Technology Tales

A late “advance” sighting?

Somewhat infuriatingly, Google released its own browser, Chrome, into the wild near the end of last year but only for Windows. My experiences with it on that platform are that it works smoothly, albeit without many of the bells and whistles that can be got for Firefox. While an unofficial partial port was achieved using Crossover Chromium and there is the Chromium project with all its warnings and the possibility to add a repository for its wares to Ubuntu’s software sources, we have been tantalised rather than served so far. However, that was recently bettered by the release of early access versions. In reality, these can be said to be alpha versions so not everything works but it’s still Chrome and without the need for Windows or WINE. The rendering engine most importantly seems to be the equal of what you get on Windows while ancillary functions like bookmark handling seem incomplete. In summary, the currently available deb packages are a work in progress but that’s better than not having having anything at all.

Things that I like about VirtualBox OSE

Now that VirtualBox 2.0 is out with its 64-bit operating system support among other things, the version included in Ubuntu 8.04, OSE 1.56, is looking that bit older. Nevertheless, there remains a lot to like about the version that I have been using.

For one thing, its Shared Folders functionality doesn’t trip up Photoshop Elements like VMware does. VMware so hobbled Photoshop’s ability to save back to the Linux file system that it had me looking at the WINE route and I got to use GIMP for a while. VirtualBox brought me back into the Photoshop fold and I seem to like the results that I can get with Elements better than those from GIMP.

Another nicety is the way that guest OS desktops can be resized to fit in a maximised VM window. For this to work, you need VirtualBox Guest Additions in place in the virtual machine but it works very well when all is in place; my experience is with Windows XP. Full screen is on tap too once you use the Host+F combination; the right hand control key is usually the Host key by default. If there is any criticism at all, it might be that seamless application windows are not available in OSE 1.5.6.

Linux kernel changes can upset things, but drivers don’t take too long to appear and you can always take matters into your own hands anyway. It’s a far cry from the blithe indifference of VMware and the need to resort to vmware-any-any patching to get things under way again.

All in all, VirtualBox OSE treats me very well. Guest operating systems may seem sluggish at times but it’s never enough to annoy or seriously impede usage. It’ll be interesting to see if a newer version of VirtualBox makes it into Ubuntu 8.10.

Running Internet Explorer on Linux

On first sight, this probably sounds daft given how good Firefox is but you cannot ignore those surfing the web using the ever pervasive Internet Explorer when doing some web development. Using virtualisation is a solution to the need but it can mean that you need to set up a web server with Perl, PHP, MySQL and the like in a virtual machine, all for a little offline testing and then there’s the potential for a lot of file copying too. Otherwise, you are trying to sneak things online and catch the glitches before anyone else does, never a good plan.

Therefore, having the ability to run IE to test your offline LAMPP set up is a boon and IES4Linux allows you to do what’s really needed. Naturally, WINE is involved, so some flakiness may be experienced, even after the ever useful API library’s reaching version 1. Otherwise, all usually runs well once you work your way through the very helpful instructions on the IES4Linux website. I did get a misplaced message about the version of WINE that I was using, and Python errors made a worrying appearance, but neither compromised the end result: a working IE6 installation on my main Ubuntu box.

IE5 and IE5.5 are also on offer if you’re interested but, after looking at my visitor statistics, I think that I can discount these. IE7 and the work-in-progress IE8 make no appearance on the availability list. The absence of IE7 is not a big problem as it might appear because coding for IE6 sufficiently suffices for IE7, even now; IE8 may not be the same in this regard but we shall see. Even so, a later browser release does mean a more secure version and I reckon that including IE7 should be next on the project’s to-do list. Saying that, what we have now is far better than nothing at all.

Killing those runaway processes that refuse to die

I must admit that there have been times when I logged off from my main Ubuntu box at home to dispatch a runaway process that I couldn’t kill and then log back in again. The standard signal being sent to the process by the very useful kill command just wasn’t sending the nefarious CPU-eating nuisance the right kind of signal. Thankfully, there is a way to control the signal being sent and there is one that does what’s needed:

kill -9 [ID of nuisance process]

For Linux users, there seems to be another option for terminating process that doesn’t need the ps and grep command combination: it’s killall. Generally, killall terminates all processes and its own has no immunity to its quest. Hence, it’s an administrator only tool with a very definite and perhaps rarely required use. The Linux variant is more useful because it also will terminate all instances of a named process at a stroke and has the same signal control as the kill command. It is used as follows:

killall -9 nuisanceprocess

I’ll certainly be continuing to use both of the above; it seems that Wine needs termination like this at times and VMware Workstation lapsed into the same sort of antisocial behaviour while running a VM running a development version of Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex (or 8.10, if you prefer). Anything that keeps you from constantly needing to restart Linux sessions on your PC has to be good.

A reasonable requirement of an IDE

I have been having a play with NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP and, while it has a lot to offer, one impression remains uppermost in my mind: it is so slow. I might have a project with a lot of files in it but start-up takes an age because of project checking. Other functionality such as text searching is far from speedy either. The sluggishness probably arises from this release being very early in its life cycle and it reminds me of how slow older versions of the Java IDE were, even if this is slower. For PHP development, I’ll be giving NetBeans a while to mature before taking another look at it.

On a similar note, I recently dispatched Quanta Plus from my system for sluggish start-ups and will not return to it because other alternatives such as Bluefish and Eclipse PDT fit my needs much better. I like my editors to be slick and responsive and Quanta has been around long enough for any slowness to be knocked out of it. However, I get the feeling that the extras have added bloat while I expect any additional functionality that I never use not to get in my way. It is for the latter reason that I was always able to get on with Dreamweaver and even run it on Ubuntu using the WINE library. If I really wanted a stripped out yet functional editor, Gedit would do most of what I need -- it colour codes syntax for a variety of languages for a start -- but it’s always handy to have a file system explorer window incorporated and I value any syntax checking and auto-completion as well. So, it looks as if Eclipse and Bluefish could be serving my needs for a while to come alongside so use Dreamweaver for online editing of website files.

Mucking about with WINE

It was the prospect of having Photoshop Elements going on Linux that got me thinking about working with WINE. The cause of that was Elements’ inability to edit, create and save files to a VMware shared folder. As it turned out, there was more to my WINE adventures than getting Elements working. Because I was in learning mode, those adventures turned out to be messy ones with WINE getting uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times. For the last of these, I forced matters by installing from a DEB package rather than going through Ubuntu’s normal channels. The openSUSE journey was a bit more orderly and that VM option remains if I want to go experimenting more.

Along the way, I got the Windows version of Opera going as a test. When trying out WINE in former times, I never tried installing applications into it like I do now. I don’t know if this was because I hadn’t made an important connection or that wasn’t the way that things used to be. Flushed with the success of Opera, I went further and discovered that Dreamweaver 8 and Altova’s XMLSpy 2007 Professional work without my breaking a sweat. Photoshop Elements was another story and one that I have told before. Apple’s iTunes was another thing that I tried but without success, even with a useful guide on Wine Reviews; for some reason, I’m having trouble getting the installation to complete successfully. I think that I’ll leave my tinkering at that for now but my general impression is that WINE works well these days, even if there is the odd crash or inexplicable disappearance of an application window. The latter happened with Dreamweaver and XMLSpy and I needed to log off and back on again to clear the slate for further progress.

Running Photoshop Elements 5 on Ubuntu and openSUSE

When you buy a piece of software and get accustomed to its ways of working, it is natural to want to continue using it. That applied to a number of applications when I moved over to Linux in the latter half of last year and one of these was Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 5.0, a purchase made earlier in the year. My way forward was to hang on to Windows by way of VMware. However, Elements fails to edit or save files in the Linux file system accessed through VMware’s shared folders feature. I have yet to work out what’s happening but the idea of using a more conventional networking arrangement has come to mind.

Another idea that intrigued me was the idea of using WINE, the Windows API emulator for Linux. You can get it in the Ubuntu and openSUSE software repositories but the WINE website has more to say on the subject. That’s only the first stage though as you might see from WINE’s Wiki page on Photoshop and its kind. However, their advice is a spot incomplete so I’ll make it more explicit here. You need to run Winetricks from its online home as follows:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks mdac28

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks jet40

The first line flicks a switch to fool Microsoft components to install thinking that they are installing into a Windows system with IE on board. Without this, the rest will not happen. The second installs Microsoft’s native ODBC drivers; Elements will not function at all without these if my experience is any guide. The last step is to add JET support so that Elements’ Organiser can get going. With all of these in place, having a working Photoshop Elements instance under Linux should be a goer. Apart from the odd crash, things seem to be working OK on Ubuntu and openSUSE seems hospitable too. Further experimentation may reveal more.

Update: The WINE Wiki has now been updated (and links back here!). As per dank’s comment, the above lines can be condensed into what you see below:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6 mdac28 jet40

What? No DNG?

Google’s Picasa is now available for Linux so I decided to give it a spin. The availability of downloadable DEB packages made installation a piece of cake. It has ported using WINE so the look and feel is very much of the Windows world. The functionality is similar too and it can seek out image files on your PC. However, it didn’t find any DNG files for me and that surprised me because DNG could become the standard raw camera format for digital imaging. The lack of support for proprietary formats like Canon’s CRW might be understandable but I like to review the raw image files before committing to editing them and Picasa will not suffice for this purpose, leading me to stick with what I already use.