One of the other things I had hoped to do this weekend was play around with the new VMWare player. VMware is a company that makes virtual machine software, the entry level pricing usually starting at $199 and going up from there. They’ve recently released a “Player” that can run preconfigured vmware system images. Which means a person can setup a system image in a file then zip it up and send to another person to run in their “player”.
Tag: error
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Disabling KDE 3.4.x sound notifications
Ok, one of the first things that I got annoyed with in the new Mandriva 2006 install on the laptop was the event triggered sounds. Popup notification window one sound, error message – glass breaking, etc. etc…. So, I started trying to remember where to cut all that stuff off. It took a bit of digging to find it, because it’s not in the KDE control panel under “sound” where it might be found in a Windows setup…
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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BIOS Beep Codes
One of the nice things about working on computers is that when it comes to the raw hardware of a system, the engineers have designed a way to communicate what’s wrong (even if it’s just a general idea) even when the hardware has a pretty serious problem. When a computer boots it goes through a POST *(Power On Self Test). This POST process basically is the BIOS (Software embedded in the hardware of the system that exists whether or not an Operating System like Windows is installed) “waking up and testing the hardware.”
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The wolf in sheeps clothing, software that claims to be anti-spyware, but installs more spyware on your pc
The bad news is that the spyware situation for home pc users can be murkier every day. I remember a particular user who once installed an antivirus program because a popup appeared claiming to have found viruses on his drive, next thing he knew he was having all sorts of spyware problems, viruses found all the time (to “prove” the antivirus component was running.), etc. etc.
Spyware Confidential has the story on the latest wolf in sheeps clothing, something called spyaxe. This link shows a screenshot of one fake warning. One problem is how to describe to people how to identify legitimate versus illegit popups and warnings.
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Bad capacitors causing strange system behavior
This is, in fact something I’ve been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I’ve visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fact I think I saw it a couple times a week and either couldn’t reproduce the errors on demand, or could only get an error once, do something and not see it again, then hear about something similar the next day…
Anyway, ultimately the system has been replaced (and it’s twin…) on inspecting the motherboard post-pull, there were some interesting issues with the capacitors, yellowish crusty leaked electrolyte… uh-huh, that explains everything…
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QEMU with KQemu accelerator module
I’ve been playing around with qemu lately and there is a little tip I ran into that helps in getting the kqemu module running if you have Win4lin installed.
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Qemu Windows XP install
Well, I alluded yesterday to a struggle with installing Windows XP under Qemu. Here are some details on the long and (still winding) road. At this point I have a working XP install running under Qemu but, I’ve run out of disk space (2G) and need more space before I can upgrade it to SP2. Note that I have not installed any third party software, just the base OS. Well…. I did have a long way around to get there….
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A tun of trouble….
Sorry, VERY bad pun but I couldn’t resist. I mentioned that I was having tun difficulties that kept me from playing around with anything fancy networking-wise with qemu. For starters let me see if I can explain what tun is. Tun is a method of creating a point-to-point “imaginary” network connection between a program and an operating system. For instance, Qemu sets up a device called /dev/tun0 in the host operating system. This /dev/tun0 can communicate with the kernel and then the outside world. /dev/tun0 behaves just like any other network interface to the viewers on the outside (even getting it’s own ip address that is network reachable.)
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Having multiple domains direct to one web site
Recently I’ve consolidated a few domain names that I’ve acquired to direct to this site, and a few others to direct to another site that I maintain. One of the things that I wondered about after I set things up in the sites control panel to receive requests as the other domain names was how that might effect search engine positioning. (more…)