VirtualBox

Installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu x64. At first there was a problem: starting Guest hung system. But this problem was eventually found as a BIOS setting. Avoid enabling Limit CPUID MaxVal in BIOS when using VMM. Now system is working fine. At first, VBox installed from Ubuntu PPA, but then removed that and installed as per this page. Either would probably work fine since problem was BIOS setting.

Now have Ubuntu x86 and x86 guests running on x64 system.

Clean systems are now available for testing programs in both x86 and x64.

- ww

This is a placeholder for the screenshot, and thumbnail for the application. No content here.

Find the application at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/debipack/

DebiPack thumbnail

DebiPack Screenshot

VirtualBox

Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:

• You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
• You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
• You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
• You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.

One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC,  and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.

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I’m trying to use Debreate 0.6.5-1 on Ubuntu 10.04 to build a package. I’m new to package building. Can you help with where I’m going wrong?

I have some comments on Debreate:

1. I can’t find a tutorial. Looks like a great program. But it’s not obvious how to use it.
2. I’d like an option that takes a whole tree – like Packin does – and builds the package from that. The features that are present look interesting, but are not clear and may not match my requirements, whereas, the Packin method would seem to work for all requirements.
3. Does Debreate build a .desktop file, or require that you have one? If it builds one that’s great. But I couldn’t get that far since the build failed. Not clear how to do a build, or what those paths are. Error is obviously not very helpful.
4. It’s complex to fill out all the tabs in Debreate, and I’m likely to want to build a package many times to test it. How about the ability to save ALL the information in the tabs to a file. I thought that’s what the control file was until I looked at it. Maybe the control file could contain “Comments” that contained the rest of the information if the control file is for something else. Maybe the control file is used by the package installer, but that was never clear, since the use of Debreate appears to assume that I know all about packages before I start.

Thanks,

ww

Update: Restart to clear the error below and then install the [recommended] driver. All is well as far as I can tell.

Using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Zotac GeForce 9300 Motherboard

attempted to install the [recommended] choice and it failed.

With a previous install, this worked, but then system failed to start graphics when it rebooted. But that system used to have an AMD video graphics driver installed, so I reinstalled the entire system and now this occurs.

How can I clean out the “archives” and try this again?

- windy

Thermaltake SD100 Case

The Jetway Atom D525 based system is running with Ubuntu 10.04.

The goals for the system are:

1. Employ an Intel Atom D525 processor – a high performance dual processor system.
2. Employ an Nvidia ION2 graphics processor designed for high performance netbooks / nettops. With DVI and HDMI display outputs.
3. Support DDR2 memory, so that I could use memory parts I already have rather than purchasing new DDR3 SODIMM memory.
4. Have a nice case with an internal power supply rather than an external power supply.
5. Run Ubuntu.

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Update:

1. Use regionset to set the region code if it’s not set.
2. Use gxine, which is a more robust dvd player application.
3. Now it plays most protected DVDs as well as unprotected ones.

Just installed Ubuntu 10.04 x64 on a mini-ITX system and would like to play DVDs. I’d like to use this as an entertainment system.

It plays non-protected DVDs just fine.

I have followed instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs

Including the part about chmod chgrp in the trouble shooting part.

But protected DVDs give me this error:

MoviePlayer Error

Here’s the package manager showing what’s installed that might be relevant:

DVD_Packages_installed (click for larger)

Any clues about what might be wrong?

Thanks,

windy

My Compaq Presario SR1920NX is running Ubuntu 10.04 and has media card slots.

Sure would be nice to insert a camera card and get the photos. And this works for the CF, and Memory Stick slots, but the SD card will not mount. (more…)

Back in 2008 I built a small VIA based system for a photo frame. Just checking on recent Mini-ITX system produced some interesting results. For about the same cost as the Blue-Diamond system back in 2008 the current systems have dual core Atom n510 systems with 2GB ram and 160GB SATA HD.

M350 Case

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So, when you install Karmic Koala [9.10], you still don’t get Windows File sharing [SAMBA], and setting it up is still a few undocumented and obscure steps. I covered this before for Gutsy, but things are a little different with Karmic, so I’ve redone the screen shots and directions.

If you could Google for “Ubuntu Samba Install” and get a page that told you what you wanted to know, then I wouldn’t do this post, but you don’t get a good page. This page is not that helpful. It looks it was written in the dark ages and it does not configure WINS so that you can PING the other systems on your network.

So here’s the real scoop, which is a modified version of this post I did for Gutsy.

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I just upgraded my Ubuntu Linux system to Karmic Koala [ 9.10 ] from Gutsy Gibbon [7.04]. As you can tell, it had been some time since I had upgrade. The good news is that the upgrades, through 8.04, 8.10, 8.04, to 9.10, went without a hitch, although they took over 3 hours.

And network file sharing, SAMBA or SMB, works without a hitch with no modifications to the built in configuration. Hurray!!!. You may remember a previous post about Ubuntu Not Playing Nice that showed the modifications that I had to do to BIND and to SMB configuration to get things to work. UPDATE: file sharing worked because I had fixed it in Gutsy. It still DOES NOT WORK OUT OF THE BOX with Karmic Koala.

See this post for how to start to make it work with Karmic [9.10].

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The PS3 is probably the best, and reasonably priced, Blu-Ray player on the market. Now that the HD format wars are over, it was time to get a Blu-Ray player

All the Windows hype about the “Media Editions” of Windows was never very clear. Apparently the Media Edition contains the features necessary to serve various files to the other entertainment systems in the home. Music and video players can play files from your desktop harddrive via these servers. Now with a new PS3, Media Services is becoming more useful. It will be interesting to play photos and videos from a server. The PS3 only has a 40GB harddrive and the file management features of the PS3 are very primitive.
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Ubuntu and Windows can work together on a network of course, using winbind and samba. But Ubuntu doesn’t come that way and the configuration of Samba needs some work to make it happen.

I’ve got my systems all file sharing now, but it took some doing since I’m not a Samba expert.
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When settings files are transferred as part of a program update, it may be interesting to assure that the files are not corrupted, or changed in such a way that the program is compromised. One can do this with XML Signatures.
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I recently purchased a 15″ PhotoFrame for what seemed like a great price of $250US. Of course now they have a WiFi version for $270. But I have a 17″ LCD monitor that wasn’t pulling it’s weight anymore, so I wondered how much trouble it would be to make a PhotoFrame from that.
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I chose Puppy Linux 3.01 and burned a CDROM. I’ve got Nero 8, so that part was a snap.

When I booted the CDROM, I got a much better result than for Ubuntu:

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The next problem is installing Puppy on the CF card.
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I’ve installed video and dvd support as discussed in this article in PCTech101.
At this point I’ve installed RPMs from the OpenSuse repository. http://software.opensuse.org/download/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/SUSE_Linux_10.1/

I had to install these rpms manually. YAST refresh of the site would never complete and it would then produce errors that the available RPM could not be found on the site. I downloaded them from the site and then installed them using rpm -Uhv.

These are the components that I have installed in the KDE mm suite. [click for larger image].

When I use any of the video players: Totum, Kaffein, Xine – the audio plays, but there is no video. Is there something else that I need? I get a black screen. No errors. The configuration for Kaffein indicated no errors.

Thanks,
ww

[Updated 10 Nov 2006]

I’ve just started learning how to use CVS on Linux with KDevelop, and there are enough gotchas that I thought it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned. I have used lots of source control in the past, but never CVS. RCS [ages ago], QVCS [windows front end for rcs], and VSS with Visual Studio.

Serious coding on Linux means that I need source control, so I had a look at what’s available. CVS seems to be the long-time standard for open-source projects. But SubVersion is new on the scene, relatively, so I took a look. But after a little study of a few doc pages, including this one, it looks like SubVersion has the nasty habit of suggesting, if not requiring, that your directory tree look in a special way for SubVersion use. That, and the fact that the SubVersion GUI client for Linux looks like it is in its pretty early days, has lead me to choose CVS and Cervisia. Any Open Source code base with a version above 1.5 has got to have seen a fair amount of use.
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I’m working on a Hex Display Widget under KDevelop.

Here’s a first version that begins to work. The options in the view menu work to change the display grouping.

ww

KHexWin test program