I had to get some kind of virtualization going in order to run a Windows application the other day.  I’m most familiar with VMWare Server, so I decided to install that.

Turns out, the guys at VMWare Inc. had released a new revision of VMWare Server (2.0!).  I only had previous experience the 1.x series, but I thought 2.0 would be easy to set up, as 1.x had been relatively straightforward (after you download the required scripts, go through the ridiculous questionnaire from the configuration script, and whatnot).  Turns out that 2.0 is a huge change from 1.x (big changes on a major version upgrade? Who’d have thought?) and it still has some rough edges right now.  The main difference I noticed is that 2.0 uses a web-based management system, so instead of opening the VMWare Console application like in previous versions, you open your web browser and point it to “http://localhost:8222″.

I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea.  Maybe it IS a good idea, only poorly implemented :)  Anyway, it turns out that to actually access the console of any virtual machine (which is basically the whole point of VMWare IMO), you need to install a browser plug-in.  Furthermore, it turns out that this browser plugin does not install correctly by default on my machine using Firefox 3.0.4, Firefox 2.0.0.18, or on Opera 9.51.  I even tried running the browser as root!!

Here is the workaround I was able to figure out that let me install the browser plug-in to make VMWare Server 2.0 work:

Close firefox.

sudo ls /root/.mozilla/firefox/

Find the name of root’s firefox profile folder in the output from the above command.
Delete extensions.rdf from root’s firefox profile folder

sudo firefox &

Load the VMWare Server interface back up (localhost:8222)
Try to install the plug-in again.

I was able to get it working this way, but I’m not that confident in this workaround, especially since it requires running the browser as root.  I’ve actually since switched to VirtualBox instead of VMWare Server, and I’ve had good luck with it so far.

This has only happened to me once, and only when connecting my Sansa Clip 1GB via USB.  On the other hand, I don’t often connect the Sansa Clip so it could be a common problem for some.  I’m running the Asus P5K-VM motherboard (Intel G33/ICH9).

Basically, after connecting and connecting the device a few times, I got these lines in the output of dmesg:
[268429.607723] usb 8-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
[268431.894349] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: port 2 reset error -110
[268431.894356] hub 8-0:1.0: hub_port_status failed (err = -32)
At that point, I could not get my computer to recognize the Sansa Clip again even after powering it on and off and reconnecting the USB cable multiple times.

I was determined to resolve this problem without rebooting, as I hate rebooting (as I’ve explained previously).  I was able to get it working again by entering the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r ehci_hcd
sudo modprobe ehci_hcd

After that my USB keyboard (which had been plugged in the whole time) mysteriously started typing the enter key continuously until I pressed a different key, at which point everything seemed to be working fine.

Mechwarrior 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, so tonight I sat down and spent the time to get it running again on my current operating system of choice (Kubuntu 8.04).  Here are (what I hope are) easy-to-follow instructions that should let you do what I did.  This should work with the original DOS version of Mechwarrior 2 (with the audio tracks in cd-audio format on the disc).

Step 1: Install DOSBox.

• Click Add/Remove Programs in your K menu.  Select DOSBox from the list of available applications, click ‘apply changes’.

Step 2: Rip the original game disc to an image on your hard drive and convert that image to a format that DOSBox can use.

• Insert the CD then open a Konsole window and run the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
cdrdao read-cd --datafile image.bin --driver generic-mmc:0x20000 --device /dev/cdrom --read-raw image.toc
toc2cue image.toc image.cue

Step 3: Start up DOSBox and give it some virtual drives to work with.

• At the DOSBox command prompt, run the following commands:

mount c ~/Desktop
imgmount d c:\image.cue -t iso

Step 4: Install Mechwarrior 2 from the command prompt just like you would have on your old DOS machine and enjoy (commands below if you don’t remember how you used to install things in the “good ol’ days”).

d:
install
(follow the installation prompts)

A little warning, my Core 2 Duo E6600 machine has some trouble running this game at 1024×768, so I run at 800×600.  If you have a less modern machine you may have to resort to 640×480 or less :(

Just FYI for Kubuntu 8.04 users who might be thinking about running Compiz Fusion on their ‘work’ machines.  I have tried it twice, and while Hardy Heron has made it very easy to enable ‘3d effects’ on the desktop, there are still major bugs that will probably crash your X server at some point.  I’m sure they’ll get it right eventually ;)

I like to leave my computer on 24/7.  Having an ‘uptime’ of months is a matter of personal satisfaction for me, and is really one of the reasons I like Linux - if something goes wrong you can usually fix it without restarting.  Today I encountered a problem that a user with a normal usage pattern probably never would have noticed, as it would have been fixed if I had restarted.

My sound stopped working today.  I would open Amarok and try to start playback and it would look like it was playing (the eq was bouncing), but no sound was coming out.  I went to a command prompt and tried to use the ‘madplay’ command line utility to play an mp3.  It gave me the error: “/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy”.  I did a quick search on that error message and came up with some helpful articles that led me to believe that maybe a certain process was monopolizing my sound device and not letting other processes access it.  On advice of this forum post, I was able to use the ‘lsof’ tool to find which process was locking up my audio device and then end that process.  Here is the command I used:

lsof /dev/snd/*

I was able to see that ‘firefox’ was using my sound device, so I just closed firefox, and sure enough that fixed it.

I’ve had some problems with Adobe Flash ever since I upgraded to Kubuntu Hardy Heron. Flash applets would come up in firefox as just a grey box sometimes. Sometimes I would come back to a previously-opened browser tab to find a Flash applet turned from a working video player (or whatever) to a grey box. Videos from sites like Youtube would often play but sometimes would start coming up as grey boxes until I restarted firefox. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling flashplugin-nonfree and nspluginwrapper with apt-get following some instructions I found online, but that never solved the problem. I tried the Adobe Flash Plugin 10 beta. I tried Opera. Opera wouldn’t load the flash files at all. I tried Konqueror. Konqueror would work more often than firefox, but still was inconsistent.

Here is my current solution that seems to have solved most all of the flash problems I was encountering. I removed flashplugin-nonfree. I removed nspluginwrapper. I removed Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta. Then I reinstalled just the flashplugin-nonfree package using aptitude instead of apt-get. I found this page was helpful in learning what to try. Here is a list of commands if you are having similar problems and want to give this potential solution a try:

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get remove nspluginwrapper
sudo aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

Today I received my DAC707 SuperPro digital to analog audio converter from Audio Magus.  I recently helped a friend set up his similar machine to use one of these devices.  It sounded really nice so I decided I should have one for myself.  It also frees me from having more junk in my PC as I had been using a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS.  It was a solid card but I figured I could get better audio output by moving the conversion and pre-amplification outside the PC chassis which is traditionally full of electrical interference.  The SuperPro allows me to run either optical or spdif digital audio out to it for digital to analog conversion and then preamplification.  Anyway, it sounds great, but it was not immediately intuitive how to get my digital audio output working on my onboard sound card.

Here are a few tips so hopefully you can get SPDIF-out working with less hassle than it took me:

• The only volume level that matters is ‘PCM’ (at least on my particular onboard audio chipset).  I cannot access the ‘PCM’ volume level through Kmix, only through AlsaMixer (KMix 2.6.1 and AlsaMixer 1.0.15 BTW).
• Mute does matter on some channels such as ‘Master’, and ‘IEC958′.  Make sure these aren’t muted.
• Turn on crossfading in your music player because otherwise you might get annoying popping or crackling between tracks as the DAC seems to turn itself off and then back on between tracks if theres just silence.