Ahahahah

Nice… Novell owns unix. SCO owns nothing. Ahahah

Fake Steve sums things up here nicely.

Now… we need to get Novell the hell away from Microsoft.

I got home tonight and took the plunge. I upgraded my linux box to Dapper and set to trying to get XGL working. After a few false starts with configuring the two files I managed to get it up and running. I am, like everyone else making these “Dapper + XGL = LOVE” blog entries, totally in awe.

It looks so good. And that’s running on this old 2Ghz Celeron box with 384MB of ram and 4AGP with a nvidia GeForce FX 5200 128mb card.

This is the same machine that - no matter what the card - gives me 9fps in WoW. And it’s running XGL like a champ with less memory.

I can’t imagine how smooth it would be on a nice new P4 with a gig or more of ram.

Yeah.. I’m stuck on Dapper/Ubuntu.

Downloaded and installed SuSE 10.1 on one of my laptops. Seems to be working fine so far. Nice eye candy. I’m looking at getting MonoDevelop installed on here.

I noticed that there’s a new version of Google Desktop out. Work banned Desktop when version 3 came out a few months ago. In the article I read it mentioned that they’ve setup their multiple system search so you can disable it by blocking one port or traffic to a specific IP rather. I’m going to take the article into work tomorrow and see if they’ll lift the ban on Google Desktop. It’s too handy to do without.

I got this today trying to restart the work VMachine after it appeared to hardlock on me. I kept getting Unexpected Signal 7 errors until I deleted all but the vmx and vmdk files. Now it works great. Must’ve been an issue with the vmem file corrupting or something. VMWares site mentions memory issues in relation with the Signal 7 error.

Justin asked me again if I was going to Mind Camp 2.0 at the end of the month - Saturday April 29th - 30th. I’ve put it off because it’s going to be $25 a ticket. Though there is a rumor that there will be a kids area. He asked today and mentioned that Linux wasn’t going to be represented well because Linux Fest NW will be happening the same Saturday. Doh!

Looks like everyone from #smuggle is heading up to Linux Fest. I think I’m going to try and make the free time. Hrmmm do you think a two and a half year old is going to be interested in a linux convention?

Recently my computer at work blew up and I had to reinstall the OS and start from scratch. Backing everything up and starting over was a pain. I decided to minimize any down time in the future by installing Ubuntu and then running windows with virtualization. That way if some new policy - or just the nature of windows - caused my system to experience catastrophic failure again I could simply copy a folder containing a base image complete with dev environment into place and fire the VM back up in no time flat.

I’d used VMWare’s Workstation in the past and I’d heard that they’d recently released VMPlayer for free. Well that was certainly a good price. I downloaded that and while I was scrambling to find a copy of Workstation around the office so I could create my image someone mentioned that you can create images for VMPlayer - which supposedly, as the name suggests, only runs the VMachines but doesn’t create them.

After a bit of digging around I found all the steps I need to setup my new image and start loading windows. I’ll document the steps as follows - mainly so I don’t have to run around all over the place the next time I want to create an image and I’ve forgotten how. This is for installing and setting up on Linux. Namely Ubuntu Breezy.

1) Make sure you have gcc-3.4 and your linux kernel headers installed. (You should know how to work apt-get)

2) Grab VMPlayer from VMWare’s site and install it. I selected bridged network during the install, for what it’s worth.

3) Grab qemu from their site. You need version 0.8.x

4) Create a .vmx file. This is just a text file actually. You can modify an existing file - like the example at the end of this post - or go to this site to have one dynamically generated for you (http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html).

5)In the same folder run the following command to create the actual drive image: qemu-img create -f vmdk Drive1.vmdk 2G
(it’s all fairly self explantory. 2G is the size you want the image to be - expand to, it doesn’t take up that much room once created.)

6)Put your install media in the cd drive and select the .vmk from VMPlayer and it should begin installing after the POST. (Note: You can also PXE boot. I had problems with this but I think it was more the scripts the PXE image was trying to run and not VMPlayer)

7)Now you have to install VMTools to get your screen to size right and to get things running a little more smoothly. Download the Evaluation copy of VMWare Workstation. Extract the .iso file of your OS. So I extracted windows.iso. Mount the .iso and then get the files contained into your VM. Run setup and you’re done.

That’s it.

I’ve talked to a couple people and this doesn’t seem to be a violation of the usage agreements. Supposedly VMWare themselves have released a free tool for creating images. So this might all be moot. I believe VMWare Server was mentioned though I’m not sure if that’s the app that creates free images. It’s also been released for free. I’ll have to look into that. It was also suggested that an image created with VMWare’s tools might run better since it will make certain optimization settings.

BONUS:
Here’s an entry I found on making your physical machine a virtual machine. Just what I was looking for.. but about 1 week too late (post crash).

Until then.. happy imaging.

EXAMPLE .VMX BELOW:

(more…)

A lot of misc. data today:

Wireless:
Got the dish off the deck. It’s a Dish Network dish and not like the one in the O’Reilly Wireless Hacks book. Anyone have any experience with this model? The camera is back with my father-in-law (Who owns it) so I didn’t get any pictures.

MonoCast:
Got two decent microphones for MonoCast. They’re a normal earphone style jack though and not the three prongers. One says it’s a condensor mic but I thought those needed to be 3 prong and have phantom power. Guess not?

I’m still a little stumped about recording. I saw online where I can get a new $50 mixer on Amazon and a really nice mic for the same. But I don’t have the cash for that at the moment. I’m thinking I’ll need to get it though.

Going to get the developer interview for MonoCast this week. I swear!

Non-Profit:
Still haven’t gotten to my father-in-law’s non-profit needs. They’re still busy. But I’ve got another friend who will need some of the same work done. I’ve been thinking about Asterisk more and someone pointed me to Asterisk@Home. A nice live CD that apparently handles most of the setup for you.

Now I need to think about hardware since I don’t think they’ll want to switch to linux and run software phones. =) I may set this up at home to play with. I have a spare box that I thought Aiden might use. But he likes his laptop just fine.

WoW:
We ran SM last night and were with in minutes of finishing the last 3 bosses in the Cathedral and then we’d be able to get the Sword of Serenity. But then the guys we were questing with had to drop because the time they had at a net cafe expired. Doh!

Work:
I’ve had a lot of time to write this because due to policy changes at work that wiped out GoogleDesktop and iTunes access my computer ate itself. I put in a “Ticket” to get this resolved. But till them I’m running MonoLive on the box. I’ve checked our corp manuals and it doesn’t look like I “can’t” run linux. I may just dump windows. At least put it in a VM and not worry about crap like this anymore.

MonoCast Extra:
The MonoCast page is up now www.mono-cast.com. I might change the colors a bit but it works. The forums are… sparse. I’m going to fill those in more in the coming week.

That’s all for now.

Rev

We wound up at Joe Bar today in Seattle. As I was browsing along their table fo independent magazines / papers / and post card fliers I came across a familiar site. Ubuntu CDs! They looked to be Hoary cds. But at least they were out there. Right on. =)

As of the last issue of Linux Journal I’ve been a bit pissed off. They brought on a new Editor-in-Cheif, Nicolas Petreley. And he proceeded to lay into the Ximian guys, Mono, and Gnome. Going so far as to suggest that the Mono team are all plants by Microsoft to “…marginalize linux…” and that we should all be shot into space.

What a… dare I say it.. Fuck.

You look at this guy and he’s got dopey ass grumpy dwarf written all over him. You Google him and it brings back tons of rants about gnome/Mono/Linux and what he doesn’t like. What on earth is he doing at this magazine?

Then I’m confused. Because in that issue is an article on embedded DB40 with C#/Mono. But I’m don’t need to read this kind of crap from this Petreley guy. So I let my subscription laps and I let them know so.

Yesterday I got a complimentary copy of LJ and it again had a rant by Petreley about hating gnome. But it ALSO has a “Hello World” article by Robert Love on C#/Mono/GTK#. WTF?

In chatting with #Mono about this it was pointed out that most magazines run a couple months out on issues. So any changes he may bring to the magazine aren’t likely to be seen yet. So I’ll likely follow Stacia’s suggestion and just read through copies at the news stand until we see where the dust settles on this. But this jerk has REALLY put me off a magazine I otherwise enjoy.

I still don’t know why Don Marti was ditched.

UPDATE:

After going back and looking at the replies to my comment and that post on the linux journal site I’m just stunned at all the back biting in the community and support for Petreley. WTF?

Came across this post by Jason Olson on a Live CD designed just for playing and learning Go.

Stacia is talking about Go a bit since they play it at her favorite tea house. Maybe I’ll have to download this and try it out. Though it’s not like I don’t aleady have enough to do, eh?