I’m a big fan of the Linux operating system, but sometimes you really need a Windows to run software that isn’t available for Linux or where isn’t any related program.
Therefore you could try WINE (which emulates the Windows API within you Linux system), you could install a virtual windows using a virtual machine like Virtual Box (which emulates a whole PC within you Linux system) or you could install a native Windows operating system side by side to you Linux. If you need the whole performance you hardware could give you, you need to install Windows on your hard drive next to you Linux installation.
Since the Windows boot loader is very restrictive regarding to having multiple operating systems the easiest way is to first install Windows and then later install your Linux system, which brings GRUB (or something similar) as a boot loader.
I first installed Ubuntu on my PC and wanted to install Windows later, so I hard to do it the hardest way:
continue reading…
Archive
Category: Tools and SoftwareSometimes you run a task from the console which takes a while. (E.g.: compiling some programs, downloading something from the internet or installing updates.) Often you do not wait until this task finishes and just toggle to the next window. Would it be nice if you would get some kind of notification, when the task has finished? I found the following solution, which uses the Ubuntu notification system:
- Edit the .bashrc file from you home directory and append the following lines:
-
alias alert_helper=‘history|tail -n1|sed -e "s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//" -e "s/;\s*alert$//"’
-
alias alert=‘notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/32×32/apps/gnome-terminal.png "[$?] $(alert_helper)"’
-
- Install the libnotify-bin package
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin
- If you do not want to restart execute the next command in a console:
source ~/.bashrc
Now you have a new command available on your console: alert
If you do something time consuming now add the additional alert after the last command and you will get a nice notification:
notification from the console
Back in the days where I used Windows having video and audio conversations with Skype was really easy. Just plug in all the devices and configure the volume of the microphone and you are done.
Today I tried the same with my Ubuntu 10.04 installation and I encountered a few problems. This is how I got my webcam working with Skype: continue reading…
A while ago I used VMware server to running a few virtual instances for testing purposes. Everything worked really flawless. Yesterday I wanted to have some virtual server on my home computer again and encountered many problem with the current version of VMware Server on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
There where some problems with the installation, some to get the VMware console running and also a few the keyboard input on the console.
It took a while to get everything running and I pulled all the information I needed from many different sites. So pulled them all together in this blog entry: continue reading…
I have been interested in git for a while and played around with it a few times and past.
Yesterday I finally moved my two open source haXe libraries (hxJson2 and hxGD) to GitHub. (hxGD was hosted on Google Code before.) I really like the ideas of the work flow of git and seriously thinking about moving all my private Subversion repositories into git repositories, since there are well working tools to even import history and branches.
I am using different instant messager protocol. ICQ, IRC, sometimes MSN and Skype. It always bugged me to have 2 programs open. Pidgin for all protocols except Skype and Skype.
Today I found a really good working plug-in for Pidgin which allows you to use the most Skype features directly from Pidgin: http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/
You still need Skype to be running, but you got all you contacts in you Pidgin list. If you make a call the standard Skype dialog appears, all message communication is done via the usual Pidgin conversation windows.
How to download a video from Youtube and convert it into a mp3 file? (Or a mpeg video, or…). The most complicated part was to actually download the flv-movie. After you got this on your harddrive it is quite easy to perform more conversation to diffent file formats. Here the are my instructions for downloading and converting to mp3. continue reading…
In the last time I am back to a lot of server development. This also means a lot of database engineering. For the most the time I have used PHPMyAdmin for nearly every I have to work with a MySQL database. After a while a got a little bit disappointed, because PHPMyAdmin is a kind of bloated and sometimes it’s just take to long to perform a simple operation. continue reading…
I make no secret of that I am a big fan of the Firefox web browser. Except of a few things that I will name later I am/was always impressed by the speed improvements that are made over the past few years, which seems very important to me, because many pages you use in you daily life are more and more based on heavy JavaScript functionalities. A few days ago I decided to give a try to the newest development version of the Firefox – named Minefield – and make some tests. continue reading…
Today I tried to load a animated loading animation as a gif image into the Flash Player and discovered that he is not able to play them. It only shows the first frame.
My loading.gif:
So how to convert this gif animation into a swf file, which the Flash Player could play? (And of course I only want to use open source tools.) It was very easy: continue reading…