You're in the army now
MIA
Missing in Action. Not specifically code related but interesting/useful all the same
To Gwibber or not to Gwibber
Jul 11th
Note: Thanks to segphault (at) gwibber I can revise my whole post and and say that gwibber is my client of choice. Check the comments for his response to find out how to use the client properly.
So as some of you already know I’m a strong advocate of Ubuntu as a desktop environment.
With the release of 10.04 they have now included a new social media client called Gwibber. My first foray into using it was rather unsuccessful but i recent have revised my opinion.
By default its a rather bland and unimaginative to look at but it does handle a large number of social networks as it stands it currently covers
- Flickr
- StatusNet
- Qaiku
- FriendFeed
- Digg
- Identi.ca
Wifi Walk-about
Mar 12th
We have a couple of Acer Aspire One net books which we continually have silly little hiccups with. We finally had quite a big issue happen very recently one of the net books just refused to connect to the internet at all.
The symptoms were quite obvious.
- No matter what I did i couldn’t connect to a network, even though I could connect with other devices
- The network icon was missing in the taskbar
- I was unable to access the network center from the main preferences menu, the context menu or the command line
As the AA1 has a strong tendency to just die without warning when the battery runs out I suspected that it may have been caused by a corrupt file or three.
So now for the solution…
Turns out it is as simple as deleting a few files in order to force the networking to reset itself and not as severe as re-imaging the whole machine as Acer support has mentioned to a lot of people who have has the same kind of problems. It would be nice if companys who provide machines with linux on it would take the time to use google to find the solution instead of having a windows monkey sat on the phone not having a clue what they are doing and giving duff advice.
All right i’ll stop ranting now… the command you need to get everything running smoothly is
rm -Rf ~/.gconf/system/networking/*
This removes all the network connection settings and no need to use sudo. All you need do then is reboot and wait for the network manager to appear so you can connect to your network again.
Hope this manages to help some people
Virtually Possible in a Box
Feb 9th
I tend to have to jump between OS depending on what I am doing. I finally got my act together and figured out how to set up my Ubuntu install to connect to my windows partition to save me having to reboot every time.
I have managed to get this to work only with Windows XP… Vista appears to be a nightmare for me to get working so if anyone has any success I would love to hear from you.
Also I have had different people try this on a number of different machines with varying results, so please don’t get angry if this doesn’t work for you. A lot of the time it has appeared to be windows not liking the setup used by VirtualBox. All I can suggest is to have a look at the settings tab and try different combination. In some situations people have just not been abel to get it working on their existing install and have had to reinstall windows. My advice to you if you get to that point is to just leave it be and install a separate virtual machine and just leave you partition as is should you ever want to go back to it for something.
Heres how i did it:
- Install VirtualBox
I installed the Sun version but I have tested with the OSE version and it worked fine. For more info on setting up the Sun version via the repositories see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloadssudo apt-get install virtualbox-2.0 or sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose
- Add yourself to the correct groups
sudo usermod -a -G disk,vboxusers -a `whoami`
- Restart X [ctl-alt-bksp]
- Create a Master Boot Record manager in a file.
To do this you need to use install-mbr which is part of the debian package mbr and call install-mbr with the –force option.install-mbr --force myBootRecord.mbr
This will create an empty boot record with a size of 512bytes
- Identify which partition your windows install is on
fdisk -l /dev/sda
You should get a result similar to
Disk /dev/sda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0xf3c1f3c1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 2623 21069216 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 2624 9704 56878132+ 83 Linux /dev/sda3 9705 10011 2465977+ 5 Extended /dev/sda5 9705 10011 2465946 82 Linux swap / Solaris
For me it shows my windows partition as number 1 (HPFS/NTFS)
- Now we need to build the volume
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./WinXP.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -mbr ./myBootRecord.mbr -relative
Some instructions I have found say to include ‘–register’ but I have had issues with this so leave it off to register manually
- Now we need to set up the Windows Partition so now we boot back into windows
- In order to make windows usable independently its is recommended you set up different hardware profiles.
- Click Start > Control Panel > System
- On the Hardware tab, select Hardware Profiles
- Click Copy, name the new hardware profile Physical
- Rename the current profile to Virtual
- Change Windows XP’s IDE controller
- On the Hardware tab, select Device Manager
- Right-click the IDE Controller and click Update Driver
- Click No,.. and Next
- Click [Advanced] and Next
- Click Don’t search… and Next
- Select Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller
- Click Next, Finish, then Close and Reboot into Linux
- Reboot back into Linux
- Start VirtualBox
- Create a new Machine using the new machine wizard [new button]
- Enter a name for the machine and select the appropriate Windows OS type
- Choose reasonable memory size (advisable not to use more than a quarter of total memory unless using windows a lot)
- When prompted for the hard disk to use, select existing and point it at the new .vmdk file you created in step 6.
- From here on in you should be able to just follow the rest of the instructions and fingers crossed it all works smoothly.
N.B. You may be prompted to reactivate you copy of windows.

