A man will die, but not his ideas.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Fixing Some of Guest OS Issues with VMWare Workstation on Linux

When the virtual machine image is stored on an NTFS partition, NTFS-3G hogs the CPU and freezes the machine very frequently leading to very slow performance of the virtual machine and possibly preventing you from using files on that partition during the freeze periods. The reasone is a bit complicated, but a temporary solution is mentioned here. Just add the following line to the .vmx file of the virtual machine.

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

Cannot connect to sound card because it is busy. Make sure knotify and Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD) are not running. Kill those two processes (if they are active) and restart the vmware service just to make sure.
On Linux, VMWare frequently stopped my Shift/Ctrl/Alt keys from working when going back from the guest OS (was XP in my case) to Linux. A solution to this problem would be to use the setxkbmap command to reset the keyboard layout.
The arrow keys and other special keys are not functioning properly or not functioning at all. Create a config file in ~/.vmware directory and add this the following to the file then restart the vmware service.

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Labels: linux, ubuntu, VMWare, XP

Posted by A :: 6:05 AM :: 0 Comments:

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Friday, December 29, 2006

Reminders to Self

Reminder to self.

HowTo: Print to PDF using cups-pdf

Download the cups-pdf package:
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
(or via Synaptic)

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

"In order to ensure CUPS-PDF is running with the required root privileges you have to make ‘root’ the owner of the cups-pdf backend and set the file permissions of the backend to 0700 (root only)."

In Gnome:
System > Administration > Printing
New Printer
Local Printer & Use A Detected Printer click on PDF Printer
Choose “Generic” as the manufacturer
Choose “postscript color printer rev3b”
Leave the driver set to “Standard (suggested)”

Note:
Printed documents are stored at ~/PDF

HowTo: Write Arabic in Ubuntu

HowTo: Verify Checksum of Downloaded Files

md5sum filename

Then compare resulting checksum with the one provided in the ".MD5" file. If they match, then the file has most probably been downloaded correctly with no errors.

Labels: linux, ubuntu

Posted by A :: 2:57 AM :: 2 Comments:

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Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Auto-Mounting Windows Shares in Ubuntu 6.10

OK, I finally managed to have Ubuntu running on my PC. And just so that no body jumps to conclusions, the issue was not resolved. I downloaded Edgy Eft Desktop CD and re-installed Ubuntu. Of course, I had to start configuring everything back the way it was. I have two NICs and share my Internet connection with my brother's PC via Firestarter. And among the things that I needed to configure was accessing the shared folders on his PC which was running Windows only. In order to not forget the process once again, and help others who might be looking for how to perform this, I'm listing the process here.

First, we need to install the smbfs package via apt-get or Synaptic. By the way, smbfs is not smbclient. Then we should create a file containing necessary credentials for accessing the shared folder. You could name the file anything you like (e.g. cred, smbcred, or sambapass). The file should contain the following fields:

username = windowsuser
password = windowspassword
domain   = WINDOWSDOMAIN

You can use gEdit for editing the file. And by the way, in my case, I left the password and domain fields empty since they are not applicable.

Next, decide where you would like the shared folders to be mounted. I created a folder named "mounts" in my home directory and created a sub-directory for each shared drive on my brothers PC. Finally, we need to edit /etc/fstab so that we don't have to perform the mounting process every time we boot the machine. Before doing so, it is advisable that you create a backup copy of the file just in case.

In order to edit the file, you need to have root privileges. Thus, you could for example run gEdit via gksudo and provide the password. After that, you could open the fstab file from within gEdit and be able to edit its contents. What you need to add is a line for each shared drive/folder specifying were it should be mounted, file system type, what credentials are necessary for accessing the share, and setting the owner and group for all files in the share. For example:

//10.0.0.2/c /home/informer2000/mounts/sliders-2_c smbfs credentials=/home/informer2000/sambapass,uid=informer2000,gid=informer2000 0 0

Please note that there should be no line breaks in the line (i.e. all the above should be in one line). Now, all you have to do is save the fstab file, open the terminal and type sudo mount -a and if everything went well you should be able to access the shares from the directories at which they are mounted. In addition, the mounting command is not required after that because they will be mounted automatically when Ubuntu starts.

Labels: linux, ubuntu

Posted by A :: 3:13 PM :: 2 Comments:

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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Eclipse on Ubuntu

Still haven't fixed the IT8212 IDE RAID controller's problem with Ubuntu on my machine until now. However, today I managed to install Eclipse 3.1 on Ubuntu Breezy Badger on a dual-booting machine I've set up at the college's lab. It took some time since I'm still novice with Linux and did not have any idea about its packages and the many administration utilities it has. But in the end, I did it. Thanks to the nice guide at Ubuntu's wiki titled EclipseIDE, "How to install Eclipse in Ubuntu" by Ivar Abrahamsen, and the "Java Development on Ubuntu" series of posts on David Coldrick's Weblog.

Of course, I had to download all necessary files and packages on my home PC and then copy, install, and configure them on the lab's machine since there was no Internet connection over there. Thus, I did not use apt-get in the installation process. The packages I needed were available at Debian's packages site in the utils section of the stable distribution (fakeroot 1.2.10), the misc section in the unstable distibution (java-package 0.27) and the utils section of the unstable distribution (fakeroot 1.5.8). Only downloaded the ".deb" files. One package upon which the java-package depends was available with Ubuntu and did not need to download it, just used Synaptic.

Finally, you have configure Sun's JRE to be the default because somehow the GCJ runtime conflicts with it. This can be done by executing the following command which will ask you about the one you'd like to be the default:
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Alternatively, use Synaptic to remove the java-gcj-compat package and everything should be OK.

Update:
Discovered that all necessary packages could be obtained from Ubuntu's packages site. Duh!!!

Labels: Eclipse, Java, linux, ubuntu

Posted by A :: 9:37 PM :: 3 Comments:

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