Too Far Afield

At least not this morning. When I came to university a few minutes ago and wanted to get a coffee from Emma, our student association’s coffee machine, I found someone sleeping on the sofa. And opted to not risk waking him up. Hence the morning without coffee. There seems to be a pattern here. Due to several both unrelated and unexpected problems, I had to go without coffee for the most part of last week…

If you have no icons in OpenOffice after switching your icon theme in Ubuntu, you need to install the appropriate OpenOffice style package. For example, if you switch your Ubuntu icon theme to Tango, you need to install the package openoffice.org-style-tango to get back your icons in OpenOffice. If you do not install the package, all the icons will be substituted by text. This works, but it looks kinda weird.

Recently, one of my customers had to declare bankruptcy. This is nothing new to me. Unfortunately, this does sometimes happen. As usual, we got mail from the insolvency administrator, who sent us a Forderungsanmeldung (form to file a claim) and a copy of the court order on commencement of proceedings. Because the customer was a GbR (partnership under civil code), we even got two letters from different insolvency administrators, one for each partner in the GbR. And one of these letters made me smile.

In the court order, that I was sent, the court set a date for the creditors’ meeting. Before the secretary of the second insolvency administrator had made the copy of the court order for the creditors (this includes me, unfortunately) she had made two small hand-written notes next to the date of the creditors’ meeting. One note said not. (in English: “filed”). The other note right next to the first note said in Outlook not. (in English: “filed in Outlook”). Each note was accompanied by a date and a short signature.

Time for Lightning to get out of beta, I guess.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her 1906 book The Friends of Voltaire.

I’m a big fan of Karambolage, a weekly telecast produced by the French-German television channel Arte. The show analyses and explains both French and German idiosyncrasies and curiosities. An excellent example is their film on the accidental broadcast of an old version of Helmut Kohl’s New Year speech by German television in 1986. Unfortunately, I miss most of their program due to time constraints. This is not a big problem however, as Arte provides video streaming in Real Media format for the last four editions.

As I recently switched to a new laptop (more on this in a later post), I had to install RealPlayer from scratch. I would prefer it, if Arte streamed using excellent open source technologies, but RealPlayer is at least better than some other proprietary options.

After I had installed RealPlayer on Ubuntu Linux 7.04, I had video, but no sound. If you experience the same problem, try the following.

By default RealPlayer uses the esd sound daemon. First install the alsa-oss driver and try, if you get sound with it.

1. sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
2. aoss realplay

If you got sound, you can switch from esd to aoss permanently by editing the start script of RealPlayer.

1. sudo gedit /usr/bin/realplay

In the start script of RealPlayer try to find the line

1. REALPLAYBIN=$HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin

and replace it with

1. REALPLAYBIN="/usr/bin/aoss $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin"

Don’t forget the quotation marks. Now save the file and fire up realplay again. This time without prepending aoss of course. If you get sound again, everything is OK. If you do not get sound now, but got sound one step earlier, you probably made a mistake when you edited the script. Open the script again and check, if you made a typo or something.

Imagine the following scenario: You are a happy Linux user. Sometimes you still need a Windows application. You could use Wine, but in this tutorial, I will show you how to run Windows XP in a virtual machine on Ubuntu Linux, using the free (as in beer, not as in speech) VMWare player.

Installing VMWare Player

Installation of VMWare Player is easy. A package for Ubuntu 7.04 can be found in the multiverse repository. You just need to install it. You might also need to install the restricted kernel modules from the restricted repository, if you did not already install those.

1. apt-get install vmware-player

Installing Windows XP

After you installed VMWare Player, you need to download a dummy virtual machine to hold your Windows XP installation. You could theoretically use some web service to create your own virtual machine, but some kind person already did this for you. A zip archive containing a dummy virtual machine for Windows XP can be downloaded from the Ubuntu Wiki. Download and unzip the dummy virtual machine.

Now insert a Windows XP CD into your CD-ROM drive and select VMWare Player from the Applications – System Tools menu. When prompted for the virtual machine to run, select the dummy virtual machine you just unzipped.

Note: It is important that the Windows XP CD is in your drive before you run the dummy virtual machine.

VMWare Player should now run the dummy virtual machine and the regular Windows XP installation process should start. Follow the installation process as usual. You also need to activate your copy of Windows XP within 30 days after the installation.

Getting internet access

If you want to surf the internet from your virtual machine, there are a few more steps to follow. If you do not want to go online, just skip this part of the tutorial.

Unfortunately, the network drivers for the network card simulated by the virtual machine are not included with a stock copy of Windows XP. This means that you need to download and install the drivers for the Intel e1000 network adapter. This is a bit tricky, because you need to get the drivers from your host system (Ubuntu) to your client system (Windows XP).

First, download the Intel network drivers.

Note: You need to download the drivers for Windows XP, of course.

Now create a new temporary directory and move the driver package into this directory. Use mkisofs to create an ISO file that contains the network drivers.

1. mkdir driver
2. mv PRO2KXP.EXE driver
3. mkisofs -o ./driver.iso ./driver/

Now open the configuration file of the dummy virtual machine (WindowsXPVirtualMachine.vmx) in your favourite text editor and edit the entries for ide1.0 (the CD-ROM drive) as follows.

1. ide1:0.fileName = "/home/user/driver.iso"
2. ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

Note: You need to specify the full path to the ISO file. Otherwise it will not work.

Now restart your virtual machine. Your CD ROM drive in Windows XP should now contain the network driver package you downloaded earlier. You can now install the driver as usual. After the driver has been installed successfully you should be able to surf the internet (e.g. with Internet Explorer). You might want to install a safe browser like Firefox and update your machine using Windows update as soon as possible, because otherwise your new Windows XP installation might be rendered unusable by viruses in less than a few minutes. But this is outside the scope of this tutorial. You probably know why you prefer Linux, don’t you?

So we gave it a go with Mozilla, and lo and behold the use of web technologies (designed from the ground up to run everywhere) means that the multiplatform thing actually works. What’s more, our runtime (Firefox) is 4ish megabytes instead of dozens. I just downloaded a Java-based app and the 100+ Mb package is ongoing proof that their deployment model is still hopelessly borked.

Matthew Gertner from AllPeers Ltd. in his blog post Two Things I Love About Mozilla about the advantages of the Mozilla Platform.

I hate bridging days. You drive downtown, because you want to collect something from a shop. You spend 1 EUR on a parking ticket. Just to discover, that the shop is closed on May 18. You try to call someone, because you have an important question on a bill. Just to be greeted by an answering machine, that politely says there is no service on May 18. I hate bridging days.

Today we proudly present to you a message from my new laptop’s Linux kernel:

Click to see the big picture.

Joel blogs about a new elevator technology in the 7 World Trade Center in New York. Guess what? As I blogged before, this technology is already in use in the Hamburg subsidary of Deutsche Bundesbank. And it probably already has the usability problems Joel predicts for the American counterpart.