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:
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Archive
Tag: UbuntuSometimes 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:
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alias alert_helper=‘history|tail -n1|sed -e "s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//" -e "s/;\s*alert$//"’
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alias alert=‘notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/32×32/apps/gnome-terminal.png "[$?] $(alert_helper)"’
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- 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…
In my last post I wrote about some problems that I had with my virtual server that freezes under heavy load. The improvements I suggested worked really nice but the server still sometimes freezes – not often as before but it still happened. So I “googled” around and also asked at ServerFault.com.
It seems that keeping up the the apache mpm_prefork and mod_php will not be the solution anymore. Most sites suggested to use mpm_worker instead, because it uses less memory (and my problem was, that my Apache consumed all my memory). On the other hand there could be some problems with thread-safety, but I liked to give it a try. PHP will not me used as an Apache module any more. Instead we will run PHP as a FastCGI script. continue reading…
On the last blog I wrote for was an article which described who to install eAccelerator on a Ubuntu server. As this blog entry had a lot of visits I decided to put it on this blog again:
PHP is not the fastest scripting language, that truly a fact. Except from optimizing the scripts there a few possibilities to speed everything up. One is to install a byte code optimizer and cache on your server. They cache the byte code created by the PHP parser and try to optimise it. So every time some one requests for a page on your server the script does not have to be parsed again. This brings a speedup of 120 – 250% depending on you script. There are several byte code caching program available, the one I like most is eAccelerator. Sadly eAccelerator is not available through the Ubuntu repositories so you have install them yourself. Here is a short description how to archive this!
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