Converting VirtualBox to VMWare

The new set of online, free courses available this spring emerged on http://www.coursera.org - among the ones I'm trying this spring is

Software as a Service: http://www.saas-class.org/

Instructions for setting up for labs appears on the book's website, http://saasbook.info.

I prefer running VMware-Fusion on my macbook-pro.   Armondo Fox (one of the instructors) was in the process of updating the script they use to configure an image, so  I dug around.  Converting their VirtualBox image might be a better approach.

I started with this post for starters (you can use it for reference if you like):

http://www.ctrip.ufl.edu/howto-convert-virtualbox-to-vmware

For reference, I'm running:

• macbook-pro, i7, with OS/X 10.6.8 (snow leopard)
• VirtualBox Version 4.1.8
• VMware Fusion 4.1.1
• VMware ovftool 2.1.0 (download from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/)

First, download a VirtualBox image for the class, as per recommended instructions on http://www.saasbook.info/bookware-vm-instructions.

Download the ovftool, unzip and install the package.  I made sure it was in my path with the following:

ln -s "/Applications/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool" ~/bin/ovftool

You can select whatever destination is appropriate and in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/).

  Export the Appliance

From the VirtualBox manager, select your SAAS image.

From the menu File => Export Appliance, get to the export settings.

Choose a location, change the name of the exported extension to .ovf and continue (none of the checkboxes should be selected).


  Edit the OVF


Open a terminal, and change to the directory where you exported your VirtualBox image (for me, the default was ~/Documents).  There are 3 sections I needed to fix up in the exported *.ovf file:

• the VirtualSystemType;
• the SATA Controller section;
• add an item option to the sound card section;

I dropped the Caption line out of the SATA controller area (this is not necessary).  That resource subtype is LSILOGIC.

  Convert

Now, in the terminal, convert the virtual image using ovftool (adjust the filenames as appropriate):

$ ovftool SAAS-edited.ovf SAAS-new.vmx

The conversion will run a while, showing a percentage indicator.

  Import

From your VMware Fusion Virtual Machine Library window, select:

• Create New
• Continue without disc
• Use an existing virtual disc
• Select your target conversion disk - in the example above, that would be SAAS-new.vmdk
• Select "Take this disc away from the machine currently using it" - since we just converted it, there is no one using this.

Finish the process with remaining defaults, and you should be ready to  boot your vm in VMware.  You will probably want to perform any system updates (Ubuntu), and then install VMware tools:


Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools

The new Unix

It's been a while since I posted. Unix / Linux - like systems are everywhere!

One of my new "linices" is a MacBook. It didn't take long to see it was much quieter than my Ubuntu desktop (or even the netbook I'd loaded Ubuntu on). At first, I use VNC to connect to my Ubuntu box, but later VirtualBox on the laptop.

I'll look at some of the smaller tools I used to accomodate "unix" usage of my macbook in a later post. It's been 6 months, and I would not have thought I'd be this satisfied. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is understanding what Windows license to get for a virtual box (so as to be able to make test within a windows environment). I was spoiled by having a pre-release version of Windows 7 (which expired). I do not currently have a pressing need to investigate windows - so I let it go, and remain mostly, increasingly unfamiliar with it.

There are a few mac-specific tools (scripts) I've found to accomodate my unix habits. I'll share those in the future.

In the meantime, welcome to the new unix-ish machine!

Ubuntu - ubdate bug... again...

The latest Ubuntu upgrade today broke my system.  At first, I thought it overwrote my /etc/fstab.   Further checks showed what really happened - UUID references stopped working properly:

mount  -t ext3 /dev/disk/by-uuid/....

failed to mount the correct disk partitions (instead, mounting something other than the uuid partition described in the fstab).

As it is,  /dev/disk/by-uuid  is populated with relative symbolic links to the referenced partitions,  e.g.

   /dev/disk/by-uuid/12345-xxxxxx  =>  ../../sda9

What was actually mounted was a similar partition number from a different disk -  in my case, for /home, and /local (root partition was - at least - correct).

I updated fstab to point to the raw devices directly (e.g. /dev/sda9, as appropriate).  As a defensive measure, I also now version my /boot/grub and /etc spaces  (I use mercurial; either git or mercurial would be equally simple).

Does somebody want to report this?  Maybe this is a more longstanding problem (?) that was triggered by todays  kernel update on my box.

*sigh*
[update: 5/4/2010]:

It seems there was another casualty of this update (I think):   Skype.   I only accidentally found out, as I have been using skype since.

However, yesterday, I installed a new computer (and skype on it).   Both skype's should work.   Quiting skype should log you out of that skype connection.   Today, I didn't get any calls on my Ubuntu skype.

I was puzzled at first, but after re-installing skype on Ubuntu, all works as expected. If logged into both, both ring when called. Logging out of one leaves messages in the other.

Since skype-ubuntu worked before re-installing, I expect that something in the libraries that affects sync with the skype server was either broken or severed (the Ubuntu upgrade involved a kernel upgrade). I can't tell what is at fault here, but it is not the first time I've noticed Linux-Skype behavior change, only to be repaired by a skype re-install.

Now, I will treat Skype (along with NVIDIA) as requiring a re-installation (at least, defensively) on kernel upgrades.

Upgrade Ubuntu (9.04 to 9.10)

Since last fall I had a terrible experience with upgrading Ubuntu from 9.04 to 9.10 (left my notebook unusable on the road), it was with great trepidation that, all these months later, I considered doing this.  I'd read a piece on "quickly", and tried it on my netbook (which has 9.10), so I wanted to try this for my desktop (particularly, to setup a template for other than bazaar, and other than Launchpad hosting - notably interested in using mercurial, and - because of Guido von Rossum's code review tool - Google Code).

I backed up my user spaces, swallowed hard and went forward.

I'm now running 9.10 on my desk.   There were a few problems, but nothing that apeared to hurt the install.  I also upgraded to the beta NVidia drivers (their performance seemed noticable on ION, so I thought I'd try them here too).

Here's the problems (such as they were) that did show up during the install:

• Notice about ghc6-doc failing to install (documentation for the Haskell compiler - I just removed it for now;
• Old rpm database for installed (?) rpm packages not usable with the new version;  (I just glanced at it - I think it must be empty... I'm not worrying about this)

I have (so far) noticed this:  when trying to bring up nautilus from a terminal window, I'm getting:

(nautilus:9916): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

The Official web2py Book

I use web2py, and we have had the PyCon registration system running under it for the past 2 years. It's an evolving framework - there are some really nice things about it. Lack of readily available documentation is one of the things that has been holding me back from considering running a sprint on the registration system (which itself could use some restructuring based on experience with the various users / people registering, sponsors, and so on).

Well, now there is an online web2py Book documentation (there has been a book, PDF, and online view of the PDF - but nothing this accessable) - and soon, I expect it to provide author / contributor logins, comments, etc. I'm really happy about this.

Have a look.

Google Chrome on Linux

My Ubuntu Firefox 3.5.*  seems to have been bogging down ... sometimes appearing to hang, no keyboard input for seconds...

This has gone on for a while.    It also has trouble I never bothered to track down with audio, particularly streaming video or internet radio/music (I use Opera to "just get around it.")

Last summer I spent some time building / debugging Google Chromium (the open source version of the browser) - so I know that was rapidly undergoing development for Linux.

A little while ago, I was happy to find Google Chrome Beta available for download for both my Linices.

Note:  I did find one problem reading SSL certificates with the 64-bit version (reported), but - now my keyboard is snappy, the websites that were picky (e.g. paying mortgage) and didn't like Firefox no longer complain.

I like the "feel" of Chorme, and did when I used it (partly in revolt of IE) in a corporate environment.

And now it's here.

Live USB Creator - CAUTION!!!

After having Ubuntu upgrade leave my netbook useless (I had to re-install), and - since this happened on the road when I really could have used my machine - I was determined (after doing a clean-install of Ubuntu 9.10)  to have alternate boot options on my netbook.

At least I'd have a way to keep working.

I also wondered if any of the existing installs would properly manage the touchpad (that is, allow disabling while typing).

I decided to install a small image of the original windows, an Ubuntu and a Fedora.

I set about to create various test live-images on USB so I could test what worked well, and then work out the backup and installation sequence I would need.

I started from a Fedora boot on my desktop.  Fedora images are created by Live USB Creator.   I could create other test images from Fedora with UNetBootin.

I had been using UNetBootin for a while - it seems pretty nice, automatically downloading a distro (or taking a path), and being pretty smart about selecting the USB it would configure.

I worked back and forth between Live USB Creator and UNetBootin.  At one point, I was testing a release candidate F12, and quickly used Live USB Creator (after using UNetBootin for the last several creations, including some USB ones).

Ach!   Live USB Creator picked a disk with my home directories, and DELETED user areas before I realized what it was doing.  VERY NASTY.

Beware!

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade quashes audio

The other night, as I usually do, I accepted a slew of Ubuntu updates.  My audio was gone afterwards.

After some searching, this thread proved helpful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449  but I did need to figure out what an appropriate ASLA driver would be.

The soundcard list on the ASLA site showed two options; I went for the HDA one, since

lspci -v

showed HDA from the NVIDIA driver on my ASUS board, that is to say I needed the snd-hda-intel  driver.   Not intuitive, but it worked... sort of...

I followed the instructions on the ubuntuforums link to build from sources, compiling the snd-hda-intel driver with the help of module-assistant (building couldn't have been easier).

The volume control panel has trouble opening (I'm not sure if this is because of the debug build).   Basic sound works, but my Logitech headset is no longer seen, and so my skype is out of commission (does not make me happy - my phone of preference suddenly was made inoperable!).

UPDATE:
It appears that the generic 10de NVIDIA HDA (OSS mixer) sound device, if selected from the volume control hangs the volume control - and you can (?) never get back to it.  The applet is gnome-volume-control:  and when it hangs, you can't even select another window, do anything at all.  CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a normal terminal login allows you to find and kill that process.  Then you can get back to the X-Win screens (CTRL-ALT-F7).

I tried installing from the Ubuntu distribution (as per the Ubuntu Forums);  I tried building from the alsa sources from Ubuntu;  I tried building from the ALSA latest sources (all drivers) from the ALSA-Project.   I tried both before, and after (repeatedly) removing pulseaudio.   I tested, looked thru the lsmod list on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10) install.

As one last ditch, I'm going to try to remove what the Ubuntu Forums suggest, get it back to distro with apt-get, and then build the entire distro ASLA sources, and see what that gets me.

cd /usr/src; sudo tar xjvf alsa-driver.tar.bz2; cd modules/alsa-driver
sudo ./configure  --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) --with-cards=all --with-isapnp=yes --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes
sudo make

I thought about removing a little more than the Ubuntu Forums say - e.g. libasound2 and libasound2-plugins - but apt-get pulled far too many libraries into the mix with that - close to 300.   For now, I'll just try the standard thing the forum suggests:

 sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

 sudo apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

 sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Next, I'll install the ASLA driver as I built it over this:

sudo make install

and reboot...

It looks like pulseaudio doesn't know what to do.  I have rhythmbox playing music through speakers, while I try a test call with skype.   I can initially succeed in having the outputs separate, but I get no input through the skype app from the headset microphone.  If I try, the music shifts into the headset (out of the speakers) and, on a song transition, back again.

Finally I'll try what I posted here in the first place about removing pulseaudio:

killall pulseaudio
sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio
sudo aptitude install esound
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

It looks like this works.  There is a bit of a caveat: the pulseaudio server seems to be running;  I had to su (sudo was not sufficient) to stop it  (pulseaudio --kill).  It looks like I'd created a .asoundrc file which started up pulseaudio; if you have one, you will want to comment out any pulseaudio lines in it, or (as in my case) remove the file (pulse was the only stuff in it).  Everywhere in /etc  it is set to NOT start on startup, but it is there, and can run, for example, when fired by the menu item Applications->Sound & Video->PulseAudio Volume Control.  It may be useful to remove these applications

UPDATE:
Well, I have restored Skype (more fundamentally, usb Logitech headset recognition on this installation) - this seemed to be accomplished by building / installing _all_ the sound drivers.

For future fallbacks, I can (still) use skype on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10), or my Fedora-11/64 install.

This was way more work than I would ever want a normal system update to cause me.  Perhaps its time to think of a simple mercurial versioning of update actions, perhaps limited to the last 10 revisions (or so) - a rollback system like, for example, Windows has.

Anybody up for designing this for the Linux community?

HP mini 311

I wanted long battery life (something I could write with on trips, the train), and something to run Linux on.  Most of the netbooks out this summer (2009) had screen resolutions which didn't suite them for making presentations at meetings, conferences, etc.  Even worse, they seemed to be most usable with so called "Netbook Remixes"  of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora) which tried to make presentations more readable on the small, low resolution screens.

The 311 offered an NVidia chipset, an HDMI output port, and better resolution, while still holding reasonable battery life (and - at least for my preferences - the HP had a usable keyboard).

To save money, I got a basic, in-stock version from Amazon (no shipping costs, etc. made that the best cost option).

I had a Hitachi Travelstar 7200 320G drive, which happens to be conservative for standby power (better than the 160G drive that came with the 311).   I added 2G RAM, which brought the total RAM up to 3G.

Access to the drive and RAM areas couldn't be nicer - see http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/HP-Mini-311.htm for some nice pictures.

I started out with a clone of my Ubuntu 9.04 system (a dd copy) - it seemed to work and update fine, but the touchpad would not be recognized by the mouse driver.   What I mean is the touchpad worked fine, but there was no "touch" controls in Ubuntu, so that tap-to-click was always active, and made any typing a significant challenge (as the cursor would jump about quite readily... really, it's a great touchpad).   In Windows, I was able to disable the tap-to-click feature, and then could both navigate and type usefully.

I tried all the "regular" suggestion on the web to get the touchpad recognized, but to no avail.  On one trip, I let Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) "upgrade" overnite, hoping this might help.  It made my system totally unusable (wouldn't even boot - no keyboard; a real disappointment on a meeting trip!).   When I got home, I did a "fresh" install of Ubuntu 9.10, and that is what I run now - it worked fine, but did not help with the touchpad.

Finally, I found a workaround here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1316361

I added these aliases:

alias touchoff='sudo modprobe -r psmouse'
alias touchon='sudo modprobe psmouse'

This successfully disables the touch-pad altogether, but leaves USB mice working fine.   I added a little IOGear Bluetooth 2.1 USB Micro Adapter (model GBU421; I got mine at CDW).  My favorite mouse worked right away.

The above mentioned thread seems to now have some working / hacked version of psmouse (with added hardware identifier), so no doubt there will be better solutions soon.   For now, the aliases give me the control I want, without any worries about upgrade conflicts or problems.

Skype on Ubuntu Jaunty

I wanted to get skype up on my box; more and more people from open source forums around the world are on skype, and sometimes it's just easier to talk than IM.

I picked a USB headset from Logitech (ClearChat Comfort USB), and downloaded the newest Skype Beta (2.1 - Sept. 2009) For Ubuntu 8.10+, 32 bit (I'm running a 32 bit Ubunty, a 64 bit Fedora).

I could not seem to get skype to send sound out to the USB headset, so after some stumbling around forums and various suggestions, here's what worked for me.

As per the Troubleshooting Skype section on ubuntu.com/community/skype, I followed the suggestion (for Intrepid/8.10 there) to remove pulseaudio and install esound.

killall pulseaudio
sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio
sudo aptitude install esound
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

This seemed to work at first - I got menu choices in the skype options->sound devices page, and was able to get sound out of the headset, but getting recording to work (and trying all the device options) was not working.

I'd checked the volume control to make sure the record levels were set and not muted for the Logitech USB headset. I set System->Preferences->Sound to Sound Capture from the Logitech USB Headset (ALSA) - I left the rest of the device settings at Autodetect. I decided to try the gnome-sound-recorder (applications->sound & video->sound recorder), and that pointed me to which of the Logitech listed devices worked. I tried this in skype (no luck). I then tried recording with Audacity, and that gave me the needed hint: First, I had just one device (the same one) set for both playback and record in Audacity, yet it failed to record. Changing the settings from stereo to mono fixed that. The hint being - same device, same channel in skype - and that did the trick.

I made a test call, and then a test call to a "real" phone - report of sound was "better than any other phone in my home". Ok. Skype, here I come.

Firefox and Advertising sites...

I have noticed my browser becoming sluggish, bordering on inactive - this is Firefox 3.5.2 (mostly I notice it on Ubuntu's Firefox, but this is confirmed, definitely true for Fedora's Firefox too - worse: it seems to be doing lots of disk activity, slowing down the entire pc; killing intellicast.com site restores sanity...).

It's subtle - at first I thought it might be a memory leak, or a loop in Firefox, but I noticed that the weather page I usually keep open (intellicast.com) - if I kill the page, the responsiveness comes back, and the system monitor shows CPU cycles (pegged when this happens) fall immediately. It doesn't happen when you open intellicast; sometimes it happens in a few minutes (~15); sometimes after an afternoon. Because of this, I suspect it has something to do with javascript from an advertiser site (rather than something in the core intellicast site).

It's annoying. It's beyond annoying...

Humor: from Windows XP to Ubuntu

Be sure to watch the last 10 seconds of the video ;-)

Ubuntu Kernel Update & NVIDIA Driver

Earlier, I reported that Fedora failed miserably on booting w/ a new kernel with the NVIDIA graphics driver installed (which I want, for two-headed desktop).

I hadn't seen a problem with Ubuntu Kernel update, but that appears to only have been true for one update - but not the latest. The good news is Ubuntu detects and reports that NVIDIA complains, and nicely defaults to the default driver (and single-headed mode).

Since, effectively, Ubuntu (and it appears Debian in general) does not have a non-graphic multi-user mode akin to init 3, here's what I did:

• Be sure to have _some_ nvidia driver available;
• exit Gnome window manager:

• sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

--------
UPDATE:
As of kernel 2.6.28.15, it doesn't appear that gdm stop works (no terminal). This, however, seems to work for me:

• sudo telinit 1
• (login as root)

Alternately, if booting (Ubuntu, grub2), and you want to come up with the boot menu, then right-shift should get you there:  pick recovery mode, and boot into shell to accomplish the following.

--------

• run the NVIDIA run script with the update option; this will get a newer driver from the NVIDIA ftp site if one is available:

• sudo sh NVIDIA*.run --update

--------
UPDATE:
If running under telinit 1, NVIDIA driver will complain about potentially not being able to find files when searching in "init 1" - continue anyway (telinit 1 is not quite init 1 on other systems). When coming back up, you can telinit 3. I've found external USB hubs (e.g. printers, drives) are not re-initialized, so I prefer to reboot (but you can quickly telinit 3 to check video settings first, reboot later).
--------

If you came up graphical in Ubuntu before you discovered a problem w/ the kernel interface for the NVIDIA driver, then Ubuntu changed your config. When you come up (gdm start, or reboot if you like) then run the NVIDIA settings program to configure your monitors as you like as root:

• sudo nvidia-settings

You need to do this as root to save the configuration for future boots.

VirtualBox for Smart Phones

There are more and more smart phones with linux kernels in their base. These are quickly going to become search / info / utility appliances and, I predict, replace a significant part of everyday personal computer use (you will still want a computer to do work, but for messaging, searching, simple connectivity that is / will be overkill, even in the face of netbooks).

It follows that the development process, then, of web applications (and other utility applications) will need to become less (not more) specialized. The good news - this will slowly come. The beginnings are starting to show up.

Android Phone "Live CD", usable in VirtualBox;
Palm PRE SDK (also using VirtualBox);

The Blackberry SDK - J2ME development (Eclipse); currently their tool say they require windows for their MDS RAD tool;

iPhone SDK - Requires Mac OS/X, and last I read approval from Apple before you can distribute your apps;

As you can see, this leaves you with 4 different development approaches, the last two providing their own emulators. The first three have plugins for Eclipse (so that is at least some common development feel). The first two can use Linux for a development environment (in fact, Android's "standard" development environment has been Ubuntu). The Blackberry development environment seems to be Windows only, but you _could_ run that under virtualbox on Linux, possibly with the Windows-7 Release Candidate.

So at the root, the common environment seems to be a small overlap of Palm-Pre & Android, although I don't think the development approaches are similar. In short, providing seemless services for the new "mobile pocket PC" (e.g., smartphones) is a steep hill. Clearly, this will have to change at some point. Right now, there seem to be 4 competitors for this space. A similar shootout is taking place for RIA client end, with Flex/Flash vs. JavaFX (?) vs. Json (is SVG anywhere in this mix?). That's a lot of choices for a developer of end-to-end solutions for this space.

One interesting item: Android has a native scripting environment, which (among other things) gives you access to phone facilities through a natively executed Python interpreter.

More on this later.

Another Fedora Kernel Update

I followed suggestions on the Fedora forums - now when rebooting after a kernel update, the fastest way to re-run the NVIDIA driver install (and thus a recompile of kernel interfaces):

• at grub boot menu, "a" to alter kernel options;
• add '3' (without quotes) to the end of the line to come up init 3
• login as root, and run the NVIDIA installer (with the --upate option, it will check if a newer NVIDIA driver is available from the nvidia ftp site, and get it)
  
• reboot (actually, could probably just init 5...)

That's it. Not great, but simple enough, short of creating an automated script to just re-compile the kernel interface. This will do for now.

Fedora Library Conflicts

Today, I attemped a recommended system update on Fedora-11.

I had a conflict between a i586 and an x86_64 qt library. Not knowing where the 586 library came from, I yum remove'd it - it removed the following dependencies:

Running Transaction
Erasing : 1:qt-4.5.1-13.fc11.i586 1/5
Erasing : 1:qt-x11-4.5.1-13.fc11.i586 2/5
Erasing : phonon-backend-xine-4.3.1-6.fc11.i586 3/5
Erasing : phonon-4.3.1-6.fc11.i586 4/5
Erasing : skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586 5/5

Removed:
qt.i586 1:4.5.1-13.fc11

Dependency Removed:
phonon.i586 0:4.3.1-6.fc11 phonon-backend-xine.i586 0:4.3.1-6.fc11
qt-x11.i586 1:4.5.1-13.fc11 skype.i586 0:2.0.0.72-fc5

The system update then worked.

I guess with 64-bit Fedora, you have to find a 64-bit skype (?).

Not sure.

Virtual Windows on Linux

While looking for options to load my Garmin from Ubuntu, I came accross a link to Windows-7 Release Candidate. The activation looks to be good for about a year.

I have experience with both VMWare and VirtualBox hosting Linux on Windows (Android development). I've always wanted to give this a try the other way around (but wasn't eager for the cost of another Windows license).

A Windows-7 Customer Preview of the release candidate is available this month, so I gave it a try. The good news is it's to be active thru May of 2010.

I got VirtualBox 3.0.0 first for Ubuntu 9.04, following the instructions for adding it to the sources list. I added the source list, apt-get update and then searched for the virtualbox-3 version the site spoke of.

My Ubuntu installation is a 32 bit (even though my hardware is 64 bit), so I installed the 32-bit version of VirtualBox, as well as a 32 bit version of Windows-7. After installing VirtualBox, a reboot showed it in the Applications->System Tools menu.

Registration worked, I made a new Windows-7 "disk", allocating 1024M RAM to it, and then added the Windows-7 installation CD iso image to this "machine." I was now ready to "boot" this virtual instance. Windows installation worked fine. Next step was to reboot and update windows. On my setup (at least) the cursor-capture (right control) key doesn't seem to get passed back to VirtualBox once Windows-7 is running (it will before windows boot has completed, it seems), so a priority was to install the Virtual Box Guest additions from the Devices Menu. Installing this CD image showed it mounted on Windows (from the Start menu, Computer). I ran theVboxGuestAdditions-x86 version, rebooted Windows and now my mouse was no longer captive.

UPDATE: Note that for the VBoxGuestAdditions to correctly install on Windows-7, you need to boot Windows-7 in "safe" mode: press F8 at boot to get a menu giving you the option. Otherwise, Windows will not allow some of the files to be installed.

Browser, network, updates, sound, etc. all worked.

On Fedora-11 x86_64, again things are a little more complicated.

From www.virtualbox.org I installed the Fedora-11 64 bit version (an RPM file), and downloaded the 64 bit version of Windows-7 Preview (the release candidate). Reboot of Fedora-11, and VirtualBox appeared on my Applications->System Tools menu, but wouldn't boot (critical error). Firing it up from a shell (VirtualBox) showed a permissions problem on startup. On Fedora-11 the first userid is 500; on Ubuntu it's 1000. Since I have a dual-boot setup, and since I share the source (and document) areas, I changed my userid under Fedora. VirtualBox makes an IO directory, /tmp/.vbox - BUT incredibly it does not create it with the current invoking user's ID, but with (!) 500. Chown (with group = vboxuser) of this directory solved my startup problem (good). Unfortunately I'll have to do this each time I boot Fedora (it's tmp! I've reported this). Once running, installing Windows-7 preview worked fine; I followed the same procedures as for Ubuntu. On the Fedora Vbox, I could not get sound to work - whatever combination of vbox settings I used, Windows-7 did not see an audio device under the 64-bit setup & Fedora.

Other than that, browsing, windows update, playing videos (youtube, etc.), songs, all the fundamentals seem solid. On the 64 bit side, Adobe's Flash player didn't seem to be able to load automatically in Win-7 - I had to manually select a 64 bit windows (Vista) option for the browser install, and then it worked. Performance on both seems pretty darn good.

Another way to test web applications. I've built Google Chrome for Linux, but it's still in Alpha. Now I have Chrome, Firefix, Safari, IE8, and Opera running under windows.

As I fire these up, and try to make some links, I'm seeing the control key in VirtualBox 3 doesn't seem to come thru to the applications in the guest, e.g. CTRL-C / CTRL-V to copy / paste don't seem to work at all (I have to right-click COPY / right-click PASTE). Checking this with copy/paste attempt from within wordpad confirms; only the 'c' of a CTRL-c keypress makes it through; menu pasting pastes something from the paste buffer from before (outside windows).

Pidgin for online communications...

In my corporate environment, I had a couple of choices to cross over all the various messaging and internal, secure chat rooms, as well as outside connection for occaisional things like PyCon IRC meetings.

I used several things, eventually settling, because of breadth of coverage in one place, on pidgin.

Fedora-11 seems to keep up-to-date with pidgin releases (it just updated me this past weekend), but Ubuntu does not - so I followed the instructions for adding the repository, as shown on http://www.pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/

So far, so good - my Ubuntu now stays up-to-date with pidgin, albeit straight from the pidgin sources. If I have problems, I'll have to post bugs directly to pidgin.

nslookup?

For some reason, nslookup was not working on Fedora-11 today...

Some of the symlinks were illformed for the libraries.

$sudo yum reinstall bind-libs

seemed to solve the problem. The re-install was about 1/2 the size of the uninstall... not sure what was up.

Fedora Browsers

Blogger dot com complained of an error, post failing when I tried posting from IE6 under wine; apparently that post happened anyway.

As follow-up, when I tried to install IEs4Linux using it's gui, wine failed on rundll - wine complaining:


This is with wine 1.1.23 (from Fedora).

The first time through, the gui installer caused Gtk to complain - something about some code in a .c file that should never be reached... I could not get this to repeat, so it must be something about file creation / tests / etc.

I ran the installer with no-qui, and was able to get IE6 working. I tried making this post with it (and in fact had completed the post content) - but when trying to make the post, blogger encountered a submission error, and IE6 didn't keep a cache - turns out the submission happened anyway.

So, I went to FIrefox to redo the post - only to find it there.

Not sure how useful testing with this kind of IE will be - it looks like basic browsing and rendering are useful.

The beta IE7 install fails to reach anything; I've given up on it. For grins, I installed the IE5.5 (not sure what I'd want that for).

Perhaps I'll try this over on my ubuntu, where - if memory serves me - I have wine 1.1.24 running (and it's a 32 bit environment).