Hi there folks.

As you may all know, Google released source code for it’s much ballyhooed OS, named after it’s popular browser named Chrome.  I’ve been able to run a vmware image in VirtualBox and although I know it’s just a technical preview of the OS, I can say it’s pretty zippy (good for a sub-netbook machine).

Again, the emphasis, sub-netbook – I really don’t think this will replace your netbook/laptop any time soon as it’s primary OS.

As a side note, I am thinking of compiling and building the sources in Ubuntu soon so I can look at how they made the linux kernel boot that quick (even in VirtualBox, it booted up, in let’s say, less than 10 seconds?).

Anyways, I’m getting somewhat offtopic… here’s how to install Chrome OS in VirtualBox (I am assuming you have VirtualBox installed on your host OS already):

1. Download the vmware image here: http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/

2. Unarchive the vmware image to a folder of your choice.

3. Open up VirtualBox and click on the New Button.

Follow these screenshots shown below for setup:

Create Virtual Machine

Set OS Name

Set Memory Requirements

Select your vmware harddisk (3 screenshots below)

Finishing up

And you should be able to start your Chrome OS in VirtualBox by selecting Chrome OS and pressing start button (sample screenshots of Chrome OS below):

A few days ago, my wife running Windows XP on the HP laptop I gave her a few years ago innocently clicked on one of those Facebook links posted on her wall “supposedly” coming from her friend talking about a cool video link.  What she didn’t know was that the link she clicked upon inadvertently installed a nasty worm/keylogging software into her computer and sent those links to her friends which we found out later, clicked on the link too!  Talk about the dangers of social networking…

What transpired was that on next boot, her machine ran suspiciously slow, then warnings from her antivirus software came popping up, and eventually came about crashing the whole system on the boot after that, only leaving the wallpaper showing on the desktop.

Adding to the difficulty was that it was one of those malware that loads up even in safe mode.

In the past, I would use live cds like PCLinuxOS 9.1, and Knoppix to boot and rescue the machine using F-prot for linux.  I didn’t have the time or luxury to download these cds since they were all now sporting over 700Mb in download size, which would certainly take a couple of hours to download.

I found a live cd after some searches through Google, which does exactly that and sports a significantly smaller download size too (about 50Mb).  It’s made by a somewhat known antivirus company, named Avira (I’ve installed Avira on my windows machines in the past, but I’ve settled for Avast and AVG, besides, what more could I ask… they’re free for home use).

The Live CD Rescue disk is located at the tools section of the Avira site.

Heres how to use it:

1. Boot up from the live cd:

2. Select the default option, and press enter.  You should boot up to a screen as shown below:

3. Default configuration is to report only infected files.  We would like to change that to automatic disinfection by clicking on the Configuration button and selecting the option as shown here:

4. If your computer is connected to the internet, it is possible to update your antivirus db files by clicking on update:

5. Go back to the Virus Scanner tab and press “Start Scanning”.  The antivirus software should be able to scan all available hard disks for viruses and malware automatically.

I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s flagship OS lately, and if one is to believe all the hype, it will definitely give microsoft a run for it’s money.

Everywhere, news sites such as CNET, OSNews and Ars have been talking about the coming Google sponsored Operating System.  And since we’re talking about Google here, that alone says much about the current buzz about it.

But what is Chrome OS exactly?

For those of you folks who don’t know what this is, here is a snippet of information from the Official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

So what’s the verdict?  Will Chrome OS replace Windows (or OSX, or even Desktop Linux) as a viable replacement?

I can give you an opinion right now of what I think of it… in the near future, not likely.

Here are the reasons why:

1. It is tied to a specific platform.  I consider this as an “apple-lesque” feature.  Come on, Google has set it’s limits to a netbook spec based machine, and a limited one at that (no harddisk, only SSDs, a specific sized lcd monitor, a specified keyboard size, etc).  I remember Intel doing these on netbooks; you can only run the graphics card only up to a certain size and resolution.  It’s pathetic.
2. The center of all activity is the browser.  What can you expect with Google?  Of course, all of the apps are tied up to the “cloud”, but what if I don’t want to use apps in the “cloud”?
3. It is application lock-in heaven.  Think of it.  All data, all your preferences are stored in Google.  Admittedly, I use google services all the time, but with this setup, you are guaranteed of this lock-in.
4. I like my gnome and kde apps.  I even like my games and applications in both Linux and Windows.  With the Google Chrome OS hardware spec requirements, I can only see netbooks coming with this OS installed as something of an internet appliance, nothing more.  I like my netbooks more featured, thank you.
5. Third world countries don’t have abundant internet connection (read: wifi)… so of what use is this to them?

I know, I know, it’s based on the linux kernel, and you can most probably modify the core of this OS. But my question is, what about the applications that Google bundles it with?  Most likely you cannot use these on a modified distribution.

I’m honestly more excited about the  announcement of a modified NX server months ago (called NeatX, which in my opinion is a good remote desktop solution for Linux servers, having used NX and FreeNX on some of the server boxes I manage), than on Chrome OS.

In conclusion, with all these hiccups, I don’t ever think we’ll see Chrome OS displacing Microsoft significantly in marketshare, for at least a number of years.

Looks like Tom posted a fresh news update on the codeweavers side of the fence.

Codenamed “Zombie Mallard”, this version sports compatibility to Left4Dead 2, and apparently, Codeweavers is running a raffle wherein the lucky winner customer buying CrossOver Games or CrossOver Offline gets an Intel Core i7-870 Lynnfield 2.93 Ghz Quad-Core Processor machine as a prize!

Sounds too good to be true?

Here’s an excerpt from the Codeweavers Site:

As part of our CrossOver Games 8.1 release, and its support for Left4Dead 2, we felt it was important to put superior firepower into the hands of our users! Any customer purchasing CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional until December 1st will be automatically registered to win this loaded CodeWeavers Gaming PC. We’ll pull the name out of the hat on December 1, 2009, just in time to have this little gem sitting under some lucky winner’s (non-denominational) Christmas / Hannukah / Kwanza / Festivus tree. Lovingly hand-crafted by our very own sysadmin / web genius / first-person shootist Jeremy Newman, we promise it will have all the woof you need to feed smoke to the baddies. Did we mention that it comes with a lifetime license for CrossOver Games Linux as well?

Look to Tom Wickline’s site for more details.

http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/games/codeweavers-releases-crossover-games-81-for-mac-and-linux.html

Since I’ve been able to get a new webhost (and lots of space and unlimited bandwidth), I’ve decided to share with you some rpms I’ve compiled and used on the machines I’ve been running.  All of these files are open source licensed, so feel free to download these files.

What’s in the repository?  ffmpeg, mysql-cluster, apache gotten from the RH repository (it’s the latest apache version), among other things.

Some special sauce have been added, like ffmpeg able to use speex codecs (which the rpmforge repositories cannot use), and php-ffmpeg, and some special php extensions which are not installed by default by plain vanilla php.

To access this repository, just get this file below:

http://ostalks.com/ostalks.repo

And place it in your yum.repos.d folder.

Have fun!

I happened to chat with Jay Klepacs, aLinux creator, a little over a month ago (we’ve been friends since 2000s, during the PeanutLinux days).

If you’re wondering what aLinux was, it was a linux distribution derived from looplinux and was basically a hybrid of sorts (in it’s early days, it was very slackware linux inspired, but sporting rpms as it’s package format) and was featured in distrowatch years ago.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050829

I asked him how he was, and what’s up in aLinux land (which hasn’t seen a release for quite a while). In fact, I haven’t worked on pnutproject for quite a while either with Craig… real life since has taken over and I’ve been working quite busy for a start up company which I’ve been in for almost 3 years (never had so much fun programming and doing cool stuff with linux too!).

To make the long story short, aLinux lives, but not for distribution… yet. I don’t know if Jay would release it to the public either (it still uses KDE 3.5.x, btw which I still prefer over KDE 4.x).

Anyways, here’s the screenshot for you to enjoy. Have fun!

A friend of mine asked me to help him set up linux on his newly purchased Lenovo laptop (doesn’t have an OS preinstalled). Few observations:

Ubuntu Intrepid failed to install on this laptop (messed up X resolution when it goes to the ubiquity setup screen).
Fedora 10 does install successfully.

There are two hardware gotchas that do not work after install, namely, the touchpad and the wireless. The laptop’s webcam gets detected and runs out of the box.

For the touchpad problem, disabling then enabling the touchpad by pressing the Fn+F8 key combination on the login screen twice does the trick.

As the wifi card of this laptop uses the Broadcom chipset, we have to install the Broadcom driver from the non-free repository of the rpmfusion website:

su -c ‘rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm’

and then running

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

and then rebooting the laptop will enable the user to use his wifi with no problems at all.

You might have heard of ssh2 pecl bindings for php. Unfortunately, the “stable” version fails to compile for php 5.2.x.

I am providing source rpms for CentOS/RedHat which fixes this problem.  Please take note I’m using a free file hosting service to host this source rpm.  If you know of anything better than this, please tell me.

CentOS/RedHat php-pecl-ssh source rpms

There’s a useful link below that should help you get started with php ssh2:

Make ssh connections with php

Update: You can now get this php extension at my repository

SmartBro Prepaid is a mobile broadband solution which consists of a HSDPA capable modem and prepaid sim card.  There are two type of these modems available, I am going to talk about the second, newer modem (the smaller black usb dongle), as the first one already has howtos available in the internet.  For the curious – this dongle is called the Longcheer, and is based on the Alcatel OT-X020 modem chipset.

Although this writeup is based on setting it up on Ubuntu Intrepid, the following steps should be applicable to other distributions as well.  You may want to improve on these steps by placing these commands on a bash script, but what I’m giving you is the staightforward way of doing it.

Here are the steps:

Download the usb_modeswitch binaries and the latest usb_modeswitch.conf file here:

http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/#download

Extract the usb_modeswitch binary and place it in a place like /usr/sbin.  usb_modeswitch.conf goes to the /etc folder. Comment out the lines which has the headers Alcatel OT-X020.  You have to disable the other modem enabled on this config file, or usb_modeswitch won’t work.

Edit your wvdial.conf file (located in /etc) to look like this (As a bonus, I added a default dialer section for your nokia cellphone – I have a Nokia E61i to connect to the smart internet network):

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet"
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
New PPPD = yes
Baud = 460800
Idle Seconds = 3000
Auto DNS = 1
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Ask Password = 0
FlowControl = NOFLOW

[Dialer smartbro]
Init1 = ATZ
#Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init2 = ATE1
#Init2 = ATE0V1&D2&C1S0=0
#Init3 = at_opsys=0
#Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","smartbro","",0,0
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
New PPPD = yes
Baud = 912600
Idle Seconds = 3000
Auto DNS = 1
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Dial Command = ATD
Ask Password = 0
FlowControl = NOFLOW

Write down this code and save it as initmodem.sh and place it in /usr/sbin:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1c9e product=0×6061 && usb_modeswitch
sleep 3

Plug in your SmartBro USB dongle and run:
# sudo /usr/sbin/initmodem

To connect to the internet, just type in:
# sudo wvdial smartbro

and to disconnect, just press CTRL+C, or kill the pppd process

I think this should work also with SmartBro 1500 as well.  Enjoy your smartbro connection!