September 2010 (#178):

• Mailbag
• 2-Cent Tips
• News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
• Video editing from the command line, by Silas Brown
• Away Mission: VMworld, IDF, OOW, by Howard Dyckoff
• Henry's Techno-Musings: Hotmail Change Prompts Switch to Linux, by Henry Grebler
• Almost-but-not-quite Linux..., by Ben Okopnik
• Common problems when trying to install Windows on KVM with virt-manager, by Anderson Silva
• HelpDex, by Shane Collinge
• Ecol, by Javier Malonda
• Doomed to Obscurity, by Pete Trbovich
• The Linux Launderette

Mailbag

This month's answers created by:

[ Anderson Silva, Henry Grebler, Mulyadi Santosa, Mike Orr (Sluggo) ]
...and you, our readers!

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Our Mailbag

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SFLC vs. Westinghouse (Busybox GPL violation)

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Thu, 5 Aug 2010 16:15:39 +0100

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/04/gpl_violation_westinghouse/

"It's the first time a US court has awarded an injunction ordering a GPL violator to permanently stop distribution of out-of-compliance GPL'd software."

http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/aug/03/busybox-gpl/ http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/03/more-gpl-success.html

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.

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Load average vs CPUs

Mike Orr [sluggoster at gmail.com]

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:15:26 -0700

Hello Answer Gang. I was raised to believe that the load average reported by 'uptime' and 'top' should not go above 1.0 except for short-term transitory cases, and if it persistently goes to 2 or 3 then either you seriously need more hardware or you're trying to run too much. But recently I heard that the target number is actually equal to the number of CPUs. My server has 4 CPUs according to /proc/cpuinfo, so does that mean I should let the load average go up to 4 before being concerned?

In fact, my load average has not been that high. It was 1.5 or 1.7 when I noticed the server bogging down noticeably, and that was probably because of a large backup rsync, and a webapp that was being unusually memory-grubbing. Still, my basic question remains, is 1.5 or 2 normal for a multi-CPU system?

One other issue is, I'm not sure if it really has four full CPUs. I think it might have two of those "dual core" thingys that have two processors but share the same I/O and cache or something. Here's a bit of the 'dmesg' output in case it's meaningful:

[    0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[    0.000000] Checking aperture...
[    0.000000] No AGP bridge found
[    0.000000] Calgary: detecting Calgary via BIOS EBDA area
[    0.000000] Calgary: Unable to locate Rio Grande table in EBDA - bailing!
[    0.000000] PCI-DMA: Using software bounce buffering for IO (SWIOTLB)
[    0.000000] Placing 64MB software IO TLB between ffff8800091de000 - ffff88000
d1de000
[    0.000000] software IO TLB at phys 0x91de000 - 0xd1de000
[    0.000000] Memory: 8185276k/8912896k available (5499k kernel code, 524948k a
bsent, 202672k reserved, 3081k data, 796k init)
...
[    0.020000] Initializing CPU#1
[    0.020000] CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 16K
[    0.020000] CPU: L2 cache: 1024K
[    0.020000] CPU 1/0x6 -> Node 0
[    0.020000] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 3
[    0.020000] CPU: Processor Core ID: 0
[    0.020000] CPU1: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1)
[    0.300088] CPU1: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz stepping 09
[    0.300099] checking TSC synchronization [CPU#0 -> CPU#1]: passed.
[    0.310146] Booting processor 2 APIC 0x1 ip 0x6000
[    0.020000] Initializing CPU#2
[    0.020000] CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 16K
[    0.020000] CPU: L2 cache: 1024K
[    0.020000] CPU 2/0x1 -> Node 0
[    0.020000] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0
[    0.020000] CPU: Processor Core ID: 0
[    0.020000] CPU2: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1)
[    0.470108] CPU2: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz stepping 09
[    0.470120] checking TSC synchronization [CPU#0 -> CPU#2]: passed.
[    0.480175] Booting processor 3 APIC 0x7 ip 0x6000
[    0.020000] Initializing CPU#3
[    0.020000] CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 16K
[    0.020000] CPU: L2 cache: 1024K
[    0.020000] CPU 3/0x7 -> Node 0
[    0.020000] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 3
[    0.020000] CPU: Processor Core ID: 0
[    0.020000] CPU3: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1)
[    0.640119] CPU3: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz stepping 09
[    0.640128] checking TSC synchronization [CPU#0 -> CPU#3]: passed.
[    0.650032] Brought up 4 CPUs
[    0.650037] Total of 4 processors activated (22401.29 BogoMIPS).

-- 
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com>

[ Thread continues here (6 messages/16.81kB) ]

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2-Cent Tips

[2-cent Tip]: Counting your mail

Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:13:02 -0400

A few minutes ago, I needed to count all the emails I had archived in my ~/Mail directory. A moment of thought, and:

grep -rc '^From ' Mail/*|awk -F: '{s+=$NF}END{print s}'

NOTES: Email headers start with a 'From ' at the beginning of the line, so each line that starts that way identifies a single email. 'grep -r' is recursive - i.e., also searches subdirectories. The output from 'grep' is a bunch of lines, each of which looks like 'file.txt:17', which says that 'file.txt' has 17 matches; therefore, we use 'awk' to split each line on colons - but since the filename itself could contain a colon, we need to grab the very last field. In 'awk', 'NF' is the count of fields in each line, and '$X' is the value of field X - so '$NF' is the value of the last field. Sum them up, print them out when it's all over, and presto - count of emails.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/3.70kB) ]

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[2-cent Tip]: Renumbering files

Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:01:52 -0400

This comes up occasionally: you have a numbered list of files and you need to reorganize them, say by moving all the numbers up two places to accomodate two more files being added to the "front of the queue", or inserted in the middle of it. Even if you're familiar with loops, the answers aren't quite as simple as "loop over the numbers, add 2, and rename": doing so would overwrite the third file with the first one, the fourth one with the second one, and so on. Ugh, what a mess!

Here's the general form of an approach that'll work well:

start=0		# Lowest number in the list
end=10		# Highest number in the list
incr=2		# The increment
for n in $(seq $start $end|tac); do mv $n $(($n + $incr)); done

Since piping the list through 'tac' will invert it, we will now be renaming the files in reverse order - that is, 10->12, 9->11, 8->10, and so on - which will prevent the above collisions. Renaming files that have numbers as part of the name isn't much more difficult: given, say, 'File1xyz.txt' and so on, the loop body simply becomes

for n in $(seq $start $end|tac)
do
	mv File${n}xyz.txt File$(($n + $incr))xyz.txt
done

Bonus feature: if you have a list of numbers that goes over 9 (or 99), and you want it sorted numerically (rather than '1 10 11 12 2 3 ...'), just use 'printf' to format the second parameter:

for n in $(seq $start $end|tac)
do
    mv $n $(printf '%02d' $(($n + $incr)))
done

The '02' in the above will result in numbers that are always 2 digits long, by prefixing the single-digit ones with a zero. Obviously, this can be extended to whatever number of digits is desired - and 'ls' will now show a properly numerically-sorted list.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/3.93kB) ]

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[2-cent Tip] typing command in bash shell with comfort

Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]

Sat, 7 Aug 2010 16:00:38 +0700

OK, sounds a bit confusing. Let's just say you are a kind of man (or woman, of course) who thinks that typing something like: sudo find / -xdev -type f -perm /06000 -mmin -60 | xargs ls -lt -c will be so much comfortable if it is done inside an editor...let's say...uhm...vim.

How to do that? simply press Ctrl-X, followed by Ctrl-E. And depending of the content of your EDITOR environment variable, bash will fire up that editor. Start typing, edit as neccessary, and save. And kazaaammm, that command is executed right away.

PS: Tribute to commandlinefu.com and http://www.catonmat.net/blog for this neat piece of trick!

-- regards,

Mulyadi Santosa Freelance Linux trainer and consultant

blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com training: mulyaditraining.blogspot.com

[ Thread continues here (5 messages/4.88kB) ]

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News Bytes

By Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff

Contents: News in General Conferences and Events Distro News Software and Product News

Selected and Edited by Deividson Okopnik

Please submit your News Bytes items in plain text; other formats may be rejected without reading. [You have been warned!] A one- or two-paragraph summary plus a URL has a much higher chance of being published than an entire press release. Submit items to [email protected]. Deividson can also be reached via twitter.

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Deividson was born in União da Vitória, PR, Brazil, on 14/04/1984. He became interested in computing when he was still a kid, and started to code when he was 12 years old. He is a graduate in Information Systems and is finishing his specialization in Networks and Web Development. He codes in several languages, including C/C++/C#, PHP, Visual Basic, Object Pascal and others.

Deividson works in Porto União's Town Hall as a Computer Technician, and specializes in Web and Desktop system development, and Database/Network Maintenance.

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Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book collection and several pet rocks.

Howard maintains the Technology-Events blog at blogspot.com from which he contributes the Events listing for Linux Gazette. Visit the blog to preview some of the next month's NewsBytes Events.

Video editing from the command line

By Silas Brown

This is an article about basic video production in MPlayer. MPlayer has its own "edit decision list" facility, but that is limited to deleting scenes from an already-made movie; it cannot be used to take scenes from more than one source file and to sequence them in a different order, as is often needed in production. However, by running several MPlayer commands in succession you can do this on the command line, and you don't need particularly high-spec equipment or dexterous mouse skills or even eyesight to do it (some eyesight is a plus but you don't need much).

Previewing in MPlayer

Firstly, make sure you can play each of your source-material videos with the mplayer command (use mplayer -framedrop if you have a slow computer). Installing mplayer from your package manager may be enough, but in some cases a newer version of mplayer and/or support for additional types of video codecs is needed; in this case the exact setup procedure can vary, depending on your distribution and its version, so you may have to do some web searching to find out.

Once mplayer is set up correctly to play the video format you have, in the video window you should be able to press Space to pause and use the left and right arrow keys to seek, and in the console window you should get a continuously-updated one-line status report which includes the field V: followed by the video's time counter in seconds. When the video is paused, you will be able to read off the exact V: value, and you can use these values to decide where you want to start and end your clips. (You can fine-tune the values later by trial and error.)

Taking the clips

After you've decided on the order of your clips and have made a note of their start and stop timestamp values (for example in a text editor), you can extract each clip to a separate file by running mencoder once for each clip, like this:

mencoder video3.avi -ofps 25 -o clip1.avi -oac lavc -ovc lavc -vf scale=320:240 -ss 59 -endpos 15
mencoder video1.avi -ofps 25 -o clip2.avi -oac lavc -ovc lavc -vf scale=320:240 -ss 14 -endpos 3

In the above example, clip1.avi is taken from video3.avi, starting at 59 seconds in (the -ss 59) and lasting 15 seconds (the -endpos 15). clip2.avi is taken from video1.avi, starting at 14 seconds and lasting 3 seconds. We specified a value for the output frames per second (-ofps 25) and the pixel size of the output video (-vf scale=320:240) to make sure that all our clips will have the same pixel size and frame rate, which is necessary to make sure they can be put together properly.

After running mencoder for each clip, it is advisable to use mplayer to view the resulting clip and check that its start and stop points were just right. If not, you may have to re-run the mencoder command with adjusted values (add a half-second here, subtract a half-second there) until you're happy with the result.

Check the framerates

In some cases, in addition to -ofps, you may also have to specify an -fps value (best put near the beginning of the mencoder command) to make sure that the input frames per second is read correctly; for example some FLV videos need -fps 24. If the input frames per second is not read correctly, after a while the picture will run ahead of the sound if the FPS is too high, or will lag behind the sound if the FPS is too low. Even if the clip is very short, a wrong FPS could result in the next clip starting the picture before the sound or vice versa. So when playing each clip, check that the sound finishes at exactly the same time as the picture finishes. Thankfully mplayer usually gets the input FPS value right by itself, but it's worth knowing about this for when it doesn't.

You may also want to check that the output frames per second (-ofps) value you provide is actually being obeyed by mencoder. Sometimes mencoder has to adjust it to cope with the constraints of whatever output format you're using. If you look at mencoder's textual output, toward the end there will be a line beginning Video: which will include the number of seconds and the number of frames in the output video; divide the frames by the seconds to get the frame rate. Synchronization might work slightly better if you then choose an approximation of this new value as your preferred -ofps value. (Don't pay any attention to the "fps" values that are incrementally printed by mencoder; these are merely telling you how fast mencoder is doing the conversion, not the actual running speed of the film.)

Putting the clips together

When you are happy with all the component clips, you need to combine them into the final video in order. This is done with a final mencoder command, for example:

./mencoder clip1.avi clip2.avi clip3.avi -o result.avi -oac lavc -ovc lavc

Then check that the result.avi file plays using mplayer and that you are happy with it. Sometimes (perhaps due to floating point rounding errors in mencoder) the video will run ahead of the sound in the final result even if all the individual clips are in step; if the final mencoder frequently reports Skipping frame! then this may happen. If it does, you can experiment with the -fps option on mplayer to find the framerate that synchronizes sound and video, and then run an additional ffmpeg command to adjust the framerate to that speed, for example:

ffmpeg -r 23 -i result.avi -sameq -ab 224k corrected-result.avi

where 23 is the framerate you found that best synchronizes to the audio, and 224k is the audio bitrate in use (you can change this at this stage if you like). ffmpeg seems to be better at making this adjustment than mencoder. Don't be tempted just to add the new -fps to the above final mencoder command instead, because in some cases doing that can result in the inclusion of extra audio from outside your original clipping points. Re-check the adjusted result with mplayer, and if necessary try repeating the ffmpeg command with a slightly different framerate.

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Silas Brown is a legally blind computer scientist based in Cambridge UK. He has been using heavily-customised versions of Debian Linux since 1999.

Away Mission: VMworld, IDF, OOW

By Howard Dyckoff

VMworld 2010

You can still catch the end of VMworld 2010 US, which is also just weeks ahead of VMworld Europe in October. The conference theme is "Virtual Roads, Actual Clouds" and will feature more than 170 unique breakout sessions which focus on reducing IT complexity and enabling IT as a Service through virtualization and cloud computing. If that piques your techie interest, consider catching live and on-demand keynote presentations available via webcast at http://www.vmware.com/go/vmworld-general-sessions.

VMware will host its second Technology Exchange track for developers as part of VMworld. This three-day event is open to all developers. With beginner and advanced levels, these sessions provide in-depth views of developer tools, APIs, best practices, and, of course, cloud architectures.

This is a premium conference, as the registration rates show. Expect a great conference bag, great grub, interesting vendors with cool swag at the Expo, and interesting people sitting next to you. The VMworld 2010 agenda is available at http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/agenda/.

I couldnt find a public archive for VMworld 2009 presentations, but here is a link for community videos, which includes the video podcasts from the VMworld 2009 Expo floor featuring VMware technical experts:
http://www.vmworld.com/community/video/
The fifth link page there contains short presentations like "NetApp VMware View Integration" which is also at http://www.vmworld.com/thread/3188?tstart=120.

Intel Developer Forum

Coming up next in mid-September is the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). This conference features more than 150 technical sessions presented by Intel and industry experts. The tracks cover topics like Cloud Computing, Eco-Technology, Extending Battery Life, and High Performance Computing (HPC). there are also product tracks on Intel processors, solid-state drives, visual computing and new SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) standard.

Beside the informal Chalk Talks from previous IDFs with Intel experts, IDF 2010 will also have Poster Chats, informal gatherings where researchers and developers show the directions of their latest projects giving attendees the opportunity to hear about technology still early in the development stage. This is both a hardware and a software conference, and the sessions vary greatly in technical depth. Some are expert-only, some are product-oriented and may be presented by Intel parnters - look at the talk summaries and the speaker company information.

Go to http://www.intel.com/idf/ to see the agenda and/or register.

I couldnt find a link for the main content from IDF 2009, but IDF 2009 press site has links to the keynotes and selected technical presentations here:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2009/video.htm

And here is a similar link for content from IDF Beijing 2010 in April:

http://www.intel.com/idf/library/library-beijing-2010.htm

In particular, let me point to the IDF 2009 Day 2 Keynote from Dadi Perlmutter on the total mobile experience. He showed the die-size progression for mainline processors and also for the low-power (in both senses) Atom chip family down to 15 nm. Then he discussed the dream criteria for mobile devices, which are all on Intels product map, natch:

• built-insecurity (so thats why they bought McAfee)
• ease of use and networking
• long battery life
• and all in a lightweight package at a low cost...

Didi and Mooley Eden did a chip booster session, starting with the high end Core i7 quad-core. Right, not exactly a chip for all-day battery use, but he did highlight how core idling down to 2 and even 1 core (in the newest processors) could drop power consumption significantly. Basically, the quad-core Core i7 had similar performance at 45 watts to the old single core Xeon chip which burned 150 watts. Thats one core to one core.

Check out these images from that keynote:

http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2009/sf/keynote/090923_dp/orig_Slide31_1.jpg

http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2009/sf/keynote/090923_dp/orig_Slide50_1.jpg

Oracle Open World, and JavaOne

Finally, Oracle Open World (OOW) arrives in late-September, This year, OOW rolls in the famous JavaOne conference to its stable of other user conferences under the OOW umbrella. That could mean several thousand more developers attending an event which already has the population of a small city, all struggling to to get to sessions at both JavaOne and Oracles own Develop mini-conference as well as sessions in other parts of downtown SF. This could be interesting. OOW is taking on the dimensions of COMDEX, but without the noisey slot machines.

This years OOW is reported to have over 1800 sessions, including hundreds of labs. And there could be almost 50,000 people competing with you for a seat - just like COMDEX.

Expect some Open Source controversy over Oracles legal actions against Google over Java patents at the 2010 Oracle Open World. Apparently, these concerns transcend Google's creation of its own JVM - the Dalvek VM - to avoid licensing and certification issues. So its "Clash of the Titans," San Francisco Bay Area style, and some of that may creep into the conference sessions as well as the deluge of Twitter posts.

In 2009, the big announcement was version 2 of the Oracle eXaData Database Machine, based on Sun hardware. And the hot topic was how Oracle would shepherd - or dispose of - Sun's IP and product lines. Oracle came out with strong support for all of Sun's major product lines, especially Java and MySQL. These topics will assuredly be visited again this year.

Since Oracle Open World is partly a customer appreciation event, the food and conference bag are better than average. Of course, the cost without discounts is $2500. You'd want something sensational for that. In 2009, the conference party included performances by AeroSmith, 3 Dog Night, and Roger Daltry. Everybody felt like a VIP.

The 2009 OOW archive is not currently available, but the 2008 archive is. This link lists all archives currently available:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+OpenWorld

Highlights from the 2009 keynotes and some of the OOW podcasts can be found here:

http://www.livestream.com/openworldlive and http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/034626

Recently there were several OTN Virtual Developer Days (#OTNVDD) in the US, India and China, but the presentations and labs are still available on-line. If you are a night owl, you can still register for the OTNVDD scheduled on September 2nd for Russian developers. Oracle provides over 2 GB of compressed VMDK files - this requires a machine with 2 GB of RAM and at least 8 GB of free physical disk space. You can host all the provided VM images with VirtualBox.

I'm sure that some of these items, or items similar to them, will be included in OOW 2010. Get access to the VDD materials here:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/OTN+Virtual+Developer+Day.

Comparing the varied Virtualization strategies at these 3 events will be interesting. VMware and Intel are partners, but so are Red Hat and Intel. The Oracle/Sun conglomerate is also an Intel partner, but Oracle is a proponent of Xen while Red Hat is staunchly behind KVM. Maybe with Oracle battling both Google and the whole Open Source community, Intel is the one to watch.

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

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Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book collection and several pet rocks.

Howard maintains the Technology-Events blog at blogspot.com from which he contributes the Events listing for Linux Gazette. Visit the blog to preview some of the next month's NewsBytes Events.

Henry's Techno-Musings: Hotmail Change Prompts Switch to Linux

By Henry Grebler

Rumblings

Caller ID enabled me to answer the phone, "Hello, Home."

A short pause; then my wife's voice, "Hello, Work."

She always seems to be a little surprised by technology. And often quite delighted. But not this time.

"I can't write emails," she continued.

I asked for more information. "Ok, I'll take a look."

Just then, Tri came into my pod, talking. I turned around. "I'm on an important support call," I smiled.

"Tell 'em to put in a ticket."

"My customer is more important than that."

"I'll come back later."

My wife uses Hotmail for her email. I put her on speaker, and navigated to hotmail.com.

"Hang on! This looks different! Where's my inbox? Wait a minute - where's Hotmail!?" It was my turn to be non-plussed: I'm not good with gratuitous change.

I ruminated, not for the first time, how users are full of irrelevant details, but forever fail to mention the elephant in the room. My wife is no better or worse than other users.

Typically my thinking goes something like this. I try to do something; the behaviour I see is not as I expect. I fiddle around a bit, just in case it is a spuron. Then I stop. When did I do this last? Did it work ok then? Yes. What's changed?

So my mild hysteria when I got to the Hotmail page has nothing to do with my inability to cope with change. All right, it has everything to do with my inability to cope with change. But it serves another purpose. It means that I notice that a change has occurred. Consequently, when, soon after, I encounter an unexpected response, I am encouraged to consider a possible connection between the change and the unexpected response.

"Up the top." Our roles have changed; she has no problems with moving the furniture around. Neither do my kids. Me - not so much.

I scanned the alien terrain. Nothing looked like a link to me - another new fashion. Then I found it. I was taken to my inbox. I don't use my Hotmail account all that often, but it looked unchanged.

When I clicked on New, I was presented with a screen which looked unremarkable. I found I could enter a To: and a Subject: - and so could my wife. However, when I clicked on the body of the email, I got a cursor and could enter text; she didn't, and couldn't.

"I'm going to have to leave it until I get home," I told her. "I'm sorry."

"That's all right. It can wait."

Home

When I got home that evening, things were pretty much as she'd described them. No amount of clicking in the body of the email solved the problem.

I tried Internet Explorer (yuk), but it also had problems. I tried some other computers with different revs of Firefox.

When I tried Firefox 2.0.0.2, I got:

Upgrade your web browser


We recommend that you upgrade your web browser so you can get the most
out of Windows Live Hotmail. Upgrading should only take a few minutes.
To get started, choose one of the browsers below: 


    * Microsoft Internet Explorer
    * Mozilla Firefox
    * Google Chrome
    * Apple Safari


If you don't want to upgrade right now you can still continue to use
Windows Live Hotmail, but some parts of it may not work and it may not
be displayed properly.

Yet another piece of useful information my wife had omitted to report.

So, it looks like Hotmail knew what they were doing. Let me rephrase that: it looks like the people at Hotmail were aware of the effects of their changes.

When I went to the compose window, I could not enter text in the body of the email.

Analysis

For some time I had been trying to move my wife from Windows 98 to something else. Anything else. But she was comfortable with the environment with which she was familiar.

And I don't blame her one bit. It's one aspect in which we are very much alike.

I still use olvwm as my window manager and am prepared to go through hoops to have it on all the computers I use. I can't always get what I want, but I do ok.

The one thing that drives me to distraction is the trend amongst Linux distributions to pursue a Microsoft Windows look and feel. Everything about Microsoft Windows is at odds with what I want to do and how I want to do it. It's like trying to get me to wear clothes intended for a creature with different numbers of arms and legs from me: I can probably contort myself to don the garb, but I will be so uncomfortable I won't be able to achieve much.

But I digress.

I'm a good hubby: I try to give her what she wants. Even when it comes to computers. So I considered how to get her back her Hotmail.

I could install the latest Firefox (version 3.something). No, I couldn't: it does not support Windows 98.

Perhaps we could move her to Google mail. This is still an option.

I could install some form of X server on her machine, and have her run Firefox on my machine, displayed on her machine. This is still an option, but I have not (yet) found an X server which supports Windows 98. I am prepared to search further.

Interim Solution

While I'm navigating these options, what's she going to use for email? Well, I'm not saying I've got the best solution, but it was fairly straightforward for me to fire up Firefox 3 in a VNC server on my BSD machine; and start a VNC client on her machine. Hey, presto! She can use Hotmail.

It's all very recent. I'm dying to hear her feedback. Stay tuned.

Evil Grin

But I think I have a better idea. I think I'm detecting that this is, for her, the last straw. I think that she is resigned to migrating to a different platform. And if the platform is on the table, guess what else is on the table? Yep: Linux.

Because the case is so hard to refute. First of all she knows that she has support. She can call her Help Desk (as she did at the start of this article) and be sure she will get great service. And she's been around me long enough to know that I'm much better at supporting Linux than I am at supporting Microsoft Windows. Hell, it's what I do!

So the good news is that Microsoft (owner of Hotmail) may be the motivation for her to move to Linux. Don't you just love the irony?!

What's the opposite of "Conclusion"?

Stay Tuned

It was my intention to have this all wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. I hoped to have moved my wife to a Linux platform and present a neatly packaged article for all to savour.

Sadly, that hasn't happened.

Real life (the bit that intrudes into my writing time) has prevented me from producing a happy ending. So far.

I'm scared that the relevance of the subject matter will attenuate with the passing of time.

Here's what's happened recently. My wife is using the interim solution. It is much less user friendly than I had expected, but bearable. Just.

I was able to fire up Ubuntu (not the latest) off a CD on another computer and let her try to use Firefox. Her response was extremely encouraging, the experience very positive.

With a bit of luck, I will be able to report back next month.

Stay tuned.

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Henry has spent his days working with computers, mostly for computer manufacturers or software developers. His early computer experience includes relics such as punch cards, paper tape and mag tape. It is his darkest secret that he has been paid to do the sorts of things he would have paid money to be allowed to do. Just don't tell any of his employers.

He has used Linux as his personal home desktop since the family got its first PC in 1996. Back then, when the family shared the one PC, it was a dual-boot Windows/Slackware setup. Now that each member has his/her own computer, Henry somehow survives in a purely Linux world.

He lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia.

Almost-but-not-quite Linux...

By Ben Okopnik

It's a well-known fact: if you've just bought a sky-blue Nissan Sentra with a spoiler, black-and-gold pinstripes, and whitewall tires, you're suddenly going to start seeing that exact car all over the place. It's as if everybody in the world read your mind, and shamelessly STOLE your brilliant idea of what's in style! Although before you start ranting about Those Idiots and using the top row of characters on your keyboard to describe them in detail, get this: It's Not Them. It's You.

What I mean here is this: those cars have been there all along. The only difference is that your attention has now been focused by your baby, the best car you've ever bought, the coolest chick-magnet... well, you get the point. As long as you're in your honeymoon period with your new purchase, your brain will instantly snap-focus on all those factors in a given street scene - something that you would normally tune out of your consciousness, at least the parts that don't offer you a specific benefit or threat. That's how we humans operate.

In that vein, and with a nod of recognition to our wonderfully-selective perceptions, we present a few images that should warm the heart of any geek. Enjoy - and if you should happen to have a few similar snapshots of your own, please send them to us. We'll be happy to share them with all our readers!

"Having sound card problems? Just follow this simple recipe."

(Sent in by René Pfeiffer)
"Protect your prize roses by encrypting them with our patented CHAINSAW algorithm! To a casual thief, they'll look just like a small pile of woodchips... We're still having a bit of a problem with decryption, but our i18n is excellent!"

"All right, lads, here's how we're going to catch that damn fast-moving penguin..."

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Ben is the Editor-in-Chief for Linux Gazette and a member of The Answer Gang.

Ben was born in Moscow, Russia in 1962. He became interested in electricity at the tender age of six, promptly demonstrated it by sticking a fork into a socket and starting a fire, and has been falling down technological mineshafts ever since. He has been working with computers since the Elder Days, when they had to be built by soldering parts onto printed circuit boards and programs had to fit into 4k of memory (the recurring nightmares have almost faded, actually.)

His subsequent experiences include creating software in more than two dozen languages, network and database maintenance during the approach of a hurricane, writing articles for publications ranging from sailing magazines to technological journals, and teaching on a variety of topics ranging from Soviet weaponry and IBM hardware repair to Solaris and Linux administration, engineering, and programming. He also has the distinction of setting up the first Linux-based public access network in St. Georges, Bermuda as well as one of the first large-scale Linux-based mail servers in St. Thomas, USVI.

After a seven-year Atlantic/Caribbean cruise under sail and passages up and down the East coast of the US, he is currently anchored in northern Florida. His consulting business presents him with a variety of challenges, and his second brain Palm Pilot is crammed full of alarms, many of which contain exclamation points.

He has been working with Linux since 1997, and credits it with his complete loss of interest in waging nuclear warfare on parts of the Pacific Northwest.

Common problems when trying to install Windows on KVM with virt-manager

By Anderson Silva

Let me start with a very basic question: why, oh why, would anybody want to run Windows on their Linux workstation? A web developer could argue that they need a way to test their applications on multiple versions of Internet Explorer. A system administrator could argue that they need a sandbox to test an email client like Outlook, or play around with integrating a Windows workstation into their network. In my case, I want a Windows virtual machine on my laptop because I want to be able to watch movies on Netflix.

If you are not familiar with KVM, I would recommend that you take a look at the following guides before you read these tips:

• If you are running Fedora: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Virtualization_Guide/
• If you are running Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM

The following is a set of tips and quick fixes I've collected over the last few months to get a Windows XP installation working under KVM being managed by virt-manager. Some of these tips will work for other versions of Windows, as well as for other Linux distributions other than Fedora 13 (my current distribution).

Tip #1

Before you even install the KVM, libvirt, and virt-manager packages, check your BIOS setting. Some computers, like Intel-based Lenovo Thinkpads, have a 'Intel (R) Virtualization Technology' option turned off. You must turn that on for virtualization to work.

Tip #2:

Set selinux to permissive mode, or turn it off completely.

To do this:  edit /etc/selinux/config and change the SELINUX parameter.

Tip #3:

If you are going to install Windows from a CD/DVD (instead of an ISO file), make sure that the user which you are running virt-manager as, has read access to the optical drive device on your system. Otherwise, virt-manager may not let you select your drive as an install media location.

Tip #4:

During the installation of Windows XP (as far as I know it doesn't happen with Vista or 7), the error "A disk read error occurred" shows up during boot time, not allowing you to complete the installation. The problem here is that for whatever reason, virt-manager by default creates disk images using the raw format, and the Windows XP installer does not like that format. The solution is to convert your disk image to qcow2 format.

To convert your existing image:

cd /var/lib/libvirt/images/    # or whatever other location you 
keep your images at
qemu-img xp.img -O qcow2 xp-qcow2.img

Note 1: You may have to start the installation process again, and re-format the disk, after converting the image to qcow2 format.

Note 2: Under Fedora 13, I've tried creating qcow2 disk images before starting the installation via virt-manager, but I got the same "A disk read error occurred" problem.

Tip #5:

Once Windows is installed, if you are not able to increase the screen resolution of your virtual machine, check the virtual video driver that your virtual machine is using. If it is not the 'vga' model, change it, and re-start your virtual machine.

Tip #6:

This tip, for whatever reason, was the one that took me the longest to figure out. It took long not because it was a hard problem, but mostly because I was looking at it from the wrong angle. As I said in the beginning of this article, I wanted a Windows virtual machine on my laptop to watch movies, and even though I did get Windows installed, I could not get the sound working on it.

One of the most frequent answers I found on the web was about exporting the variable QEMU_AUDIO_DRV with different parameters to get the sound working correctly, but none of the parameters worked for me. I also read that at least in Fedora, vnc doesn't support audio, which basically meant that I needed to find another way to view my desktop. That's when I decided to shift gears and look at SDL instead of vnc.

To do that, the following must be done:

1. Remove the 'Display 0' property under Hardware Details, and add a new Graphic Device using 'Local SDL Window' instead of VNC Server.

2. Edit the /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf, and get qemu-kvm to run as your user:

user = "ansilva"
group = "ansilva"

3. Restart libvirtd:

service libvirtd restart

Now, if you open up virt-manager, and start up your Windows virtual Machine, it should show up as a separate window outside the virt-manager GUI.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these six tips will be enough for you to get your Windows virtual machine running well enough under KVM and virt-manager, so you can do your work or even have your fun. I highly recommend that you also take a look at the command line tool virsh for managing your virtual machines, which could easily be the subject for an entire new article in the near future. Stay tuned.

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Anderson Silva works as an IT Release Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Liberty University, a MS in Information Systems from the University of Maine. He is a Red Hat Certified Architect and has authored several Linux based articles for publications like: Linux Gazette, Revista do Linux, and Red Hat Magazine. Anderson has been married to his High School sweetheart, Joanna (who helps him edit his articles before submission), for 11 years, and has 3 kids. When he is not working or writing, he enjoys photography, spending time with his family, road cycling, watching Formula 1 and Indycar races, and taking his boys karting,

HelpDex

By Shane Collinge

These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.

Flash problems?

All HelpDex cartoons are at Shane's web site, www.shanecollinge.com.

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Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs around in his brightly-coloured underwear fighting criminals. During the day... well, he just runs around in his brightly-coloured underwear. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.

Ecol

By Javier Malonda

The Ecol comic strip is written for escomposlinux.org (ECOL), the web site that supports es.comp.os.linux, the Spanish USENET newsgroup for Linux. The strips are drawn in Spanish and then translated to English by the author.

These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.

All Ecol cartoons are at tira.escomposlinux.org (Spanish), comic.escomposlinux.org (English) and http://tira.puntbarra.com/ (Catalan). The Catalan version is translated by the people who run the site; only a few episodes are currently available.

These cartoons are copyright Javier Malonda. They may be copied, linked or distributed by any means. However, you may not distribute modifications. If you link to a cartoon, please notify Javier, who would appreciate hearing from you.

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Doomed to Obscurity

By Pete Trbovich

These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.

All "Doomed to Obscurity" cartoons are at Pete Trbovich's site, http://penguinpetes.com/Doomed_to_Obscurity/.

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Born September 22, 1969, in Gardena, California, "Penguin" Pete Trbovich today resides in Iowa with his wife and children. Having worked various jobs in engineering-related fields, he has since "retired" from corporate life to start his second career. Currently he works as a freelance writer, graphics artist, and coder over the Internet. He describes this work as, "I sit at home and type, and checks mysteriously arrive in the mail."

He discovered Linux in 1998 - his first distro was Red Hat 5.0 - and has had very little time for other operating systems since. Starting out with his freelance business, he toyed with other blogs and websites until finally getting his own domain penguinpetes.com started in March of 2006, with a blog whose first post stated his motto: "If it isn't fun for me to write, it won't be fun to read."

The webcomic Doomed to Obscurity was launched New Year's Day, 2009, as a "New Year's surprise". He has since rigorously stuck to a posting schedule of "every odd-numbered calendar day", which allows him to keep a steady pace without tiring. The tagline for the webcomic states that it "gives the geek culture just what it deserves." But is it skewering everybody but the geek culture, or lampooning geek culture itself, or doing both by turns?

The Linux Launderette

The Web is dead, apparently.

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:17:00 +0100

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 ("The Web Is Dead, Long Live The Internet")

The first graph in that is put into context here: http://boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.html

the 'X is dead' idea is discussed here: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-x-is-dead/61663/

("[I]t's impossible not to notice ... that Anderson's inevitable technological path happens to run perfectly through the domains (print/tablet) he controls at Wired, and away from the one that he doesn't.")

Oh, and... "THEN Javascript NOW Objective C".... rofl.

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.

[ Thread continues here (7 messages/11.72kB) ]

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Interesting spam: in Irish!! [100% FÁIL IASACHTA Ráthaíocht]

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Fri, 6 Aug 2010 18:53:38 +0100

The Irish is so bad it can only have come from Google Translate, but it's fun to see spam in my (native? no, that implies first; national?) language.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Francis Tyers <[email protected]>
To: TAG <[email protected]>
Date: 2010/8/6
Subject: [Fwd: 100% F?IL IASACHTA R?tha?ocht]
To: joregan at gmail.com
Cc: mlf at dlsi.ua.es

My first spam in Irish. :D

Fran

---------- Forwarded message ----------

> From:?john smith <jsjohnsmith.loanfirm at gmail.com>
> To:
> Date:?Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:41:00 -0700
> Subject:?100% F?IL IASACHTA R?tha?ocht
> Dia duit a chara,
> 
> T?imid ag Christian Eagra?ocht a buna?odh chun cuidi? le daoine i
> riachtanais Cuid?onn, den s?rt sin mar go gcabhr?idh airgeadais. Mar
> sin m? t? t? ag dul tr?d an deacracht airgeadais n? m? t? t? in aon
> praiseach airgeadais, agus t? ag cist? g? chun t?s a chur le do ghn?
> f?in, n? is g? duit iasacht a shocr? do bhfiacha n? do bhill? a ?oc,
> as t?s a chur le gn? deas, n? go bhfuil sibh ag baint s? deacair a
> fh?il ar iasacht ? na bainc cheannais chaipitil ?iti?la, d?an
> teagmh?il linn inniu tr?d an r?omhphost jsjohnsmith.loanfirm at gmail.com
> an b?obla "a deir Luke 11:10 ag gach duine a fhaigheann iarrann; s? ag
> iarraidh a fhaigheann; agus chun ? a bhuaileann, beidh an doras a
> oscailt" . Mar sin n? lig an deis seo a th?ann t? ag toisc go bhfuil
> ?osa mar an gc?anna inn?, inniu, agus n?os m? go deo. Le do thoil ?
> seo do Dhaoine ar eagla minded agus Dia tromch?iseacha ..
> 
> 
> T? t? comhairle a l?onadh agus na sonra? th?os .. ais
> Do Ainm :______________________
> Do Seoladh :____________________
> Do T?r :____________________
> Do Gairm :__________________
> Iasacht M?id g? :______________
> Fad :____________________ Iasachta
> :__________________ Ioncam M?os?il
> Uimhir f?n Cell :________________
> Maidir is Fearr
> 
> 
> John Smith.

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.

[ Thread continues here (7 messages/15.74kB) ]

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