Technology Tales

Setting up openSUSE in VMware Workstation

While it should have been as straightforward as following the instructions on the openSUSE website, a bug in VMware Tools derailed things for me. The usual procedure would have you starting by selecting Install VMware Tools from the VM menu before popping into the virtual machine to do the rest. Once binutils, gcc, gcc-c++, kernel-source and make are in place, the next steps should involve using YaST to install the RPM for you to run the vmware-config-tools.pl script from the terminal.

However, a bug in compat_slab.h puts a stop to any hopes of installing the vmhgfs component. That's needed if you like to enable the shared folders feature; looking in /mnt/hgfs then would get you to any shared folders. While everything else will be there, why miss out on one piece of functionality when it comes in useful?

Having found a useful thread on the subject, here's my way forward: it is as the expected procedure up to the point of installing the RPM. With VMware Tool installation on a Linux guest, you have two options: use RPM as described or use the compressed tarball. The latter seems the better course. Extract the contents into a folder and navigate to that folder. When there, go into vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source and extract the file vmhgfs.tar. Proceed into the resulting vmhgfs-only contained wherever you put it and perform the following edit of compat_slab.h:

Change

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2, 6, 22) || defined(VMW_KMEMCR_HAS_DTOR)

to

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE <= KERNEL_VERSION(2, 6, 22) || defined(VMW_KMEMCR_HAS_DTOR)

After that, recreate and replace vmhgfs.tar before issuing the following command in the terminal window while in the vmware-tools-distrib directory: ./vmware-config-tools.pl (anything prefixed with "./" picks up the file from the current working directory rather than where system binaries are stored). Though a kernel compilation will be involved, all the defaults should be sensible. Hopefully, all will work well after this.

Update: I am left with a number of outstanding issues that I need to resolve. Lack of internet access from the VM is one of them, and a constant forgetfulness regarding the nationality of my keyboard (it's British) might be another. In the interim, I have removed VMware tools until I can spend some time setting these to rights. That means internet access has returned, and the British keyboard layout is being interpreted correctly for now...

Other uses for the middle mouse button

Here's another one of those things that I discovered while being clumsy: in Firefox, click on your middle mouse button/wheel while hovering over a tab, and it will close it; you don't even need to click on the close icon. Evince, the PDF viewer favoured by Ubuntu, also makes use of the middle mouse button: for panning your way through documents using the hand tool. In a moment of lateral thinking, I tried the same trick with Adobe Reader; in version 7.x, it works in the same way. On Windows at least, Adobe Reader 8.x is a different animal and features automatic scrolling, a very useful proposition for the reading of eBooks if the text doesn't pass by you too quickly, and even a moderately reliable read aloud feature.

Choices, choices…

While choice is a great thing, too much of it can be confusing, and the world of Linux is a one very full of decisions. The first of these centres around the distro to use when taking the plunge; you quickly find that there can be quite a lot to it. In fact, it is a little like buying your first SLR/DSLR or your first car: you only really know what you are doing after your first one. Putting it another way, you only know how to get a house built after you have done just that.

With that in mind, it is probably best to play a little on the fringes of the Linux world before committing yourself. It used to be that you had two main choices for your dabbling:

• using a spare PC
• dual booting with Windows by either partitioning a hard drive or dedicating one for your Linux needs.

In these times, innovations such as Live CD distributions and virtualisation technology keep you away from such measures. In fact, I would suggest starting with the former and progressing to the latter for more detailed perusal; it's always easy to wipe and restore virtual machines anyway, so you can evaluate several distros at the same time if you have the hard drive space. It also a great way to decide which desktop environment you like. Otherwise, terms like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc. might not mean much.

The mention of desktop environments brings me to software choices because they do drive what software is available to you. For instance, the Outlook lookalike that is Evolution is more likely to appear where GNOME is installed than where you have KDE. The opposite applies to the music player Amarok. Nevertheless, you do find certain stalwarts making a regular appearance; Firefox, OpenOffice and the GIMP all fall into this category.

The nice thing about Linux is that distros more often than not contain all the software that you are likely to need. However, that doesn't mean that it is all on the disk and that you have to select what you need during the installation. Though there might have been a time when it might have felt like that, my recent experience has been that a minimum installation is set in place that does all the basics for you to easily add the extras later on an as needed basis. I have also found that online updates are a strong feature too.

Picking up what you need when you need it has major advantages, the big one being that Linux grows with you. You can add items like Apache, PHP and MySQL when you know what they are and why you need them. It's a long way from picking applications of which you know very little at installation time and with the suspicion that any future installation might land you in dependency hell while performing compilation of application source code; the temptation to install everything that you saw was a strong one. The "learn before you use" approach favoured by how things are done nowadays is an excellent one.

Even if life is easier in the Linux camp these days, there is no harm in sketching out your software needs. Any distribution should be able to fulfil most if not all of them. As it happened, the only third party application that I have needed to install on Ubuntu without recourse to Synaptic was VMware Workstation, and that procedure thankfully turned out to be pretty painless.

A fallback installation routine?

In a previous sustained spell of Linux meddling, the following installation routine was one that I encountered rather too often when RPM's didn't do what I required of them (having a SUSE distro in a world dominated by a Red Hat standard didn't make things any easier...):

tar xzvf progname.tar.gz; cd progname

The first part of the command extracts from a tarball compressed using gzip and the second one changes into the new directory created by the extraction. For files compressed with bzip use:

tar xjvf progname.tar.bz2; cd progname

The command below configures, compiles and installs the package, running the last part of the command in its own shell.

./configure; make; su -c make install

Yes, the procedure is a bit convoluted, but it would have been fine if it always worked. My experience was that the process was a far from foolproof one. For instance, an unsatisfied dependency is all that is needed to stop you in your tracks. Attempting to install a GNOME application on a KDE-based system is as good a way to encounter this result as any. Other horrid errors also played havoc with hopeful plans from time to time.

It shouldn't surprise you to find that I will be staying away from the compilation/installation business with my main Ubuntu system. Synaptic Package Manager and its satisfactory dependency resolution fulfil my needs well and there is the Update Manager too; I'll be leaving it for Canonical to do the testing and make the decisions regarding what is ready for my PC as they maintain their software repositories. My past tinkering often created a mess, and I'll be leaving that sort of experimentation for the safe confines of a virtual machine from now on...

Importing bookmarks into Firefox

Moving from one operating system to another like I have means that a certain amount of migration is in order. While I have already talked about migrating my email, there are lesser acts too. One of these is carrying across bookmarks into the new world. This should be an easy thing to achieve and, for the most part, it is. However, the Import... entry on the File menu of the main browser only brings in bookmarks from other applications. To get more flexibility, you need to open up the Bookmarks Manager window from the Bookmarks menu (Organise Bookmarks... is the entry that you need). The File menu of the Bookmarks Manager has entries named Import... and Export...; their functions should be very apparent. The former will read from a file, very useful if you do not want to disrupt what you already have. Another migration option is the potentially disruptive act of copying in an alternative bookmarks.html file into your Firefox profile folder and overwriting the one that's already there.

The case of a wide open restriction

The addition of IMAP capability to Gmail attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere last week, and I managed to flick the switch for the beast courtesy of the various instructions that were out there. However, when I pottered back to the settings, the IMAP settings had disappeared.

A brief look at the Official Gmail Blog confirmed why: the feature wasn't to be available to those who hadn't set their language as US English. My setting of UK English explained why I wasn't seeing it again, a strange observation given that they are merely variants of the same language; I have no idea why I saw it the first time around.

My initial impression was that the language setting used was an operating system or browser one, but this is not how it is. In fact, it is the language that you set for Gmail itself in its settings; choosing US English was sufficient to make the IMAP settings reappear, while choosing UK English made them disappear again.

Personally, I am not certain why the distinction was made in the first place, but I have Evolution merrily working away with Gmail's IMAP interface without a bother. To get it going, I needed that imap.gmail.com needed an SSL connection while smtp.gmail.com needed a TLS one. After that, I was away and no port numbers needed to be supplied, unlike Outlook.

A matter of fonts…

It's when you pop from one operating system to another that you realise how operating system specific it is that fonts are. For instance, only one of the names in the following list are understood by Firefox on Ubuntu, the last one: Trebuchet MS, Lucida Grande, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif. The reason that San-Serif is understood is that it's a general font class name in the world of CSS. However, that does not mean that you still are not at the mercy of operating system fonts. In fact, font sizes vary and 16px in one font isn't the same as 16px in another; that can mean broken layouts if you are sufficiently clumsy.

As it happens, the main menu bar on my hillwalking blog should all fit on one line, yet it took up two lines when viewed on Linux. If it did that neatly, there wouldn't be much of a problem, but it didn't. While some CSS hacking could have repaired the situation, I went for a simpler solution for now: picking a Linux sans serif font that fitted the bill better. So popping in mentions of "Nimbus Sans L" in appropriate places in my stylesheet was the way that I went. Since I don't know how this appears in other Linux distributions, the wonders of virtualisation should allow me to find out.

If I was really concerned about the fonts that were being used, I could have gone with a server-side approach: embedded fonts. I haven't tried this for a while but differing browser support was a major issue when I did: you had to create a set of files for IE and for Netscape when I was investigating such things, hardly convenient even in those days when Opera was merely a speck on the horizon and Mozilla was nascent. Though it's a valid approach for those exclusive fonts, so is questioning why you are using them in the first place. Adobe's Flash is another option for those who obsess with fonts, though how users take to this remains an open question, as does the accessibility of the approach.

For now, I plan to continue evaluating how applications appear across different operating systems. For this purpose, virtualisation serves as an excellent tool, as do Live CDs. The latter is particularly useful for Linux distributions which the former has application with more scenarios: names OpenSolaris and, with a spot of tinkering, OS X come to mind. This presents an appealing concept, especially considering Firefox has essentially become a cross-platform standard in today's computing environment. Mind you, seeing how websites are rendered by Safari running on OS X might be of interest to some.

Looking at from the user's point of view rather than the web developer's, there remains a question regarding the visiting of websites that break because of the font conundrum. If you find this happening to you a lot, it may be an idea to bring in some TrueType or OpenType fonts. With Ubuntu, this is straightforward: fire up Synaptic, search for msttcorefonts and install that package along with any of its dependencies. Logging off from and on to the system will make the new fonts available. There was a time when more work was needed than that...

Restoring Anquet Mapping

One of the issues with an upheaval like that which I have experienced over the last week is that some things get messed up. Because of my hillwalking, I have electronic mapping for planning my excursions into the outdoors. My choice for this has been Anquet; I evaluated it, and it did what I needed. While I could have gone further with the evaluation, I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. Since it's a Windows-only offering as far as I know, good old VMware really proves its worth for this.

Though the software itself is a free download, it's the maps where they make their money, particularly with the 1:25000 scale mapping. I have a lot of 1:50000 mapping so it was with some disappointment that I discovered that it was no longer usable because licences had got lost. Some of the data files needed updating anyway, so I went ahead and did that to get something back. While that exercise cost me some money, I got licences and unlocking was possible. For the mapping where there were no updates, I needed to delete it and download it again, a slow process taking up many hours due to the size of the files and the way that Anquet delivers them. The updating had taken a similar amount of time.

At the end of this, all was well again. However, it would have been better if the licences hadn't disappeared and Anquet had a better way of restoring things than they do. I shouldn't have had to re-download several gigabytes of data, even if it was better than having to fork out more cash to replace what I had.

Moving Emails from Outlook to Evolution

It seems a little strange to my eyes, but Evolution cannot import Outlook PST files. On one level, I see a certain amount of sense: after all, Outlook is a Windows application and Evolution remains resolutely on the Linux side of the divide. Nevertheless, it is still a pesky nuisance.

The cure is, very oddly, to import data from Outlook into Mozilla Thunderbird and pop the Thunderbird files into the Evolution mail folder. Both Evolution and Thunderbird share the same file formats, so all is hunky-dory, since Evolution should just realise that they are there and bring them in.

That's what happened for me, and I have now migrated all of my old emails. Evolution's single file import wizard is there for those times when a spot of extra persuasion is needed; the data files are those without the file extensions. As it happened, I didn't need it.

Turning the world on its head: running VMware on Ubuntu

When Windows XP was my base operating system, I used VMware Workstation to peer into the worlds of Windows 2000, Solaris and various flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu. Now that I am using Ubuntu instead of what became a very flaky XP instance, VMware is still with me, which I am using it to keep a foot in the Windows universe. In fact, I have Windows 2000 and Windows XP virtual machines available to me that should supply my Windows needs.

An evaluation version of Workstation 6 is what I am using to power them and I must admit that I am likely to purchase a licence before the evaluation period expires. Installation turned out to be a relatively simple affair, starting with my downloading a compressed tarball from the VMware website. The next steps were to decompress the tarball (Ubuntu has an excellent tool, replete with a GUI, for this) and run vmware-install.pl. I didn't change any of the defaults and everything was set up without a bother.

In use, a few things have come to light. The first is that virtual machines must be stored on drives formatted with EXt3 or some other native Linux file system rather than on NTFS. Do the latter, and you get memory errors when you try starting a virtual machine; I know that I did and that every attempt resulted in failure. After a spot of backing up files, I converted one of my SATA drives from NTFS to Ext3. For sake of safety, I also mounted it as my home directory; the instructions on Ubuntu Unleashed turned out to be invaluable for this. I moved my Windows 2000 VM over and it worked perfectly.

Next on the list was a series of peculiar errors that cam to light when I was attempting to install Windows XP in a VM created for it. VMware was complaining about a CPU not being to run fast enough; 2 MHz was being stated for an Athlon 64 3000+ chip running at 1,58 GHz! Clearly, something was getting confused. Also, my XP installation came to a halt with a BSOD stating that a driver had gone into a loop, with Framebuf fingered as the suspect. I was seeing two symptoms of the same problem and its remedy was unclear. A message on a web forum put the idea of rebooting Ubuntu into my head, and that resolved the problem. For now, I'll be keeping an eye on it, though.

Otherwise, everything seems to be going well with this approach, and that's an encouraging sign. It looks as if my current Linux-based set up is one with which I am going to stay. This week has been an interesting one already, and I have no doubt that I'll continue to learn more as time goes on.