Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
Seeing how well Windows 8 was running in an VMware Player virtual machine and that was without installing VMware Tools in the guest operating system, I was reminded about how sluggish my Windows 7 VirtualBox VM had become. Therefore, I decided to try a migration of the VM from VirtualBox to VMware. My hope was that it was as easy as exporting to an OVA file (File > Export Appliance… in VirtualBox) and importing that into VMware (File > Open a VM in Player). However, even selecting OVF compatibility was insufficient for achieving this and the size of the virtual disks meant that the export took a while to run as well. The solution was to create a new VM in VirtualBox from the OVA file and use the newly created VMDK files with VMware. That worked successfully and I now have a speedier more responsive Windows 7 VM for my pains.
Access to host directories needed reinstatement using a combination of the VMware Shared Folders feature and updating drive mappings in Windows 7 itself to use what appear to it like network drives in the Shared Folders directory on the \\vmware-host domain. For that to work, VMware Tools needed to be installed in the guest OS (go to Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools to make available a virtual CD from which the installation can be done) as I discovered when trying the same thing with my Windows 8 VM, where I dare not instate VMware Tools due to their causing trouble when I last attempted it.
Moving virtual machine software brought about its side effects though. Software like Windows 7 detects that it’s on different hardware so reactivation can be needed. Windows 7 reactivation was a painless online affair but it wasn’t the same for Photoshop CS5. That meant that I needed help from Adobe’s technical support people top get past the number of PC’s for which the software already had been activated. In hindsight, deactivation should have been done prior to the move but that’s a lesson that I know well now. Technical support sorted my predicament politely and efficiently while reinforcing the aforementioned learning point. Moving virtual machine platform is very like moving from one PC to the next and it hadn’t clicked with me quite how real those virtual machines can be when it comes to software licencing.
Apart from that and figuring out how to do the it, the move went smoothly. An upgrade to the graphics driver on the host system and getting Windows 7 to recheck the capabilities of the virtual machine even gained me a fuller Aero experience than I had before then. Full screen operation is quite reasonable too (the CTRL + ALT + ENTER activates and deactivates it) and photo editing now feels less boxed in too.
Recently, I needed to create a waterfall plot couldn’t use PROC SGPLOT since it was incompatible with publishing macros that use PROC GREPLAY on the platform that I was using; SGPLOT doesn’t generate plots in SAS catalogs but directly creates graphics files instead. Therefore, I decided that PROC GCHART needed to be given a go and it delivered what was needed .
The first step is to get the data into the required sort order:
proc sort data=temp;
by descending result;
run;
Then, it is time to add an ID variable for use in the plot’s X-axis (or midpoint axis in PROC GCHART) using an implied value retention to ensure that every record in the dataset had a unique identifier:
data temp;
set temp;
id+1;
run;
After that, axes have to be set up as needed. For instance, the X-axis (the axis2 statement below) needs to be just a line with no labels or tick marks on there and the Y-axis was fully set up with these, turning the label from vertical to horizontal as needed with the ANGLE option controlling the overall angle of the word(s) and the ROTATE option dealing with the letters, and a range declaration using the ORDER option.
axis1 label=none major=none minor=none value=none;
axis2 label=(rotate=0 angle=90 "Result") order=(-50 to 80 by 10);
With the axis statements declared, the GCHART procedure can be defined. Of this, the VBAR statement is the engine of the plot creation with the ID variable used for the midpoint axis and the result variable used as the summary variable for the Y-axis. The DISCRETE keyword is needed to produce a bar for every value of the ID variable or GCHART will bundle them by default. Next, references for the above axis statements (MAXIS option for midpoint axis and AXIS option for Y-axis) are added and the plot definition is complete. One thing that has to be remembered is that GCHART uses run group processing so a QUIT statement is needed at the end to close it at execution time. This feature has its uses and appears in other procedures too though SAS procedures generally are concluded by a RUN statement.
proc gchart data=temp;
vbar id / sumvar=result discrete axis=axis2 maxis=axis1;
run;
quit;
The progress of Windows 10 is something that I have been watching. Early signs have been promising and the most recent live event certainly contained its share of excitement. The subsequent build that was released was another step in the journey though the new Start Menu appears more of a work in progress than it did in previous builds. Keeping up with these advances sometimes steps ahead of VirtualBox support for them and I discovered that again in the last few days. VMware Player seems unaffected so I thought that I’d try a migration of the VirtualBox VM with Windows 10 onto there. In the past, I did something similar with a 32-bit instance of Windows 7 that subsequently got upgraded all the the way up to 8.1 but that may not have been as slick as the latest effort so I thought that I would share it here.
The first step was to export the virtual machine as an OVF appliance and I used File > Export Appliance… only to make a foolish choice regarding the version of OVF. The one that I picked was 2.0 and I subsequently discovered that 1.0 was the better option. The equivalent command line would look like the following (there are two dashes before the ovf10 option below):
VboxManage export [name of VM] -o [name of file].ova --ovf10
VMware have a tool for extracting virtual machines from OVF files that will generate a set of files that will work with Player and other similar products of theirs. It goes under the unsurprising name of OVF Tool and it usefully works from a command line session. When I first tried it with an OVF 2.0 files, I got the following error and it stopped doing anything as a result:
Line 2: Incorrect namespace http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/2 found.
The only solution was to create a version 1.0 file and use a command like the following (it’s a single line though it wraps over two here and there are two dashes before the lax switch):
ovftool --lax [name of file].ova [directory location of VM files]/[name of file].vmx
The --lax option is needed to ensure successful execution even with an OVF 1.0 file as the input. Once I had done this on my Ubuntu GNOME system, the virtual machine could be opened up on VMware Player and I could use the latest build of Windows 10 at full screen, something that was not possible with VirtualBox. This may be how I survey the various builds of the operating that appear before its final edition is launched later this year.
Recently, VirtualBox gained fuller support for Windows 11 and I successively set up a new Windows 11 virtual machine that I hope will supplant a Windows 10 counterpart in time. The setup itself was streamlined but I ran into such stability issues that I set the new VM aside until a new version of VirtualBox got released. That has happened with the appearance of version 7.0.2 but Windows 11 remains prone to freezing on my Linux Mint machine. Thankfully, that now is much less frequent but the need for added stability remains outstanding.
While I was thinking about trying our Virtualbox 7.0.0, I remembered a QEMU machine that I had running Windows 11. Though QEMU proved more limited than VirtualBox when it came to having easy availability of functionality like moving data in and out of the virtual machine or support for sound, there was no problem with TPM support or system stability. Since it did contain some useful data, I wondered about converting its virtual hard disk to VirtualBox format and it is easy to do. First, you need to install qemu-img and other utilities as follows:
sudo apt-get install qemu-utils
With that in place, executing a command like the following performs the required conversion. Here, the -O switch specifies the required file type of vdi in this case.
qemu-img convert -O vdi [virtual hard disk].qcow2 [virtual hard disk].vdi
While I have yet to mount it on the new Virtualbox Windows 11 virtual machine, it is good to have the old virtual hard disk available for doing so. The thought of using it as a boot drive in VirtualBox did enter my mind but the required change of drivers and other incompatibilities dissuaded me from doing so.
Recently, a client of mine updated one of their systems from SAS 9.4 M5 to SAS 9.4 M7. In spite of performing due diligence regarding changes between the maintenance release, a change in behaviour of the SYSODSESCAPECHAR automatic macro variable surprised them. The macro variable captures the assignment of the ODS escape character used to prefix RTF codes for page numbering and other things. That setting is made using an ODS ESCAPECHAR statement like the following:
ods escapechar="~";
In the M5 release, the tilde character in this example was output by the automatic macro variable but that changed in the M7 release to 7E, the hexadecimal code for the same and this tripped up one of their validated macro programs used in output production. The adopted solution was to use the escape sequence (*ESC*) that gave the same outcome that was there before the change. That was less verbose than alternative code changing the hexadecimal code into the expected ASCII character that follows.
data _null_;
call symput("new",byte(input("&sysodsescapechar.",hex.)));
run;
The above supplies a hexadecimal code to the BYTE function for correct rendering with the SYMPUT routine assigning the resulting value to a macro variable named new. Just using the escape sequence is far more succinct though there is now an added validation need once user pilot testing has completed. In my line of business, the updating of code is the quickest part of many such changes; documentation and testing always take longer.
It has been a little while but I have managed to set up a VirtualBox virtual machine in order to take a look at the Developer Preview of the next version of Windows, something that I and others continue to call Windows 8 though Microsoft has yet to confirm the name. When I tried the installation before, it failed on me but that may have been due to having an earlier release of VirtualBox on my machine at that time. 4.1.14 has a preset for Windows 8 and I also happened to notice that it can create virtual hard disks that can be used with competitors like VMWare, Parallels and Virtual PC too. It’s an interesting development but I am left wondering why you’d need to do that when VirtualBox runs on most platforms anyway.
To get back to Windows 8, the installation ran near enough without any intervention apart form stating the language you wanted to use, U.K. English in my case. Starting up the operating system gains you a lock screen that you need to get out of the way so you can log in. It can be dragged out of your way or you can double-click on it or use the carriage return key to get rid of it. Quite why someone thinks it’s a good extra is a little beyond me when a log in screen would suffice. Logging in gets you the new start menu or, as I prefer to think of it, screen. By default, there are a good few Metro apps installed though I decided to rid myself of most of them.
Regarding those apps, one irritation could be that there isn’t that obvious a way to switch away from them to something else. Thankfully, ALT+TAB does seem to work and it has the most instantaneous effect. Otherwise, using the Windows key or hovering over the bottom left corner of the screen to get the menu that brings up the start screen. From the PC user’s point of view, I could see this needing a little more thought because it took a little while for me to figure out what to do. Closing Metro apps isn’t an option either unless you resort to the Task Manager to do so. Microsoft appears to want to leave them open from the point at which you start them until the PC is shut down. It’s a design decision that leaves me unconvinced though, particularly when thoughts of rogue apps running riot on a system come to mind. Then, a stop button could be handy.
There is no start menu as we have come to know it anymore with the start screen replacing it. However, it is possible to limit what’s on there to the software that you use most often an rearrange panels as you’d like them to be. Apart from hosting shortcuts for starting applications, it also acts as a task switcher like the task bar in Windows 7 and there is one of those in Windows 8 too when you jump to the desktop; handily, there’s a panel for that too. Installing Firefox added a panel to the start screen so a little thought has gone into such a common situation and that’s just as well. Still, there’s more work to be done because, currently, there’s no way of changing the background colour of the start screen without resorting to a hex editor or third party tools. Still, you can pick your own picture for the lock screen so things are not all locked down on you.
A preview of IE 10 is included and, apart from the occasional artifact when displaying one of my websites, it seems to work well enough as does Windows Explorer. However, apart from these and a smattering of Metro apps, the Developer Preview does feel barer that previous versions of Windows. However, it does appear that applications like Notepad, PowerShell and the Command Prompt are on there but you need to search for these. That also means that you know about them too so I’d suggest a better way of browsing the applications that are available too. This is one of the weaknesses of Ubuntu’s Unity interface and you need to search in the Dash to find them. Just starting to type in the Metro start screen (and other screens too, it seems) in Windows does trigger the completion of a search box much like what happens in the GNOME Shell Activities screen on systems with GNOME 3. While it’s good to see good ideas being reused from elsewhere, Microsoft might do well to note that you still can browse lists of applications in GNOME 3 too.
Shutting down Windows 8 also seems to be more convoluted than is the case with Windows 7. Logging off and then powering off from the log in screen is one approach and that was my early impression from GNOME 3 too. With the latter, I later was to discover a status menu plugin that added in the option where it was accessible or that using ALT key when clicking the status menu when the plugin wouldn’t work would do what I needed. Without logging off from Windows 8, you can do a shut down using the sidebar that appears on selecting Settings from the menu that pops up on hovering near the bottom left corner of the start screen or the Start button of the task bar of the desktop. Then, look for the power icon and select what you need from the menu that clicking on this icon produces. Of course, you may find that the ALT+F4 key combination when issued while on a clean desktop is the cleanest of all.
All in all, the Developer Preview of the next release of Windows looks fairly usable. That is not to say that there aren’t things that need changing. Apart from this being an early sight of what may be coming to us Windows users, it isn’t unknown for Microsoft to roll back on a radical move to make it more palatable to the user community. After all, it has to watch how it treats the corporate market too. The strong possibility of there being alterations is one thought that needs to be shared with those who are inclined to be losing their tempers at the moment and I have comments with unpleasant language out there on the web (none of that here, please, by the way). As for me, I like to look ahead in order to be forewarned about what’s coming my way in the world of computing. What I have seen so far of the next Windows release is reassuring though there are roughnesses such as PC shutdown and Metro app switching but Microsoft cannot commit commercial suicide either so these have to be fixed. It seems that the world of Microsoft operating systems is in flux with the company’s keeping a firm eye on the world of mobile computing with tablets being a major concern. Others may disagree but I can see Windows 8 working well on conventional PC’s and that’s no bad thing.
Recent experimentation centring around getting my hands on a test version of Windows 11 had me duplicating virtual machines and virtual disk images though VirtualBox still is not ready for the next Windows version; it has no TPM capability at the moment. Nevertheless, I was able to get something after a fresh installation that removed whatever files were on the disk image. That meant that I needed to mount the old version to get at those files again.
Renaming partially helped with this but what I really needed to do was change the UUID so VirtualBox would not report a collision between two disk images with the same UUID. To avoid this, the UUID of one of the disk images had to be changed and a command like the following was used to accomplish this:
VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid [Virtual Disk Image Name].vdi
Because I was doing this on Linux Mint, I could call VBoxManage without need to tell the system where it was as would be the case in Windows. Otherwise, it is the sethduuid portion that changes the UUID as required. Another way around this is to clone the VDI file using the following command but I had not realised that at the time:
VBoxManage clonevdi [old virtual disk image].vdi [new virtual disk image].vdi
It seems that there can be more than way to do things in VirtualBox at times so the second way will remain on reference for the future.
Because updating Piwik using its web interface has proved tempestuous, I have decided update the self-hosted analytics application an ssh session. The production web servers that I use are hosted on Linux systems so that is why any commands apply to the Linux or UNIX command line only. What is needed for Windows servers may differ.
The first step is to down the required ZIP file with this command:
wget https://builds.piwik.org/piwik.zip
Once the download is complete, the contents of the ZIP archive are extracted into a new subfolder. This is a process that I carry out in a separate folder to that where the website files are kept before copying everything from the extract folder in there. Here is the unzip command and the -o switch turns on overwriting of any previously existing files:
unzip -o piwik.zip
Without the requirement folder in web server area updated, the next step is to do the actual system update that includes any updates to the Piwik database that you are using. There are two commands that you can use once you have specified the location of your Piwik installation. The second is needed when the first option cannot find where the PHP executable is stored. My systems had something more specific than these because both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 are installed. Looking in /usr/bin was enough to find what i needed to execute in place of php below. Otherwise, the command was the same.
./[path to piwik]/console core:update
php [path to piwik]/console core:update
While the upgrade is ongoing, it prompts you to permit it to continue before it goes and makes changes to the database. This did not take long on my systems but that depends on how much data there is. Once, the process has completed, you can delete any extraneous files using the rm command.
Since upgrading to Linux Mint 19, I have installed some software from Flatpack. The cause for my curiosity was that you could have the latest versions of applications like GIMP or Libreoffice without having to depend on a third-party PPA. Installation is straightforward given the support built into Linux Mint. You just need to download the relevant package from the Flatpack website and running the file through the GUI installer. Because the packages come with extras to ensure cross-compatibility, more disk space is used but there is no added system overhead beyond that from what I have seen. Updating should be as easy as running the following single command too:
flatpack update
However, I needed to do a little extra work before this was possible. The first step was to update the configuration file at ~/.local/share/flatpak/repo/config to add the following lines:
[remote "flathub"]
gpg-verify=true
gpg-verify-summary=true
url=https://flathub.org/repo/
xa.title=Flathub
Once that was completed, I ran the following commands to import the required GPG key:
wget https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.gpg
flatpak --user remote-modify --gpg-import=flathub.gpg flathub
With this complete, I was able to run the update process and update any applications as necessary. After that first run, it has been integrated in to my normal processes by adding the command to the relevant alias definition.
In previous posts, I have talked about getting VMware Workstation back on its feet again after a kernel upgrade. It also seems that VirtualBox is prone to the same sort of affliction. However, while VMware Workstation fails to start at all, VirtualBox at least starts itself even if it cannot get a virtual machine going and generates errors instead.
My usual course of action is to fire up Synaptic and install the drivers for the relevant kernel. Looking for virtualbox-ose-modules-[kernel version and type] and installing that usually resolves the problem. For example, at the time of writing, the latest file available for my system would be virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic. If you are a command line fan, the command for this would be:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic
The next thing to do would be to issue the command to start the vboxdrv service and you’d be all set:
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start
There is one point of weakness (an Achilles heal, if you like) with all of this: the relevant modules need to be available in the first place and I hit a glitch after updating the kernel to 2.6.24-20 when they weren’t; I do wonder why Canonical fail to keep both in step with one another and why the new kernel modules don’t come through the updates automatically either. However, there is a way around this too. That means installing virtualbox-ose-source via either Synaptic or the command line:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-source
The subsequent steps involve issuing more commands to perform a reinstallation from the source code:
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a auto-install virtualbox-ose
Once these are complete, the next is to start the vbox drv as described earlier and to add yourself to vboxusers group if you’re still having trouble:
sudo adduser [your username] vboxusers
The source code installation option certainly got me up and running again and I’ll be keeping it on hand for use should the situation raise its head again.