8thString

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

I have tried to install Android SDK (r12) to start playing with developing applications for the platform. For no reason, I picked Windows XP Sp3 as my development OS. Customary to getting started with new programming language or platform is to create the equivalent "Hello World". The sample program was small and easy to digest but running it for the first time was not a good experience. The default Android Virtual Device configuation as per the tutorial keeps crashing on Windows XP. This is the message that I am seeing: emulator-arm.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience Searching the blogosphere shows the following sites that standout: Emulator.exe not working properly ( stackoverflow ) Emulator crash on QVGA-L resolution ( Google Code ) The information from Stackoverflow did give a good hint as to what might be the issue. It seems like the Android SDK, specially the emulator, does not like spaces in the directories

Connecting from Windows Server 2008 R2 from Linux is made easy using rdesktop. But if you want to connect from your W2k8 box to another Windows box, as part of Windows security you are requested to send CTRL+ALT+END. Doing so does not work. So what's the key sequence to send secure attention sequence ? It is Control+Alt+End :(

It is time for me again to upgrade my Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhall) as a guest machine. I know I know I should use Linux in my host machine but my main work is basically using Windows so no escaping for me to  use this OS if I want to keep relevant in the workplace. Nothing is really earth shattering with the new release except for the much debated Unity. Other than that  same old same old in the Linux land. Below is my VirtualBox guest configuration: General Name: ubu1104 OS Type: Ubuntu System Base Memory: 1024 MB Processor(s): 1 Boot Order: CD/DVD-ROM, Hard Disk VT-x/AMD-V: Enabled Nested Paging: Enabled Display Video Memory: 64 MB 3D Acceleration: Enabled 2D Video Acceleration: Disabled Remote Desktop Server: Disabled Storage IDE Controller IDE Secondary Master (CD/DVD): Empty SATA Controller SATA Port 0: ubu1104.vdi (Normal, 80.00 GB) Audio Host Driver: Windows DirectSound Controller: ICH AC97 Network Adapter 1: Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (Bridged adapter, Realtek

Just installed Google Chrome v12 in openSUSE 11.4, everything seems great. But when I tried to run it nothing happens. I fired up konsole and this shows up timus@opensuse114:~/Downloads> google-chrome /usr/bin/google-chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory timus@opensuse114:~/Downloads> Looks like we have missing dependencies. Searching repo, like: zypper search libpng shows the following... S | Name                  | Summary                                                      | Type   --+-----------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------+--------   | libpng12-0            | Library for the Portable Network Graphics Format (PNG)       | package   | libpng12-compat-devel | Development Tools for applications which will use the Libpng | package   | libpng12-devel        | Development Tools for applications which will use the Libpng | package i | li

Linux Mint 10 (Julia) was released Nov 12, 2010 which feels like eons ago in Linux land. But hey I wanna play around with it before I jump to Linux Mint 11. Overall feel is good, installation was uneventful. The interface is pretty clean and well structured. This is what I like best with Mint. Anyway, this is old news but would like to keep a log of how the installation screen looks like. Below are the screen captures. Of course Linux distribution comes with thousands of utilities but I think the following are worth to mention: Linux kernel: 2.6.35 GNOME: 2.32.0 X org: 1.9.0 ~ts

Tools to clean up xml files abound in  the internet. But if you have a need to do batch processing of a bunch of files or just the plan joy of doing it from the command line then you can use xmllint . If you are using openSUSE, Ubuntu or Linux Mint 10 (and many other Linux distro) then this is come pre-installed. xmllint is flexible and have way more features than shown below but this should give you a taste of the tools usefulness. So to tidy up an xml file do: xmllint –format ugly.xml –output pretty.xml ~ts

I just got the time to play around openSUSE 11.4 which was released last March 10, 2011. From the outside, nothing much changed between 11.3 and 11.4 especially in the installation department (seems like they are exactly the same except for the new artwork/background). Why change if it is working? Without too much ado... here comes the screen grabs. Additional information: kernel: 2.6.37 KDE: 4.6.00 (4.6.0) "release 6" X org: 1.9.3 Have fun!!! ~ts

Font smoothing and subpixel rendering is not configured/enabled by default in OpenSUSE 11.4. It seems like there are patents (see link ) around subpixel rendering that prevents FOSS distros from enabling this be default. For smallish installation (home use or experimentation) this might not be too much of a deal but of course who really knows that the patent owner will do to enforce it. So if you are not comfortable doing this, please stop. First, need to download subpixel package by muzlocker . This can be done in a console. sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/muzlocker/openSUSE_11.4/ subpixel sudo zypper ref sudo zypper dup Next, create .Xdefaults, from a console do: cd ~ touch .Xdefaults kwrite .Xdefaults Then copy the following: Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.rgba: rgb Next up, create .fonts.conf file, can be created in console, like: cd ~ tou

Debian provides you with a lot of options in terms of how you setup/install your system. You can do it via GUI, through live CDs and of course the proven text based install. With Debian Squeeze out, it is time for me to install the latest that the Debian community has to offer. I find that the installation is very straightforward so I will just post screen captures where the user would need to interact with the installation for bare bones configuration. So here we go.... Figure 1. Installer Boot Menu Figure 2. Language selection Figure 3. Set your location, this is for time zone Figure 4. Keyboard map to use Figure 5. Set machine hostname Figure 6. Set domain name. For internal/home use, pick whatever you like Figure 7. Set root (administrator) password Figure 8. Verify root password Figure 9. Create user, this would be what you will be using most of the time Figure 10. Username for the new account Figure 11. Password for the new account Figure 12. Verify password for ne