Why Not Make It A Little Easier

Moving your Windows Guest from IDE to VirtIO on a KVM host

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:34:00 +0000

I run Ubuntu server which comes with virt-manager to manage VMs. I usually run Linux VMs but I had to setup a Windows 7 VM as our accounting PC.

Everything went fine with the installation but I started noticing that the Windows guest was running extremely slow. None of the other Linux VMs had this problem though.

I had chosen most of the default options when I installed the Windows 7 VM and part of it was that virt-manager chose IDE as the block device. This is needed since Windows 7 does not come with drivers for SCSI pre-installed. Searching around I found that VirtIO was the best option and the way to do it is to install the VirtIO drivers and then switch from IDE to VirtIO. If you do it without installing the drivers you will get BSOD. This post helped me figure it out in the end.

Here are the steps you need to follow.

Make sure the windows VM is shutdown.
Download the VirtIO drivers ISO from here
Mount it on the CD drive for the VM.
Add a storage device which is of the VirtIO type. The size allocation doesn't matter since you are using it to install the drivers.
Start the Windows VM. It will try to install the drivers. If it doesn't, open the device manager and you should see the SCSI device listed with the exclamation point icon beside it. You can chose to update the driver and point to mounted ISO's appropriate directory. In my case it was Win7/AMD64. Once installed, dont reboot but shutdown the machine.
In the virt-manager settings for Windows, change the storage type from IDE to VirtIO.
You can remove the storage device you had created earlier. It is not longer needed.
Start Windows, it should boot up and install the SCSI drivers. You will need to reboot after it does.

Apparently you can do the same for network interface too. Much simpler process though.

Make sure the windows VM is shutdown.
Change the NIC type to VirtIO
Start Windows, it will not be able to activate the network interface.
Go to device manager and find the network interface and update the driver.
Follow the same procedure as above.
You don't have to restart the machine after the drivers are installed.

Why I will never buy a Dell again

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 06:39:00 +0000

I still haven't gotten Dell to give me a reason of why they can't provide XPS 13 Ubuntu Developer edition under home sales...I will not buy a Dell again because I don't want to give my money to a company which doesn't deserve it.

Ok, I understand how big companies work. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I also understand that the people in customer service are given a script that they read out of. What irked me was that the manager acted the same way. She gave me the same response and didn't appear to care for the company's bottom line.

I am not a expert in this area but I presume this is how it is setup. Each product gets associated with different "adjectives" (for the lack of a better word) which identify for example, who the target market it, what kind of marketing campaigns/promotions get associated with it etc. This is done through the ERP software and I presume each product inheriting many "adjectives" as necessary. Based on initial survey data collected, Dell would have decided what product should be created, what the target market is, who the target segment is etc. These decide what "adjectives" get attached to a certain product which then get displayed appropriately to the customer on Dell's website.

So all this said, Dell probably concluded that the target segment is developers, but this is where I think Dell made a mistake. Traditionally developers work for companies and companies buy the hardware for the developers. This is so not true anymore, especially with the explosive growth of the mobile application development. Android, Elance ecosystems for example allow people to be their own bosses and you don't have to have a company registered to make money through either channel.

I think about it this way, Cost vs Benefit. If the benefit is higher than the cost, you go ahead. It obviously is not as simple as adding a new "adjective"but I am sure it is not too complicated either. The front end software probably picks up all these automatically and shows the appropriate text. One of the reasons why I know that achieving this cant be that difficult is that Dell XPS 13 windows edition is available in both business and home sales. This brings me to my point of contention, I understand call center employees not seeing the big picture, but I expect managers to see the big picture. When a person like me has made a committed effort to try and buy a product, it should raise a flag. One, this person will be a repeat buyer if satisfied. Two, this person is also going to talk the loudest if things go either way.

I made the effort to try and understand the process to see if I could help work towards a solution. I never got far though. It may be that I got unlucky and didn't talk to the right person. I talked with the Dell folks three times at different times just to rule out that possibility. I got frustrated after that. What I wanted to see was someone analyze this in a cost-benefit manner. Whether getting me the laptop will actually make Dell money or not. I would have been satisfied it if they gave me a reason. I never got one and I sure as heck deserved one, especially after all the time I spent talking to them.

Dell obviously invested resources in getting the Ubuntu Developer Edition laptop out into the market. Don't get me wrong, I am a long time Linux user and I am very happy that Dell is actually selling Ubuntu preinstalled laptops. But they are not doing anyone any favors. Dell is selling this laptop to make money, not because they support open source. I don't feel obliged to support them in this endeavor. Ubuntu will survive with or without Dell.

As for what I am going to buy. I have begun the long and tedious process of elimination. It certainly looks like I will have to pay the "Windows Tax" after all.

Trying to buy the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Developer Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:56:00 +0000

I want to make it clear that this post is more of a plea to Dell to help me buy the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Developer Edition, rather than a rant on how Dell is screwing Linux users over.

My Vaio died and based on all the positive reviews I have been reading, I decided on the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Developer Edition. I looked at System76 and other companies, but even though they are good in specs the models are too heavy for my liking, especially since I would be traveling with this a lot.

The laptop costs $1549 and is a great fit for what I want out of it. However every Dell rep that I have spoken to has been uninterested in helping me get it.

Dell has a 12-month interest free plan in Dell home sales department which is what is how I wanted to pay. This laptop is not listed in it, its only available through Dell small business sales. In fact the Dell XPS 13 Windows laptop is listed, which has identical hardware but runs Windows 8 instead of Ubuntu.

I spoke to at least three sales reps. Two of the three reps I spoke to recommended that I buy the model with Windows 8 and then remove Windows and install Ubuntu. I don't like the idea for three reasons:

If I buy the windows version, the sales stats will reflect a Windows 8 sale which would not be true. This might not bode well for the Ubuntu version since Dell might be able to justify supporting the "project" if there aren't enough sales.
I am not sure if the software stack including the drivers that I get by putting stock Ubuntu is the same as I would get from Dell. The rep didn't have the answer either.
I refuse to pay $50 for Windows when I am not going to use it.

I get the fact that this laptop is a developer edition and Dell might be targeting businesses. I also understand that Ubuntu is not as popular as Windows and they obviously sell way more Windows laptops. My point of contention is that this whole Sputnik project came out of customer requests, which means there is a definite market for these laptops. I am pretty confident when I say that it was people like me who voted for this laptop, not small businesses. Moreover I don't recall ever being asked about it. If Dell released this version of XPS 13 after customer requests, isn't it fair to ask that they keep their word instead of being shutout completely. I would appreciate if someone there told me why or why not rather than just say no.

I am writing this in the hope that someone from Dell will read this blog and help me out.

I have posted my request in ideaStorm hoping that it will gain some traction. I am sure there are others like me

Update 1: 03/12/13 - 20:00 hrs - A Dell Rep contacted me pretty quickly after I tweeted them. Heres the transcript. I don't think I am getting anywhere.

Can't mount /sdcard

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:47:00 +0000

If you get this error from Clockworkmod menu then one of the reasons is that your sdcard is encrypted. It took me a while to figure that out. I kept thinking it was formatted in exFat.

Hopefully this will help someone else.

Samsung Captivate SGH-i897 randomly shutting off

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:11:00 +0000

Apparently this is a common problem and you wouldn't believe if I told you what fixed it for me.

Anyway this has been an issue since October last year. Surprisingly never happened before. At that time I was running CyanogenMod nightly so I presumed that had something to do with the random shutoffs.

Last week, I got frustrated and decided to switch to a more stable rom. But the problem persisted which got me curious so I started looking around. Well, what do you know, I am not the only one with this problem. Sorry to go off on a tangent but these days I count myself lucky if I'm the first to come across a problem and can write up something. One of the reasons I haven't been posting much.

So, back to the issue here. I was reading somewhere that it could be a loose battery contact. I looked at mine and battery seemed a little loose but the phone never shutoff when I jiggled the battery around. Just for the sake of it, I put some tape on the battery on the side opposite to the connector pins and made sure the battery fits snug.

Its been 2 weeks and haven't had a single random shutoff.

If for some reason this doesn't work for you, there is an app called Captivate Keep Alive on the market place https://market.android.com/search?q=Captivate+Keep+Alive that seems to work for some. FYI, this will reduce the battery life by a little bit.

Another option which worked for some is cleaning the battery contact points. More info in this thread http://www.attdroids.com/forum/samsung-captivate-forum/1547-captivate-issue-random-shutdowns-5.html

My Firsr Androi App

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:28:00 +0000

Please check out my Android app, PocketEKG - Basic.

It teaches you how to read EKGs with lots of sample dysrhythmias. Its also has a quiz to test your knowledge.

Search for EKG or ECG in the market place and you will see it. If you use appbrain which is a great site btw, you can use this link Pocket EKG - Basic for Android on AppBrain

I would love some feedback, I just found out that the images werent loading on Droid X and I have release a fix for it with version 1.1.

Getting An Upgraded Windows 7 to play nice with Ubuntu & Grub 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:55:00 +0000

I had Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu on my office desktop, both playing nice with Grub 2. When Windows 7 came out, I upgraded my Vista instead of a fresh install. I develop in Ubuntu and boot into windows only when needed. But for some reason, which I still haven't figured out why, after the windows 7 upgrade I couldn't get Grub to boot windows. When I tried to boot windows, I would get the

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for winload.exe.

Disabling signature verification from windows boot menu (F8) did not work, I even used bcdedit to set the options to disable integrity checks.

I was getting into windows by using the restore options from the Windows 7 CD and then once done, I would restore Grub to get back into Ubuntu.

Well, I have finally figured it out. Its more like a hack than a fix. But it works for me and I am happy that I don't have to do the restore thing anymore.

Heres what you do before you go into windows. What we are going to do is use a combination of EasyBCD and Grub. EasyBCD will relinquish control to Grub to boot linux.

- Find out where your root linux partition is. Look for something like this "/dev/sda7 on / type ext3". the "/" after the denotes the root partition.

sudo mount -l

- Now, write grub to the root partition instead of MBR.

sudo grub

In the grub prompt, my root partition was sda7 so, that translates to hd0,6 (0->a, 6->7)

root (hd0,6)
setup (hd0,6)

- Now reboot using the Windows CD/DVD, use "restore windows" option to overwrite the MBR and boot into windows.
- Download and Install EasyBCD from here.
- Launch the EasyBcd and navigate to Add/Remove Entries
- Add a Linux entry setting the type as Grub, give a name you like and the partition to where your root partition resides. This might not be same number as linux partition number like sda7 for example. In my case it was partition 4. I found mine using the partition size. Dont check the "Grub isn't installed in boot sector". Click "Add Entry".
- Exit out of the application and restart the computer. Now when you choose to boot linux, it will launch Grub.

No Sound in Real Player 11 in Ubuntu 9.10

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:27:00 +0000

I was occasionally getting sound when I use realplayer 11 in Ubuntu 9.10. I was getting

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1008:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

Heres what fixed it for me:

Install alsa-oss:

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

Then change /usr/bin/realplay:

The line $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@" should be changed to

aoss $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@"

Now start realplayer and then click tools->preferences and navigate to Hardware. Select "oss" for Audio driver. You should have sound now.

Cisco VPN client installation error : Invalid module format

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0000

I had been successfully running vpnclient along with gvpndialer to connect to my office until yesterday when after a long time when I tried to start the service /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init I got the error

/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/CiscoVPN/cisco_ipsec.ko: -1 Invalid module format

I tried un-installing and reinstalling, but kept getting the same error. Eventually after fumbling around and with the help of google, I realized that my linux-headers were not installed. The way to do it is simple.

Find out your current kernel version by running the command

uname -a

Then run

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-<the output from output previous command>

Now run the installer again, it should run fine

Update: If you are running Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10 then follow this tutorial, to patch the client.

Howto forward X through a third server

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:15:00 +0000

This will work across all Linux/Unix machines.

Its pretty simple actually. Lets say you want to forward X from C to A via B. In my case, A and C were running Ubuntu 9.04 and B was running Solaris 10.

Use this command to forward port 22 from B to

Machine A: ssh -L 9999:C:22 @B

Then in a seperate terminal connect to C from A using this command

Machine A: ssh -X -p 9999 @localhost

Now you can run any command on C from the second terminal.

Setting up Apache with ssl on Ubuntu 9.04 server

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:03:00 +0000

I know there are a bunch of howtos out there, but none of them was complete enough to work for me.

I started with the Ubuntu's guide for setting up Apache found here. It was clear for me though and along with making mistakes following it, it missed some details too.

I was running a PHP website, so I installed apache2 and php. apache2-common includes ssl module but it is not enabled. Run this command to enable it

sudo a2enmod ssl

Now generate the keys and certificates by running the following commands.

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

(To remove the password if you dont need it, run
openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.key.insecure
Otherwise you have to enter the password everytme you restart the server.)

openssl req -new -key -out server.csr

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey
-out server.crt

Now copy the .crt and <.key/.key.insecure> files

sudo cp /etc/ssl/private/server.key
sudo cp server.crt /etc/ssl/certs/

Modify /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl and modify the following directives to look like this

SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key

Restart apache2

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The Ubuntu website has all the above information. After this I had to do it differently. I got ssl_error_rx_record_too_long error in Firefox which went away after I did the following.

sudo ufw allow 443
sudo a2ensite default-ssl

The first command allows 443 in firewall and second sets the default site to ssl.

Kopete, Dbus daemon and lancelot hogging CPU in KDE 4.3.00

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:28:00 +0000

I recently upgraded to KDE 4.3.00 on my Jaunty system using this link.

Problems like invoking "do" using super + space freezing the desktop went away. The desktop looks a lot more polished and the network management widget has gotten better. But it did bring in some new problems. My desktop is slower, much less responsive.

One thing that I did notice was kopete, dbus-daemon and lancelot were constantly hogging the cpu. It apparently is a bug and will be fixed in 4.3.1. Ivan Čukić suggests that until 4.3.1 is released you can temporarily work around by opening <your home folder>/.kde/share/config/lancelotrc and add the following

[Main]
imPlugins=disabled

You are done. Log off and log back in.

My system is still not as responsive as I want it to be with the desktop effects turned on(it works fine in Gnome). I am hoping that will change with 4.3.1.

How to Make a SpinRite Startup USB disk

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:41:00 +0000

SpinRite is a crash recovery utility which you can purchase from grc website. Its a lifesaver when you need it.

SpinRite has an option to create a bootable disk but requires a FAT 16 partition for it to work. I found this out after many unsuccessful attempts at creating a bootable USB disk. To create a FAT16 partition you can use gParted to format it or if you are running windows then right click on the drive letter, click format and select FAT as the partition type. You can also use HP USB format tool which you can download from here.

I still havent successfully completed a SpinRite run since it keeps freezing a few minutes after startup, but I was able to recover almost all data except some songs by using an bootable Ubuntu USB installation.

I have almost all of data except for most recent ones backed up in the cloud. I use Amazon's Jungledisk. Its very easy to setup and pretty cheap considering. I have set it up for my friends who are happy with it. It automatically backs up data based on its schedule. It backs up incrementally and keeps versions of the changes too. I highly recommend checking it out. This is one area where procrastination should take the back seat.

Fix: Picasa not opening as default photo manager

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:13:00 +0000

If Picasa is not opening as your default photo/camera manager here's what you can do.

Run the fillowing command

/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/gnomehalintegration.sh

Another thing you might want to do if the above command doesnt solve the problem is to open gconf-editor (press alt+F2 and type it in). Navigate to

/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/

Look for autophoto_command. If the key doesnt exist then create it(right click, new key) and set it to: (your picasa installation directory might be different)

/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/gnomehal.sh %h

That should do it.

Solve Caller ID problem

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:40:00 +0000

If you bought a cordless phone in US and began using it in India you will notice that caller ID is no longer working even if your provider has enabled the service. The reason is that Indian telecoms use FSK technology and American telecoms use DTMF.

what you need is a FSK to DTMF converter. You can get one at any local electronics store for about Rs. 140. It would probably say ADSL splitter on it.

Let me tell you, it works like a charm, my mom is a happy camper now.

P.S: theres a website http://www.fixya.com/ which comes in handy when you have these kinda questions/problems.

How to rotate videos taken with digital cameras

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:17:00 +0000

After a little bit of searching around, I finally figured it out. Once you know what to do its pretty easy.

The cameras for some reason record in .mov format which is Apples proprietary video format. It is a poor choice I must say.

I had been trying since saturday, with mencoder I was able to rotate it but I wasn't getting audio in the output file. I even tried to do it with Windows Movie Maker which ended up being even more difficult (It wouldnt even play the file even after I installed the divx codec) and in the end gave up on Windows all together.

I found the solution in the end. The trick is to convert the file to avi first using ffmpeg¹ and then use mencoder² to rotate the file. Run the following from the terminal(Applications->Accessories)

ffmpeg -i file-name.mov -g 60 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 file-name.avi

This also reduces the file size not without loss of quality. I found this command from this site.

Now with the .avi file just run this command which I modified from what I found here and you will now have a rotated video

mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o rotated-file.avi -oac lavc -fafmttag 1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg file-name.avi

The parameter -vf rotate=1 rotates it 90 degrees clockwise. Heres excerpt from the man page

rotate[=<0-7>]
              Rotates the image by 90 degrees and optionally flips it. For values between 4-7 rotation is only done if the movie geometry is portrait and not landscape.

                 0    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).

                 1    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.

                 2    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.

                 3    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip.

For more info run man mencoder or man ffmpeg. Just be ready to see a lot of confusing options.

¹ To install open synaptic(System->Administration), and search for ffmpeg.
² To install open synaptic(System->Administration), and search for mencoder.

Command line magic

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:45:00 +0000

I have fail2ban running on my server and out of curiosity I wanted to check if theres has been any suspicious activity. The problem is that old log files are compressed which meant I had to extract each one of them and check.

I am not a command line expert but lately I have been following this website which has taught me some new commands.

This is what I used to print the output. Of course, I realise that I can "awk" the output further to view just the details instead of full contents of each file, but I haven't come that far yet.

The directory had fail2ban.log,fail2ban.log.1 and a bunch of fail2ban.log.*.gz files.

zcat fail2ban.log.*.gz | cat - fail2ban.log fail2banl.log.1 | less

Heres what I learned from this menagerie of commands.

"|" symbol redirects the output, its clever way of using the output of one program as the input of another.

zcat is short for gunzip -c which by itself means dont extract just print the contents to the stdout(command line).

"cat - " says display from stdin instead of a file. So, "cat - fail2ban.log fail2banl.log.1" concatenates the output from zcat command, the contents of fail2ban.log and fail2ban.log.1.

"less" lets you scroll through the final output.

Setting Up Canon PIXMA MX850 on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:40:00 +0000

I am very happy to say that setting up printers in Ubuntu is a breeze, at least for the printers where drivers are available.

Well, in this case its not quite, but it was still a lot easier than I thought it would be. Moreover, the reason why I had to go through some extra steps is because Canon has not release drivers for Linux. From my experience almost all major manufacturers do these days, Canon really has no excuse.

I found this link which pretty much made it work for me. What I am writing is basically a formatted version of what Tim Azzopardi mentions in that link.

First you install libcups2-dev from Synaptic package manager (System->Administration). Then you download cups-bjnp from here.

You extract the file by typing tar -xzvf < downloaded-file.tar.gz >. cd into that directory cups-bjnp-xx. Then type the following commands.

./configure

make

sudo make install

Turn on your printer and connect it to the network. You dont need to know the IP of the printer, Ubuntu will look it up for you. Now, thats cool.

Now open Printing (System->Administration), click New. You should see the Canon MX850 printer listed on the left hand side. Select that and click next. Select Canon PIXMA iP5300 as the driver and close the window.

To set it as the default printer, right click the Canon printer you just added and click "Set as Default".

Thats it, you are done.

Question regarding Remote Desktop a.k.a VNC/Vino

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:52:00 +0000

I frequently use Remote Desktop to help people out when they have questions/problems. Almost all of them run Ubuntu 8.10.

My question is this. I have read that VNC does encrypt the initial password required to access the computer, but lets say I open synaptic, if I type the password required for root access, does it get encrypted and then transmitted?

I have used VNC via ssh tunnels but it is not as responsive which is why I gave up on that idea. Right now, whenever I have to enter the password I ask the person to enter it, just to be on the safe side.

Musings: How to read and keep track of blogs, news, the web in general

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:35:00 +0000

I wrote a not-so-short tutorial on my other blog. I posted it there since I felt most people who read this blog wont need it. You can check it out if you are interested.

Here's the link:
Musings: How to read and keep track of blogs, news, the web in general

Change the default application to open with in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:46:00 +0000

It differs in the way I used to in windows so it took a little bit to figure out. But that said, this is more intuitive.

Right on the file you want changed, click properties, then select open with and choose your application. If you don't see you favourite application listed, click Add from below and add it to the list.

That's it.

bash auto completion for apt

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:08:00 +0000

The auto completion feature for apt-get which was working on a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 wasnt working on my upgrade.

Just to be clear, the auto completion works like this, you type in

sudo apt-get install py<tab><tab>

and it gives you a list of all the packages that match the expression.

I found out from this post that uncommenting the following three lines from your /etc/bash.bashrc will do the trick

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
  . /etc/bash_completion
fi

Of course,you have to close and reopen or open a new bash shell after making these changes.

Raaga.com works on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:46:00 +0000

Finally!! www.raaga.com, a website where you can listen to Indian music is playable on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop. I went there out of curiosity to check if anythings changed and was pleasantly surprised. The next, previous buttons dont work but if let be, it plays through the playlist.

Thanks for listening to us(pun intended) www.raaga.com, even though it took you a pretty long time.

I also used to listen to www.dhingana.com which in my opinion is the best option out there since it uses flash. Unfortunately, they removed their Tamil section recently, so I stopped using their service.

www.musicindiaonline.com works but needs a little cajoling. Once you click play selection or play all, the player window pops up, asks a bunch of questions. Choose the real player option and continue. You will get a message saying 'methods missing'. Click ok and then right click->This Frame(In Firefox)->view source. Look for a line with a link which ends with .smil. Copy that link and paste it to your Totem or Real player.

Fixing MS Word 2007's office open xml error opening a file

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:06:00 +0000

My colleague had a problem today wherein she couldnt open the document she had just saved. The file had a docx extension which means it is in office open xml format. The error it gave was "there was a problem with the contents: Unspecified Error in file /word/document.xml" with the line and column number.

I renamed the docx file to zip(thats what it is), extracted the files, and tried to see if there was a problem with the xml. The xml seemed valid when I checked it under Netbeans.

According to this post, one of the guys said he imported it to a doc format using Word 2003 and was able to recover their document. So I downloaded the compatibility pack for office 2003 from here and sure enough, it imported successfully and I saved it as a word document(doc) and sent it to her.

Thanks for helping me get a packet of my favorite Cheetos, Microsoft.

Fixing green screen for skype video on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:37:00 +0000

After my upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, my webcam stopped working. Googling around I came across several posts

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997807

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cheese/+bug/282473

http://kaeru.my/articles/technical/ubuntu-linux/fixing-green-skype-video-for-logitech-quickcam-pro-for-notebooks

Those posts are a good read and I recommend it. I have logitech quickcam pro and individually the links didnt make my webcam work, but I put them together and voilà.

Heres what I did:

1. Added

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/lool/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/lool/ubuntu intrepid main

to my sources (/etc/apt/sources.list)

1.5 Update: To import the key, do the following

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys CA5D96E9AB82B686 && gpg --export --armor CA5D96E9AB82B686 | sudo apt-key add -

2. Did sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. You should see libv4l-0 get upgraded.

3. Edited my ~/.Skype/<username>/config.xml to add the Video element. Mine did not have a <Video> element, I put it under <Lib> (found it by another round of googling)

...
<Lib>
     ...
     <Video>
      <CaptureHeight>480</CaptureHeight>
      <CaptureWidth>640</CaptureWidth>
      <RecvPolicy>callpolicy</RecvPolicy>

</Video>
...
</Lib>
...

4. sudo mv /usr/bin/skype /usr/bin/skype.real
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/skype.real

5. sudo vi /usr/bin/skype and put the following inside

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype.real

If you use 64 bit then replace with

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype.real

6. sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/skype

7. Test your skype video. It should work now. In case it is showing B&W and you are using a Phillips model webcam or a webcam that uses the phillips driver then do the following

8. sudo apt-get install setpwc

9. setpwc -x and you are now set