M'log

Download Red Hat VirtIO drivers for Windows

2009-11-26T20:58:00.004+01:00

Heh. I've been on the CC list for #489376 for quite some time. Actually, I had all but completely forgotten about it. I stumbled into it today, when browsing through Red Hat's bugzilla, searching for information about some other problems, and I clicked on a link that I had clicked a thousand times. It was a link to the Red Hat 5.4 KVM documentation. And whaddayaknow: even though the bug report is still marked as RELEASE_PENDING and even though the WHQL page at linux-kvm.org still lists a couple of zip-files, the drivers are already in what is called the Windows Server Catalog. So, what are you waiting for? Go test them!

Problem is, I have no idea whatsoever, on how to download them :-) Maybe I should touch a Windows box every now and then.

The fglrx debacle, or: the future of proprietary drivers in Linux

2009-08-18T13:27:00.004+02:00

First of all, let me state here once and for all that I appreciate ATI's and AMD's effort in bringing the Catalyst drivers to Linux, how meager the quality of the driver might be: if it wasn't for ATI and AMD, we would have nothing at all. And you have got to applaud AMD's releasing of documentation to the radeonhd project.

Now, to the point. It has taken the fglrx guys almost 6 months to bring 2.6.29 support and now that they did bring it, it does not work on the one distro that uses a 2.6.29 kernel: Fedora 11.

Apart from that, it seems to be pretty hard to code the fglrx driver towards the new X architecture in F11. I'm in a bit of a rush now, but to me it seems that this proves the days of the proprietary driver and coming to an end. The pace with which open source software develops will in the end too fast for most hardware manufacturers. The only thing that remains then is to depend on open source projects to provide drivers, like radeonhd. If AMD would put a bit more effort in supporting the radeonhd project, even with coders possibly, I feel radeonhd would be up to par in a relatively short time. And that would mean a more stable, more portable, more rapidly developing, more open driver for ATI graphics cards. Now, who would not want that?ra

Brein succeeds in blocking TPB in the Netherlands

2009-07-31T08:36:00.011+02:00

Brein just scored a major win against The Pirate Bay, as a Dutch court ruled that TPB had to block Dutch users from the website. (Linked sites mostly in Dutch; Brein is the Netherlands' equivalent of the RIAA, mixed with the MPAA and then some.)

I am not amused. Not only is Brein's move utterly futile, it will further alienate users, it is censorship and it is showing again that the entertainment industry refuses to enter the 21st century.

Let me explain myself.

First of all, Brein's move in having TPB blocked is futile in their grand scheme of things. Why? Because TPB is only one of such sites. And there are not a few of them, there's dozens of them and with each one that goes down and two new ones will pop up. Thus what Brein is doing, is showing it's overlords that it is doing it's job. No more, no less. Futile.

What is Brein's job anyway? It is to protect the rights of the entertainment industry. Let's see how much protection they already have and how much they actually need. To start with, consumers in the Netherlands pay a levy on most digital and analogue media to Stichting Thuiskopie. With prices of about €0.60, currently the largest part of the price of an empty DVD, is Thuiskopie's levy. Thuiskopie is supposed to compensate artists for the fact that is actually legal in the Netherlands to make a copy of original media for personal use. Good idea? Well, partly. Biggest problem is that Thuiskopie doesn't actually function that well. As Thuiskopie receives money from consumers like you and me, it has proved to be unable to pay out the compensation moneys to artists.

Making a copy of an original work for personal use - the so-called 'thuiskopie' - is considered fair use and the entertainment industry is properly compensated for it. Or at least, it could be, if it's Stichting Thuiskopie would be able to do half a decent job. But it isn't and that really is not my problem.

Now for how much protection the entertainment industry actually needs or should get. First of all, let me put forward that I think that the artists are the ones who should receive my cash if I decide to buy music. If we take a look at how we tended to spend our money on entertainment products in 2008, we'll see that the music industry's profits over 2008 are actually up! So much for the sad stories about how profits decline and artists are left without income due to piracy. But wait, there is more: we actually spent less on recorded music and more on live performances. That is really interesting, because most artists get the better part of their income from the concerts they give and much less so from selling CD's. Our money actually landed where it is supposed to over 2008! Good news!

Not for record companies of course. They are the ones who reap the profits of CD sales. But still, the music industry as a whole was up last year, so I'd say there is protection enough.

I think knowledge of the above is bound to drive consumers away from the traditional record companies as most consumers will view it as unfair to first pay a compensation levy and then hear over and over that what you do is wrong. I even think that the levy is regarded as having paid for the right to copy and download digital works. Even though I understand that's not quite what the levy was intended for, I do understand the reasoning.

Finally, and I consider this to be the worst part of the outcome Brein's successful campaign, blocking a website is morally wrong. It is censorship. For the benefit on a few companies, who failed to update their business model for too long, we are tampering with freedom of speech! Freedom of speech, people, is sacred. That is why we try not to interpret it too much. Freedom of speech is as absolute and broad as is, well, as is possible.

Their are a few exceptions and even over those exceptions there has been (and still is) a lot of debate. Things that are utterly criminal, like outings of child abuse or enticement to terrorist activity are part of those exceptions and thus illegal, and -imho- justly so. But even attempts to outright insult another person (or organisation, or religion, or whatever) have to be pretty harsh to not be covered by the freedom of speech. Which, too, is good, imho.

What we see happening now, is that for the profitability of a few companies with nearly obsolete business models, we start accepting censorship of the internet. Profitability can never, ever come in the way of free speech.

I know a lot of people will now object with 'but showing links to download copyrighted material is not covered by the freedom of speech'. Ah, but it is. At least, according to article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which goes above most law in European countries. Needless to say, that most constitutions of western countries implement the freedom of speech as well.

Reading that text, it seems that the freedom of speech and the freedom to express oneself are (almost) absolute. The ECHR does allow for some restrictions, but those restrictions should always be '[...] necessary in a democratic society'.

Now ask yourself: who is society?

Disclaimer: I hold the opinion that censoring is almost always morally wrong. However, I do not refuse to pay for music, video or other forms of digital entertainment. I do refuse to have large corporations dictate law and allow censorship of the internet on their behalf. Yes, the internet is an anarchy. Let's keep it that way as much as possible, because that was the root of it's success. Spend your money on concerts instead of CD's. Bring it to the ones that actually make the music.

vmware-any-any-patches: the one list, part two

2009-07-06T20:52:00.001+02:00

Trying to get VMware Workstation 6.5 and / or VMware Player to work in Fedora 11? I hear this thread on the VMware forums will help you out.

I switched to KVM months ago myself. Consider this a courtesy update to my 'one list' for vmware-any-any patches ;-)

Prism on Fedora

2009-05-11T10:30:00.002+02:00

Finally: a new version of Prism.

I have been doubting whether to make rpm's for prism for my Fedora install or waiting for the Prism team to release a version of the extension that works on the Firefox 3.5 beta's.

I'm glad the team released the extension before I got to deciding to build the application myself. Saves me from a lot of work and it *finally* gives me the option of having a gmail menu option in Fedora :)

Edit: you might want to have a link to go with this post

Linux pro trying out an Windows 7RC installation

2009-05-05T15:01:00.006+02:00

In a previous life, I worked for a huge Dutch IT consulting corporation. This was back when I started in IT (well not really, but at least I didn't have any certifications), so they required me to go on MCSA training. I completed all the courses and exams successfully, so apart from being pretty well qualified on Linux, I am actually an MCSA on Windows 2003, too. Don't tell anyone, I'd really like this to remain a secret between us.

So anyway, they see to keep your friends close, but enemies closer. Therefore I decided to give the RC for Windows 7 a spin. Not really, of course, but in a KVM virtual machine on my laptop running Fedora 11 to my full satisfaction.

I downloaded the ISO, got me a serial and read the requirements. The first thing I noticed, was the fact that the system requirements aren't all that steep. I'm not sure what that means for the performance inside a VM (and actually performance in general, remembering the Vista class action suit), but then again, I'm only test driving it.

What did stand out in the requirements was the fact that I had to have 16GB (what??) available in free disk space. Now, I do have space. Lots of it. But 16GB? What the heck does an OS without any extras (like Office applications, photo editing software, etc.) need 16GB for?

Then, whence installing, I noticed the installer partitioning my disk with a 100MB partition of the "System"-type and the rest as the "primary" partition. I'm pretty sure from my endeavors with fdisk, that there is not such thing as a partition of the "System"-type. I'm downloading a Knoppix image right now to find out what Windows thinks is a partition of the "System"-type. Maybe it's /boot? ;-)

There is no 'Use whole disk' or 'Do this automatically for me' button, but the 'New' button functions more or less as one of those.

The actual "Installing Windows" screen shows a couple of steps, which take a while to go through but nothing extreme. There is something listed called 'Installing features', though, which made me wonder what the other 'Install' items were doing.

Then there is a reboot, and 'Setup is updating registry settings' and 'Setup is starting services' screens.

After that, we're back in the "Installing Windows" screen, where 'Completing installation' is highlighted. Processor is at 100%, screen flickers a bit, hardware detection going on.

After another reboot, 'Setup is preparing my computer for first use' and I am asked for my username and a password (and a password hint? what?) in a second screen. In the next screen we enter the serial. Apparently, MS still has an Activation scheme going on, because Windows 7 wants to 'activate' itself when I'm online. Mmh. I don't really like that stuff. So let's not, for now.

I like the fact that an update scheme is presented to the user, which makes security a more prominent issue in Windows. Timezone picking is next, followed by a computer location selection screen. I wasn't familiar with this. I am supposed to pick from 'Home network', 'Work network' and 'Public network'. I imagine this affects default firewall settings and stuff, but a bit more detailed description of the three options would have been nice for people that have a clue and would like to know what happens under the hood. What is good, is that 'Public network' (and thus high secutiry, I think) is recommended. I select 'Home network'.

After this, setup goes on 'Preparing my desktop' and there we are. Notice there is no last reboot in between. The desktop instantly made me think 'hey, this looks like KDE4'. It has a broad taskbar and huge icons, just like default KDE4.

IE asks me what search provider I want to use, which is good. It then start babbling about 'accelerators' and 'web slices'. I am clueless about what those are, so I turn them off. CTRL-L still acts retarded on Windows, sadly.

The layout of the control panel looks cluttered, but there is a search option, so I finally got to see what this UAC thing is, everybody was so mad about.

At this point, I started to loose interest. I tried a reboot to check boot speed and I must say, Windows 7 boots pretty quick. It lost my network settings though, again asking me the 'Home network', 'Work network' etc. question.

Final remarks: the KVM soundcard, that works fine in Windows XP, doesn't seem to work. The actual amount of disk space Windows 7 takes is well over 7GB. I don't know what the 16GB requirement was for then. Otoh, 7GB? For an operating system without office applications and such? What? That's insane! There's the system32 directory holding almost 2GB, but the big whopper is the winsxs directory with almost 4GB. I read this directory has something to do with compatibility and resolving problems with dll hell, so it probably has its uses, but 7GB for an OS? Wow.

I rebooted once more into the Knoppix Live environment. The 'System'-type partition is just a normal type '7' HPFS/NTFS filesystem, just like the main partition. The difference is that the 'System'-partition is bootable, which actually *does* make it a bit like a /boot partition. Oh well, copying is a form of flattery.

Ok, enough played. I'm shutting down the VM and going to do some actual work here.

Monoless Fedora? UPDATED

2009-04-30T21:28:00.006+02:00

Mono, mono, mono. If there has been one project to divide the free software community over the past couple of years, it is Mono. By itself, Mono is just an implementation of C#, the CLR and some more programs making up the .Net toolchain. C# and the CLR are not much different from Java in concept. Both provide a cross-platform programming language and runtime environment, both are licensed under an open source license. No problems so far.

The trouble starts where Mono actually attempts to provide compatibility between Windows and other operating systems. A pure Mono application like Tomboy is unlikely to be harmed by this. The problematic part arises from the fact that Microsoft hasn't submitted all parts of the .Net stack to ECMA. So attempting actual compatibility can become dangerous. Microsoft doesn't exactly have a clean track record on the field of fair competition, so one has to wonder whether it is likely for Microsoft to use its patents to stop the Mono project when it becomes too successful.

Remember, in this context, that Microsoft has promised not to sue Novell and its customers for infringement with regard to Mono. According to Miguel de Icaza, this promise extends to Novell, its customers and its developers. When we read this the other way around, it does *not* extend to Mono users who are not affiliated to Novell. This scares me. You'll have to decide for yourself in howfar this scares you.

Now imagine Mono-based software is pushed into the popular distributions on a larger scale. It would be possible to replace a pretty large amount of readily available programs with Mono-based counterparts. Think Banshee, Beagle, Gnome Do, F-Spot, Tomboy, Muine, just to name a few.

And now image Microsoft legally pulling the plug on (parts of) the Mono project, taking the whole Mono eco-system with it, just when people got used to Mono-based programs. Ouch.

I'm not saying that that problem would be insurmountable. Au contraire: it'll probably create a huge drive in creating non-Mono alternatives. But it will hurt us. And it is unnecessary: we have C, C++, Java, and Python-programs right now.

Personally, I don't really like the whole Mono thing. I think the whole interoperability business is bogus. I think we do not need Mono. In fact, I think the whole Mono project is redundant and that it should be looked upon with great suspicion. I may be overstating it a bit, but having been in this business for quite some time, I know that old dogs never learn new tricks. To quote admiral Ackbar: "It's a trap!"

Let's not put any more Mono-software in Gnome. And yes, let's support initiatives like gnote that provide alternatives to already established Mono-programs.

Anyway, if you want to rid you Fedora box of Mono, this aught to do it:

# rpm -e mono-web monodoc mono-addins mono-winforms mono-data-sqlite mono-data mono-extras f-spot tomboy mono-core gnome-sharp gnome-desktop-sharp gtk-sharp2 ndesk-dbus ndesk-dbus-glib gtk-sharp2-devel

Just install gnote as a Tomboy replacement, move .tomboy to .gnote and you're done.

UPDATE: It seems the guys at Fedora are on the same track and are pondering the replacement of Tomboy with gnote. And personally, I love them for it.

RHCDS certified!

2009-04-25T22:40:00.002+02:00

I just received word that I passed the RH436 exam (Clustering & Storage) last Friday. Pretty happy with the score again :-)

RH436 was the last exam I needed for my "Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialist" title, so as of today, I am a RHCDS!

Bye bye Last.fm, Hello Deezer.com!

2009-03-25T12:46:00.002+01:00

In a couple of days, Last.fm will be starting to charge users outside the US, UK and Germany for on-demand radio on their website. I used to be a Last.fm subscriber, but I'm dropping their service like a hot potato for this.

It's not that I think that you shouldn't be paying for a webservice. It's just that I don't like being the one paying to make something free for someone else. Especially is the other person is not of the needy kind. That is what this feels like.

Someone on /. posted a comment refering to deezer.com. Hadn't heard of it, checked it out, saw it was cool, dropped last.fm like it had an STD.

Weave: your bookmarks in the cloud

2009-03-17T13:04:00.003+01:00

In the past, I have used del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and a host of other service to sync my bookmarks between installations of Firefox. In the end, I always quit using them pretty quickly (well, for synchronization at least, I'm still using Google Bookmarks for other stuff). I usually quit them because in the end, they didn't work. For example, del.icio.us (and Google Bookmarks) use tags to order your bookmarks. By itself pretty cool and very 21st century. Firefox however doesn't have a very useful interface for using a lot of tags. I have nearly 200 tags registered in my Google Bookmarks account. No problem for a web-based service like Google Bookmarks, but not very useful when you have a single column bookmarks menu in Firefox. I now tend to use Google Bookmarks for sites I need to be able to find again or sites that are an interesting read for later on. I still use the bookmarks menu in Firefox as my default bookmarking service.

Enter Weave. Weave is a Firefox extension / service from Mozilla Labs that lets you sync bookmarks, history etc. between Firefox installations. It needs Firefox 3.1b3 at the moment, so it's pretty bleeding edge. Nice feature is the fact that your stuff is stored encrypted by a passphrase you to supply when registering.

Now, imagine you have a Fennec installation on a small form-factor device. Fennec has Weave too, so I can use my main Firefox bookmarks, history, yes even tabs on the Fennec browser on my N800. I know Opera also has a feature like this, but I've never felt comfortable with Opera, so that just won't do. Besides, there is no Opera for my N800 :-)

So, to make a long story short: keep your eyes open for Weave.

I hacked my Vaio!

2009-03-08T13:04:00.004+01:00

Yessiree! With a little help of some tools made by some great mind, I managed to flash the BIOS of my Vaio with some bytes changed. I readily admit it was *very* scary, but in the end it worked and now I have Intel VT working on my VGN-FW21E.

No thanks to Sony support, of course. I have had several email conversations with them, but in the end they always said: 'look, we don't support this and therefore we do not know how to turn it on'. With that they conveniently forgot they were the ones to build the stupid and broken BIOS image in the first place...

Anyway, if you own an Vaio from the FW-series (or a few other types), you might want to read this thread on the forums of notebookreview.com. It fixed my problem!

I can *finally* run kvm on this things, which is the one thing I originally bought it for!


$ lsmod | grep kvm
kvm_intel              52944  1
kvm                   137976  1 kvm_intel

VMworld Europe 2009 update

2009-02-25T18:01:00.005+01:00

I had envisioned me posting regular updates about stuff I see here at VMworld, but my schedule is so busy (and WiFi coverage at the Palais so crappy), that I ended up doing this first post after almost two days in my room back at the hotel.

To start of with the good stuff: I have heard very interesting things today. VirtualCenter (now rebranded vCenter, apparently) is in the process of being ported to Linux. It's mainly the vCenter backend that's ported, not the VI Client, but this does allow for making vCenter an appliance and running it on a *solid* platform (e.g. not Windows). The demo was very convincing. So much so even, that some wondered out loud whether a Windows version of vCenter would even be needed anymore. And the best news is, that vCenter will eventually support MySQL and / or PostgreSQL as it's database. Can I hear a 'w00t!'?

Notice VMware ported vCenter to Linux because of customer demand and because people are uncomfortable with running mission critical apps on Windows. All in all good news for us penguins!

Anyway, there was other news too. I went to a demonstration of SUSE Studio, which was actually pretty cool. I hope I get my account for the alpha version soon: I would love to try this out. SUSE Studio is a framework that lets you easily create apppliances based on either SLES or OpenSUSE. It features impressive things, like being able to set up a database with a prebuilt schema during this process, without having to actually configure the machine. It's all done for you.

I've also heard VMware devs talk about paravirtualized SCSI drivers (and devices), VMkernel development, private VLAN's, IPv6 support for the whole VMware software stack (that includes the service console and the VMkernel ports, contrary to the current situation) and loads of performance enhancements for ESX.

Now if only they'd drop the idea that removing the service console is the right way to go...

Red Hat announced RHEV a couple of days ago. And even though I remember a recent Slashdot comment saying Red Hat was leagues behind the rest of the field, I think they are just getting started. RHEV looks *really* promising to me.

There have been some things that were a bit annoying here as well. As a a lot of money has been paid for me to be here, I would have expected to be able to attend every session I wanted to. Some of the more interesting sessions, however, were held in extremely cramped, small, awfully hot rooms. People were sent away because the rooms were full at more than one occasion. This was worse on Monday than on Tuesday, so let's assume the organization learned a bit overnight, but it still was pretty irritating.

The food's good though and so was the VMware Benelux party last night. Time to go take a shower and get ready for the VMworld party tonight :)

Major stride in becoming RHCA!

2009-02-20T15:21:00.004+01:00

Hallelujah! I just passed the RH442 exam, which is my third one on my way to becoming a Red Hat Certified Architect. Three down, two to go!

And I'm pretty proud of my scores too :-)

New fglrx finally fixes flickering video playback

2009-01-30T09:02:00.003+01:00

After what seems like ages, we, the users of ATI / AMD videochips, are finally able to watch video and use Compiz at the same time :-) Very happy about that.

Now, if only amdcccle wouldn't segfault...

KDE4.2 is out (but still broken)!

2009-01-28T11:08:00.002+01:00

Even though KDE4.2 looks nice and works pretty much ok, there are a lot of things that'll keep me from using it.

For exampe, the brightness keys on my laptop do not work, because Fn + KEY combination is apparently 'not supported by Qt'. Nice. I know Qt is the bomb and all, but functionality like controlling brightness of my screen should be implemented by using the correct key combinations. Too bad, because I like KDE4, but this is a show-stopper for me.

Migrating RHEL5 from SELinux Targeted to Strict

2009-01-26T08:28:00.005+01:00

If you alter /etc/sysconfig/selinux and set SELinux strict mode instead of targeted, make sure you don't just reboot!

First, set strict and permissive (just to be sure we can reboot and login again).

Now, before you reboot, touch /.autorelabel. Your system will not successfully reboot if you do not do this! Reboot and watch your apply new system labels on files on the root filesystem.

Reboot again. You should see no more errors except for some .udev related crap. If all goes ok, change 'Permissive' to 'Enforcing' and you should be good to go! Your system is now running on SELinux in Strict mode (and now stuff gets *really* complicated ;-))

Console apps using dialog?

2008-12-15T14:24:00.003+01:00

Be sure to use a consolefont that supports things like borders (like used in dialog and mc).

Lat9w-16 is working pretty well for me.

Flash for 64-bit Linux!!11oneoneone

2008-11-17T10:51:00.003+01:00

Wow. Hell just froze over. Adobe listened to the community and released a 64-bit version of their Flash player for Linux. It's not bug-free, or so I hear, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.

Get it here.

LinuxWorld 2008 Utrecht

2008-11-13T11:55:00.001+01:00

I'm at LinuxWorld in Utrecht today, mostly to attend some seminars. The first one I'm at now is a bit of a disapointment, as it is more about Java, JBoss and processes than about Linux. It's not a bad presentation, it's just not what makes me tick.

Update: Just attended the second seminar about 'covert channels', which was pretty good.

Update: Attending third one, by Microsoft's Hans Bos, right now...
Update: Bos' talk was ok, but even though this was LinuxWorld, Bos didn't use the L-word. Not once :-P
Update: Final talk from IBM's mr. Baht was amazing, almost to the point of asking: "Are you guys hiring?"

Disclaimer: written on tiny keyboard of Nokia N800; please forgive spelling errors! ;-)

Migrating from Revelation to KeepassX

2008-10-03T21:21:00.014+02:00

I finally found time to finish a little script that converts the XML output generated by Revelation to XML that is readable by KeePassX. This enables relatively easy migration from Revelation to KeePassX.

The script is pretty rudimentary, as it not able to convert all account types Revelation offers. This is partly because for my personal use, I only needed the basic account type Revelation offers (the one that has a username, a password and a url) and partly because Revelation can do things KeePassX simply cannot.

Revelation offers the possibility to store more than one attachment with an account, which KeePassX cannot do, for example. Also, it's not always easy to map Revelation account properties against KeePassX properties: Revelation has a much wider variety of properties and some overlap a bit (password and pin for example). It's probably possible to deduce what goes where, but I lack the time to do so.

In the future, I might come up with a script that just puts all the exotic Revelation properties into the comment field for KeePassX. That would be fairly clean and straightforward.

If you have Ruby installed you can just call the script with two arguments: the first argument is the filename of the Revelation export, the second argument is the desired output filename.

As it is a simple script, it will only work if you have all your entries stored in folders in Revelation. Having entries in the root element of the Revelation tree will not work, because KeePassX does not allow you to store individual entries in the root element (I hope this is clear enough).

Anyway, it's probably not a very good or elegant program, but it got the job done for me and might do the same for you.

If you find you miss some entries or parts of entries, it's probably the missing field tags that are the culprit. If you fix this, please send me a copy of the fixed script (the script is GPL'ed). If you cannot fix it yourself, tell me the problem, so if and when I have some spare time, I might look into it.

Sadly, neither Blogger nor the KeePassX forums allow attaching files to a post, so you'll have to mail me if you want to have a go. If there is actual community interest in the script, I'll try to find some place to publish it for real.

Disclaimer: I do not claim the script does what it should do perfectly. Please be careful. Please be careful to securely erase the XML files afterwards. Use the script at your own discretion and responsibility.

Update: I mailed the script to a couple of people who left comments below and it seems to be working pretty much okay. Send me an email at maxim at wzzrd . com if you want it.

Update 2: I finally found time to place the script online somewhere. You can download it here. I'd appreciate a comment if you download it to tell me how it worked for you.

Utterly brilliant interview: SNL's Tina Fey does Sarah Palin

2008-10-02T10:44:00.002+02:00

Absolutely brilliant! The amazing part is that a pretty big part of the text of Fey's version of Palin are Palin's actual responses in the real interview earlier this week. Pretty sure to make you giggle: take a look!

VMware Workstation 6.5: the new stuff

2008-09-25T20:06:00.004+02:00

I just downloaded and installed the brand new VMware Workstation 6.5 (mainly because the kernel modules for 6.0.x wouldn't compile anymore on my Intrepid box). For you convenience: here's some stuff I noticed you might find interesting.

First of all, the download already was pretty big, but is now officially vast. Weighing in at over 300MB you have a long wait ahead of you if you aren't on a high speed connection like me. I'm not seeing a lot of things in the release notes to justify a 100MB larger download, but there sure are some niceties, check this out:

* 3D hardware acceleration in Windows XP guests, which supposedly works if the host is running Linux (w00t!)
* Seamless Window support called Unity mode (I tried this and it actually works pretty well, but it's a bitch to set up: I received a myriad of errors before it suddenly started working)
* There is now a part of VMwareTools called a Virtual Printer Daemon. I'm guessing this has to do with the ACE improvements VMware announced
* A program called the 'Virtual Network Editor', which is a standalone option to edit the network settings on the host. It'll allow for more detailed and elaborate networking schemes. Probably has to do with improving ACE and implementing vaguely ESX-like features.
* My 6.0 serial number (which VMware gave me when I became VCP) still works!
* There is now a Python-based installer GUI. Not sure how this is important on Linux, since we all are tech gods, but hey, it doesn't hurt either.
* There is an 'easy install' feature, which enables unattended install of OS and VMwareTools for Ubuntu, Windows, RHEL and Mandriva (SuSE is apparently not jumping the VMware train, but solely gambling on their own Xen-based products)
* Modules are either built or provided for Intrepid (and thus kernel 2.6.27). Can't see whether they were custom built or not because of the GUI installer... No more vmware-any-any-patches! (For the time being.)

There's a lot more than this, but I gotta go do other things now :-)

World Day Against Software Patents

2008-09-24T12:36:00.001+02:00

A buddy of mine pointed this out to me, so I feel obliged to spread the word :-)

Thanks to Yung Chin

Rant: New keyboard

2008-09-16T13:52:00.002+02:00

I just went to the store to buy me a new keyboard as my old MS Natural Pro OEM is sorta dying. It's not dead yet, but it will be soon and it sure is *way* too dirty. It really is beyond cleaning.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised to see about three brands available in almost every store. There's Microsoft, there's Logitech and there's a third, low profile brand, like Trust. That's not much for choice. On the other hand: Logitech and MS are the major players in this market.

I have this thing for bent keyboards. This is why I have had a MS Natural Keyboard Pro for ages. It's a pitty these beauties aren't for sale anymore (at least, not in major stores), because the Natural Pro was a one of a kind. It is bent, has a firm yet comfortable keystroke and has a built-in USB hub. Especially that last feature was brilliant. Just shove your USB stick into the keyboard and off you go. No messing with extension cords, no bending over your system in search of a free port, just shove it into the keyboard utterly brilliant.

It's quite commonly known I am not a great Microsoft fan. I don't like their software, their practices nor their EULA's. I do, however, like their peripherals. MS keyboards and mice are really good quality and tend to Just Work(tm), even under Linux. I still would rather not buy their goods though.

Back to the store. As I was checking out the shelves of keyboards and mice, I noticed another thing. All the slightly less crappy looking keyboards are wireless. Why? What's this with wireless keyboards? Wireless stuff needs either batteries or charging, go dead after a while, need software to display battery status, are inherently insecure and unreliable and so on, and so on. In general, wireless stuff sucks.

And why is it there are so little non-Microsoft bent keyboards? I was tempted to go for the one Logitech branded bent keyboard but it cost a shitload of cash and it's still just a keyboard. I don't need an on-keyboard zoom-wheel, I don't need several thousand multimedia buttons (though I admit a few are handy) and I certainly don't need that all to cost a fortune.

In the end, I left the store with some MS desktop combo, as I needed a mouse as well and this was a discounted article. Cost about €40 and that was about the cheapest combined offer.

So here's my request to Logitech: please build a bent keyboard, equip it with a USB hub, leave off most of the multimedia keys, leave the wire on it and sell it for about €20.

That'll save me from buying more stuff from The Vole and give me an extra USB hub again next time I need to buy a keyboard. Thanks.

gem update taking forever: the solution

2008-08-26T13:14:00.003+02:00

I've been running into this little problem for a long time: gem update takes slightly longer than forever. I've Googled around a bit, and it seems I'm not the only one suffering.

One of the posts I read about this, mentioned that gem is a piece of **** and tries to load the whole of rubyforge.net into memory, which fails and / or takes forever on low memory machines. I know this to be true, because my old laptop (an HP Omnibook XE3 with 256MB), which I use as a server, has serious trouble updating my Rails gems. When I installed this machine with the server version of Ubuntu Hardy, I did what I usually do: the swap I created was twice as big as the RAM, so it has 512MB of RAM.

For updating gems, this seems to be too little. Yes, that made me cry too.

Adding more swap was not that easy, because I used up the entire disk for other stuff. Omnibooks don't have much diskspace. What to do, what do to?

Enter nbd. NBD allows me to share a swapfile from my desktop, which is then used as swapspace on my server. I can verify this works, because my server is updating it's gems as we speak, with a swapfile used over nbd. Pretty cool.

Is this hard to set up? Not at all.

First, we create a swapfile of about on the computer we want to share swapspace from. Do this with

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1024k count=1024

The swapfile is now in /tmp. Then we make it a swapfile by running

$ chmod 777 /tmp/swapfile
$ mkswap /tmp/swapfile

Now, just install nbd-server and modprobe nbd on the computer you wish to share a swapfile from. On my computer, running an Intrepid Alpha, nbd-server did not create a stub configuration file during install. If there is no configuration file, nbd-server will not start. Just run

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure nbd-server

to create on and use some sensible values, like pointing it to the file we just created.

Next, on the client, install the nbd-client package, modprobe nbd and run

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure nbd-clent

as necessary, using the same sensible values. Tell it to use the nbd as swapspace.

Last, run

$ sudo gem update

succesfully :-)

Of course, if you have oodles of diskspace left, you can also create a local swapfile and use that. I didn't because a) I have no spare diskspace on the server and b) always prefer the over-engineered solution.

Notes:
1) The way I set up nbd above is insecure. Please keep this in mind. I am only using this for a gem update, so for me, this is not a problem. If you plan to use the nbd permanently, please, use a more secure setup.
2) I'm honestly not sure whether all the steps in the creation of the swapfile are necessary. I copied some of this from a tutorial on ubuntuforums about nbd. Credit to the poster of this thread.