Windows XP in Ubuntu via VirtualBox

I have a need to edit/update an MS Word .doc file. OpenOffice works mostly for this task, but I’ve found that when I save as .doc, it blows up the file size by about 100kbs. Also, some things just don’t seem to work right. For me, table dimensions and layout seem to not be saved correctly. I have a Windows XP partition with Office, but it’s a hassle to reboot whenever I want to do something Windows based.

Enter VirtualBox. I’ve been meaning to see if I could setup my already installed winxp partition in VirtualBox without too much work, so today I did some Googleing and found these resources:

Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox.
VirtualBox (virtualbox): How to boot from an existing Win XP partition under Ubuntu.

Follow them closely, especially the first one, and everything should work. Of course, if this destroys your machine it’s your fault and not mine.

A few things I found:

1. Don’t install what’s in the apt-get repos. You need the non-ose version. Get the .deb or whatever binary for your os from the VirtualBox Downloads Page.
2. Make sure to add yourself to the disk and vboxusers user groups. I missed the disk group at first and received errors.

Good luck.

Upgrade Weekend

First, I upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 – Hardy Heron, from 7.04 – Feisty Fawn 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon. Everything went smoothly and it actually fixed a bunch of broken shit on my machine. Gotta love when that happens. The only real complaint so far is that it ships with Firefox 3.0b5, which isn’t really a problem, but a lot of themes and extensions are not yet compatible with the latest version. I could probably figure out a solution to this, but that sounds like extra work.

Second, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1. I like the new admin screens, although it’ll probably take a little while to remember where everything is. Again, smooth upgrade with no problems. For the most part, I like the layout of the new Write Post page, but the Categories section falls below the fold on my crap monitor. It was better when that was in a small box to the right of the post area. I think older versions of WP admin allowed you to set the height of the post box, that might help. Also, Fluency Admin looks nice — more greys, less blues. Maybe I’ll check that out at some point.

Finally, I upgraded the yard with less weeds and junk. Thanks, Troy-Bilt.

Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon Beta

I went ahead and installed the Gutsy Gibbon Beta tonight. So far, so good. Upgrade info can be found here and release info here.

Initial thoughts:

• The Compiz Fusion stuff is pretty cool. To minimize system resource drain, I’m not using all the fanciness that it has to offer. The new alt + tab interface is nice, though.
• Gnome gets updated to 2.20. Whatever version of Gnome I was running before had this annoying problem where the items in the toolbar (panel) at the bottom would resize based on the title of the application. So, if you were looking at a webpage that had a crazy long title, the Firefox button would take up a large portion of the bar. That is fixed in 2.20.
• NTFS writing is available with the help of the NTFS-3G project. This is pretty huge if you have a bunch of old Windows partitions lying around. I already had this setup on Feisty, but still, nice addition.

The upgrade was cake. Not only do I have a fresh OS, but a lot of other apps were updated too. Nice.

Hopefully, things will continue to go well and I’ll coast into the final release, which is due in October.

1, 2, 3 And I Come With The wicd

We’ve gone wireless in the new house, which meant a wireless card for my desktop. I ended up with a TRENDnet TEW-443PI from Newegg after reading many positive reviews. The important thing was that some stated it worked well with Linux.

Some reviewers also recommended dumping NetworkManager in favor of wicd to manage the wireless connection. I did and it rocks.

According to the website:

The official releases are for Ubuntu, but it has been known to work in Debian. It may also work in other distros. wicd will work on any version of Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 and above.

So, if you’re having problems getting your Ubuntu to connect wirelessly, give this a look. Of course, I only used NetworkManager long enough to download wicd, so I never really had any problems with it.

Ok, the real reason I wanted to post this was because of the title.

Firefox Tweaks on Linux

There are some minor things that bother me with the default Firefox install on Ubuntu. An example of this is when you single-click in the address bar. Instead of selecting the whole URL, the cursor goes to the end of the line. I hate this. Had to be fixed.

Google led me to this post at Scatterism that provided the fix for this and a few other things. Be sure to check out comment #4 for the fix to using the Backspace button as Back in browsing history.

jUploadr

Since my move to Linux, I’ve had to explore new options for things I did in Windows. One such thing is uploading photos to flickr. Flickr recommends jUploadr on their tools page for cross-platform uploading, so I figured I’d give it a spin.

jUploadr is Java based, so you’ll need a runtime installed first. By default, the latest versions of Ubuntu come with GCJ installed, which is the GNU Compiler for Java. It seems that GCJ doesn’t fully support all that needs to be supported for jUploadr to work, though, so you have to do some work to get things prepared.

Here are the steps I took to get jUploadr up and running:

1. Install Sun Java: This was actually pretty easy thanks to the great documentation at the Ubuntu site. Follow the instructions for Installing Sun Java and you should be good.
2. Uninstall GCJ: This isn’t really necessary, but I like to keep things tidy. I used the Synaptic Package Manager to find and remove GCJ. This is nice because it also finds and removes other packages that rely on GCJ. Again, tidiness is good.
3. Download, uncompress and remember where you put jUploadr.
4. Lastly, I created a custom application launcher in the panel at the top of my desktop. Right-click on the panel > Add to Panel > Custom Application Launcher. Then just tell it where the jUploadr shell script lives and you’re good. Or, you can double-click on the script and select run. Or, you can run it from a terminal window. There are many options here.

Something to note is that if you try to uninstall GCJ before you have another JRE installed, Synaptic will also try to remove OpenOffice and any other applications that require Java support. Don’t do that.

jUploadr is pretty nice. You can set the title and description for a photo before you upload it, which you can’t do with the official flickr Windows uploader. Also, you can add tags for individual photos instead of for all of the photos that you are uploading. You can create sets and add photos to them, or just add photos to already existing sets. I haven’t really played with it enough to offer up more than that, but it’s nice and zippy, so I’ll keep it.

It should also be mentioned that jUploadr works with Zooomr, and may even be their official uploader. I think I read that somewhere.

Finally, there will probably be more posts like this as I find things that might be helpful for people trying to migrate to Linux.

Feisty Fawn

After discussing some Linux things with Dave this weekend and being without my webserver for the past few weeks, I realized that I missed having a Linux box to mess around with. Then I remembered that I had a Fedora partition that I hardly ever used. It was pretty outdated, though, so I figured a fresh install would be best.

I decided to go with Ubuntu, which seems to be the favorite Linux flavor amongst the nerds currently. The installation process was the easiest Linux install I’ve ever done, which was nice. With the latest versions, the desktop install CD is actually a Live CD, so you can explore Ubuntu a bit without doing any install at all. Once you’re ready to go, launch the install process right from the desktop. The only sort of advanced thing I had to do was to manually partition the hard drive, because I wanted to preserve my NTFS partitions. Other than that, cake.

Dave completely ditched Windows back in February, but I decided to keep my XP partitions intact. Right out of the install, I was able to access the NTFS partitions without any problems. This allowed me to access all my mp3s and photos and such without days of copying things around. I’m a fan of that. So far, things have gone pretty smoothly.

As of now, I’ll be using Linux as my primary OS. Should be fun.

Yum

While this could be a post about the impending deliciousness of Thanksgiving, based on the title, its not. Instead allow me to nerd out for a second and speak about the great utility that is Yum, aka Yellowdog Updater, Modified.

Here was my dilemma: my base Linux install was lacking Emacs and since I hate vi, this had to be remedied. Instead of finding the source, downloading, and compiling or even finding a Fedora RPM, I merely had to type:

yum install emacs

This is only a basic example of Yum’s greatness. Yum is also quite useful to keep your currently installed apps up to date:

yum update [package]

If you leave off the [package], Yum’ll update all your installed components. I’m sure that there are tons of other uses for Yum that I am unaware of, so if you’re running Linux, man yum for all the details. There are other similar utilities, like up2date, but I think I’ll be sticking with Yum.

Dual Boot, Bitches.

I recently became the owner of a fancy new 160gb hard drive. So, with all the extra space, I decided to install Linux and do a dual boot with WinXP. I’m happy with my decision. Right now I am posting from my Linux install with Firefox. Its beautiful. The next step is to finish installing various WinXP apps and then wipe the old 40gb hd and rebuild the bobafred.com server on it. This will probably take some time.

One thing I did find is that my site sucks in Konqueror, the all-purpose web browser/file manager for the KDE desktop.