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Since installing bbPress on the forum.blandname.com subdomain, I’ve become addicted to the rapid posting workflow: add topic, title, description and post! It’s 4 steps and is over so quick I’ve been thinking about making a bookmarklet that will automate the task for me. Here’s the latest smaller posts I sent there, but should some day expand upon here (I’ll use blandname for longer posts from now on):
- vTiger CRM Virtual Machine
- RDP Manager for your Windows System Tray
- HOWTO TrixBox - VoIP Virtual Machine
- Online Virtual Machine Builder
- Microsoft Distributes Demo Software via VHD
- FREE Terminal Server Monitoring Tool
- VMware Workstation 6 Feature List
- Multi monitor support for RDP 6
- Add Reflections to bbPress Images
- Google PageRank and Alexa in Your Firefox 2
- Display Digg in WordPress - Digg Dugg Plugin
- Google Analytics Plugn for bbPress
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Currently the only way to get Vista on Vista virtualization running is to either use Virtual Server 2005 with some tweaks, or if you are part of the Virtual PC 2007 beta you can install Virtual PC 2007 (VPC 2K7) on Vista with no tweaks or hacks needed whatsoever. Unfortunately neither of these solutions can virtualize a 64bit operating system, but VMware Server should be Vista compliant soon - so I’m holding me breath until then.
Following my friend’s guide to setting up Virtual PC 2007 on Windows Vista found over at WebandRaptors, I was able to get VPC 2k7 set up quickly and without pain.
Next came the Windows Vista install, which was pretty straightforward. Something to note: you don’t actually need to use a CD key during installation, you can simply click the “next” button and the installer will inform you that a CD key will be needed later, I think it’s about 30days before it becomes necessary.
Once Vista is installed and configured for remote access from within VPC, all you need to do to get Aero Glass running is to connect to the virtual machine using the Remote Desktop Connection (RDP 6) client. If your host, or physical, machine supports Aero Glass, the virtual machine will allow you to take advantage of it, giving you transparent blurred windows, mouse-over taskbar previews, and cool windows+tab animation!
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I’ve been using OS X for a while now, and one thing that really irks me, especially on larger DMG files like a Leopard image, is that OS X automatically tries to verify the checksum of the DMG image file, which could take hours.
There are a few applications out there that will disable this for you, but if you want the quick and dirty method, and don’t mind using the Terminal once in a while, use this one-liner to disable the verification easily:
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true
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SSH is one powerful tool. You can do just about everything under the sun using an SSH login to a remote computer. SSH works very well in low-bandwidth situations like dialup, or satlinks.
But wakeup, we’re no longer in the 80s - people want GUIs, let’s give them fancy-pants graphics, bouncing cursors and silly linux wizards. Remotely.
Enter Xming, what I would name as top of my favorite applications. Xming is just like X over SSH, for dummies (or people who would rather spend more time working).
Xming allows you to connect to remote or local Linux workstations and servers and run full graphical applications on those remote machines on your local Windows computer.
Here’s how it works: all of the applications are run remotely, but when it comes to the graphics, the information that would invoke the graphics is sent to your local computer, not a bitmap or a sequence of bitmaps like VNC. Xming uses a local X server on your Windows computer in order to display your remote applications. This local X server is 2D accelerated, and it’s sometimes difficult to even notice that you are working remotely.
Since Xming can run in windowed or full-screen modes, you can establish thin client connections in this fashion, or you can publish applications Citrix-style.
Xming is completely free to install and setup. It is a great way to manage virtual machines, and in fact is often faster than Microsoft’s Virtual Server ActiveX control (surprised?), VMWare’s Virtual Machine view (even with VMWare tools!), and even Parallels speedy virtual machine view.
To set the whole thing up, you’ll need a computer running Microsoft Windows, one Linux box, a network connection between the two, but you won’t need much effort.
First install the Windows Xming server on your Windows computer. We’ll use Windows XP SP2 in this example, but it could easily be other varieties. Xming can be found on Sourceforge quite easily, download it, run the install (use defaults), and start XLauncher.
On the Linux computer this are slighlty more complicated, but not by much. For Gnome or KDE on Ubuntu Edgy, go to the System>Administration menu in your menu bar. In Administration, we’ll select login preferences as we’ll be setting up a new logon method (we’re using XDMCP). Select the Remote tab, and enable remote logon (same as local) to your Edgy Eft machine.
Now on your Windows machine, set up XLaunch to logon to your Linux machine using it’s IP address. Save the setting if you want, and connect. You will be presented with a logon screen to your Linux desktop!
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I’m pretty excited because this weekend Ubuntu announced that Edgy is now in Beta!
From the Ubuntu site:
“The full release notes can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyEft/Beta
Highlights include:
- On the Desktop
- GNOME 2.16
- OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC 2
- X.org 7.1
On the Server
- Task selection for easier installation of mail servers, web servers, etc.
- A pre-release of the upcoming LTSP 5.0 with support for local devices, printers on thin clients as well as language and session selection from the LTSP login manager, network swapping, etherboot support out of the box and many more additions and improvements like network swap support that reduce the minimal requirements for thin clients to 32MB memory.
“Under the hood”
- GCC 4.1.1
- glibc 2.4
- Linux 2.6.17
- New init system.
As always, Ubuntu includes the very best of the 100% Free / Libre application software world, and each new release incorporates countless newfeatures and bug fixes from the global development community.”
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Here are screenshots from the upcoming Micorosoft RDP 6 client for Windows (Vista and XP), and explanations for each feature so that you can get started with your testing now and stay ahead of the game.
The options screen to the new RDP 6 client is very similar to that in version 5, but as you can see, it does not have input regions for login name and password. This is now done when you connect, and yes it can still be stored. Also note that just like in previous versions, if you would like to save the settings you will need to return to this tab as Microsoft still seems to think that saving options should not be done from all tabs for some reason. If you would like to make the options that you changed or reconfigured global, you would save the file as default.rdp in your “My Documents” folder. In Vista this is simply called “Documents” to make things easier. Yes, they have gotten rid of the “My” prefix now.
We have all of three options here: Remote Desktop Size, Colors and the Option to diplay the connection bar when in full screen mode. Remote desktop size: whether you want to display your remote desktop connection in full screen mode or not. This does work fer very large monitors, including those widescreen suckers. It will scale down to many other sizes depending on what you maximum resolution is. The amount of colors has now increased to 32bit in the newest version of the Remote Desktop Connection 6 client (RDP 6). This means getting accurate color from applications such as Adobe Photoshop is much easier now, though you will still need to do proper calibration.
The local resources tab controls the way your remote computer or terminal connects to your Longhorn or Windows 2003 R2 Terminal Server. For sound, you have the option to play sound locally, to leave the sound on the remote computer (host) or to ignore sound completely. I have noticed that the sound quality seems tobe much better in the new RDP client, but that it depends on the connection you are using. For example when using a Wifi-B connection, the sound quality appeared to be roughly the same as the previous client iteration. When I then connected the laptop to a wired (LAN) connection, the difference was apparent when switching back and forth between RDP 5 and RDP 6. I should probably be more precise here - what I mean by sound quality appears to affect times when multiple sounds play at once, as well as when sound are triggered by alerts or login notifications, the sounds appear to play faster, having less latency than in the RDP 5 client.
The keyboard menu here allows you to specify whether actions such as alt-tab will always be recognized by the remote computer even when in windowed mode, or if the host should accept them - the host being your computer in this case. I think the default is fine for most people - meaning keep it set to only accept these commands when in full-screen mode.
Local Devices and Resources: RDC 6 supports using local devices will logged into a remote computer provided that the proper driver exists on the remote host. Microsoft will be writing generic drivers for many devices, and currently things like smart cards, serial ports and hard drives are already supported, but the list will be growing.
The programs tab allows you to specify applications to run on connection to a remote host. You can specify the path of the application to run, as well as input information regarding the folder to start the program in.
The experience tab allows you to tweak the connection settings in order to get a less latent (slow updating) connection to your remote host. When people complain about this to me it typically involves things like typing speed not being fast enough in RDP sessions, and screen refreshes being very slow. If you are using a connection to a remote computer in a local network that runs at 100mbit or up, I have found that you can safely have all of the experience options turned on. On a wireless B connection (11mbps), you may want to turn all of the settings off. If you are connecting remotely, I would highly recommend turning all of them off.
There is also an option on the screen that has always looked out of place to me - and I think it should be on the general page as it seems to be a general option. At any rate, you can also specify whether or not to reconnection after your connection is dropped by checking this checkbox. I typically have this checked.
Lastly, we have the advanced tab, which allows you to set so-called “advanced” options. Basically this involves two things.
The first is server authentication. This allows you to confirm if you are connecting to the proper remote computer. In practice, I have found that this simply does not work in Windows XP, and now have it set to not warn me if the authentication fails, because it will always fail, without a doubt. If you use Vista or Windows Server Codename Longhorn, this does in fact work, so you can leave it set to default (”Warn me if authentication fails”).
The second option dubbed “Connect from anywhere” only works with gateway servers, like the new Terminal Services in Longhorn. At this point, you are unable to use the function on Windows XP. You are able to turn it on in Windows Vista, and can play with the settings provided you have a Terminal Services Gateway Server in your network.
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Forget Windows Vista.
The real new, exciting operating system from Microsoft is on it’s way and is supposedly slated for January.
Here’s a shortlist of reasons why you should care and what to look for:
LLMNR - Have you ever had master WINS browser woes? Name resolution problems? Microsoft wants to make this a thing of the past. In my experience this has been one of the largest pains - when the master browser goes down you lose name resolution. LLMNR fixes that. I’m happy. Testing the current Windows Server Codename Longhorn on virtual networks has shown so far that it works as expected already. I’m still happy. Basically this is multicast DNS (mDNS). Follow the link for a nice wiki article that will surely convince you.
Core Server Mode - Longhorn has a new locked down mode meant for bare-bones brass tax servers. They call it Core. What this means to the regular Windows admin is that there are no more wizards. Heck, there’s no more standard graphical UI. You get a command-line shell (DON’T call this DOS, they’ll find you!) to play around with. Servers are configured via preconfiguration scripts, this shell, and remote administration tools. If this is as fast and secure as it is supposed to be, it’ll be gravy. What you DO get: DHCP server, DNS server, file server, active directory, read-only domain controller, cluster services, load balancing, and services for Unix. That’s right, services for Unix is there too.
Application Publishing - I covered application publishing in Longhorn previously, and it’s what I am most excited about, to be honest. Pick an application, fire up the wizard, make an RDP file and send away to clients (even older XP terminals) - it’s that easy. While this will take the bread out of a lot of app vendors hands, it also allows for a wealth of innovation and I simply can’t wait to see what happens here.
Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 - In the same vein, and under the Terminal Server umbrella, the Remote Desktop Connection client gets an update that adds some much-needed and oft-asked-for features. Namely: PnP redirection for media players and digicams, multiple monitor support (I’m talking to you, Bill), desktop theming, and single sign-on. Whew. I’ll have to get into this one later.
Sharepoint V3 - It’s bigger, badder, and better code for Sharepoint. Better integration with Office 2007, faster load times, more features (of course), and item-level access control. Not to mention RSS by default - that’s was the deal-closer for me. Nor more need for infinite emails sent via alerts - just use RSS! Much like Apple, Microsoft has become a fan of RSS and it’s good news all around.
IIS 7 - You’re laughing. I see you snickering. Yes IIS is used externally, and its market share is growing right now, funnily enough. In IIS 7.0 you get reduced attack surface through feature modules. This is marketing-speak that means you can disable IIS services you don’t need. You get easy replication using web configuration files. And lastly you get better admin tools. Well slightly better anyway. This isn’t Plesk, Ensim or CPanel, but it’ll have to do ’til those guys get around to supporting Longhorn.
That about sums up the good things I’ve seen and tested to date on my virtual machines (VMWare Server, Virtual Server R2 and Parallels). Feel free to chime in about what tickles your fancy or rattles your chains, I’m all ears.
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This is more of a teaser, but my dream has come true! Ruby on Rails is now installed by default on Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Beta (Leopard WWDC edition). Getting it up and running is really a snap.
Here’s the quick and dirty way to make a sample Rails environment and start the server.
Firstly, open the Terminal application. You know the scary black window with white text. Well actually it could even be white with black text - your mileage may vary (mine is black with green, for example).
Anyway, we’re wasting time - this is quick and dirty right? Otherwise I would be talking about chunky bacon.
In Terminal, type:
rails example
You’ll be met with a nice list of scrolling lines and when it’s done your “example” Rails application will have been initialised.
And that’s pretty well it!
Moving on, we want to see something tangible to prove to ourselves just how flippin’ impressive this really is, and why you knew when you saw that Apple Developper Connection article about Rails you knew good things were to come.
In Terminal, once more, sweating profusely now, we type:
cd example
ruby script/server
This runs the server for us. Once it has been set up, you can safely minimize the Terminal, and fire up Safari, Firefox, Camino, iCab, heck even Internet Explorer. We’re navigating ourselves to: 127.0.0.1:3000
Here’s what we find there (click the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot):
The nitty-gritty (no dirt band):
- Ruby version - 1.8.4
- RubyGems Version - 0.9.0
- Rails version - 1.1.2
- Active Record version - 1.14.2
- Action Pack version - 1.12.1
- Action Web Service version - 1.1.2
- Action Mailer Version - 1.2.1
- Active Support version - 1.3.1
It’s set up in a development environment by default (where you want it), using the sqlite3 database adapter (pretty typical).
Next time we’ll show you how to update these and run irb. Until then feel free to vote in our poll and support us!
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