it was released I got a little excited. I know/read a lot of horror stories about doing an upgrade. I haven't tried this in ages be it Windows or Linux. And so I tried... The upgrade took longer than fresh install. I normally do vanilla install with minimal change to the configuration. So this is new to me. After the first reboot that's where the fun/pain begins. My first impression with Unity/Dash on Ubuntu 11.10 was unpleasant. Tried to run gedit, nothing happens. Tried to run Firefox, nothing shows up :(. It is good that CTRL+ALT+T works. So I have terminal. Running gedit from terminal works!!! So it must be Unity/Dash that's not working well here. I ha

 I was trying to play with Android platform on Ubuntu 11.04 but I hit a roadblock trying to run an emulated Android device using a non-root account. Did an strace but nothing stands out, not that I am an expert. Searching the web does not provide me with something really useful. Here few things interesting. Running an android virtual device as root works as expected. But running an android virtual device as a regular user halt/stops at a blank window for the emulated device. Running it verbose shows the following: //---- some of the strings removed ---- . QEMU options list: emulator: argv[00] = "./emulator-arm" emulator: argv[01] = "-android-hw" emulator: argv[02] = "/home/timus/.android/avd/e.avd/hardware-qemu.ini" Concatenated QEMU options:  ./emulator-arm -android-hw /home/timus/.android/avd/e.avd/hardware-qemu.ini emulator: registered 'boot-properties' qemud service emulator: nand_add_dev: system,size=0x4e00000,initfile=/home/ti

Part of Windows NTFS is to support multiple stream for a single file. Most applications only access the main stream and this is what's normally readable information. Multiple streams in a file is also being used by Internet Explorer to tag files download from the internet. The additional information, among other things, saves the zone information about the file. This is mainly used for security purposes like warn a user that certain files was coming from an untrusted sources. Unfortunately this also introduces complication to handling files from the internet specially if the source is trusted. There is a tool from Technet   which can remove the streams added by Internet Explorer. The first time I used the application I am seeing " Error deleting :Zone.Identifier access is denied " when operating on files that was extracted from a zip file. I was expecting that it should be able to handle those files as well. It seems like this might a bug of the streams.exe applicatio

To display currently logged on Windows user account privileges, do: c:\>whoami /priv ~y