Author Archive
IEs4Linux Hates Wine 1.1.x?
by admin on May.21, 2009, under Linux
I have posted before about IEs4Linux and what a good tool it is. It is unfortunate but Internet Explorer is sometimes a necessary evil. I have some sites for classes which uses active X, and some which use Adobe Shockwave (come on guys updates your sites!) and thus every now and then you have to fire up IE on Linux. IEs4Linux makes this pretty simple and installs multiple versions of IE for you. Unfortunately if you are running Wine 1.x it will complain:
“IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com). ”
You can circumvent this by ignoring the message, not using the GUI installer and just directly installing the versions you want:
paracelsus@Callandor:~/ies4linux-2.99.0.1> ./ies4linux –no-gui –install-ie7
If you like you can also modify the functions.sh script in the lib/ directory and alter the Wine version detection, see this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-886205.html
In my case (Suse 11.1) I have not had much luck with IE7, I have however been able to get IE6 to function moderately well.
Also, if you have trouble with IEs4Linux you might just want to move you .wine directory and delete the .ies4linux directory and try again.
A further option is to just skip IEs4Linux and install IE directly under wine.
This site was helpful in this regards: http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Install_Internet_Explorer_6_SP1
wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/ie6setup.exe
paracelsus@Callandor:~> wine ie6setup.exe /c:”ie6wzd.exe /d /s:””#E”
paracelsus@Callandor:~> wine ~/.wine/drive_c/iexplor/ie6setup.exe
(Follow the additional steps at the Gentoo link as well.)
If you have trouble installing Shockwave in IE, you can also find a stand alone Shockwave installer, and try that method. Dig around the Adobe site: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/158/tn_15895.html and you will eventually find the Shockwave insatller. With this method I was able to get a recent (11.x) Shockwave to work in IE.
Strace process signal monitoring
by admin on May.18, 2009, under Linux
While I am no strace zen master, I did discover that in addition to system calls, strace will also show any signals a process gets. Nifty eh? Further, you can attach strace to a running process - you don't have to start a process with it initially. This can be super handy to tell if a process is even receiving signals you are sending to it - thus you can tell if it is being mean and ignoring them or never getting them in the first place. For example. In shell one: root@Anduril:~# vim blah {ctrl z} [1]+ Stopped vim blah root@Anduril:~# jobs [1]+ Stopped vim blah root@Anduril:~# pgrep vim 22264 root@Anduril:~# strace -p 22264 In shell two, now kill the process: root@Anduril:~# kill -9 22264 root@Anduril:~# pgrep vim Now return to shell one and you will see strace caught and displayed the signal received: Process 22264 attached - interrupt to quit +++ killed by SIGKILL +++ Process 22264 detached [1]+ Killed vim blah (As a note, you can also use lsof -p 22264 to view the files vim has open as well.) Why can't you kill some processes? If a process is in an uninterpretable sleep state (listed as D for example in ps ) it will not receive signals until it is active again. Kill it all you want, but its out to lunch and wont care. If a process has a defunct parent process, you might need to kill it - and not the child. Parent processes are easily identified with pstree: root@Anduril:~# pstree -p | grep vim | |-bash(22180)---bash(22197)---vim(22663) Good hunting! Pete
Moved to a New Condo
by admin on May.01, 2009, under My Life
Last month Syd and I decided to move to a new condo here in Tampa. It all rather just fell into place and happened quickly. We were growing a bit tired of our previous place and had been there about 3 years. The final straw was a dead rat in the ceiling which created a wonderful aroma for the better part of six weeks and the round shouldered condo association offering the absolute least assistance possible. We could literally hear the rats racing about in the ceiling between our unit and the ones above us. It sounded like cats playing in the unit above – too bad it had been vacant for nearly a year.
We did like the old place, especially in the pre-rat days when we moved in. It was very quiet, which we enjoyed, mostly due to about half the units either being up for sale in the collapsing Florida housing market, or winter residences for snowbirds. We had a nice view of the central court and pool area and had a good amount of space. But it was time for a change.
I had noticed a place each day on my way to work that look interesting, I liked the brick architecture and the proximity to work and central location. So one day I stopped in and found they had a few unit for lease. (They are selling them, but the horrible market played to our favor.) A few days later on the weekend Syd and I both went and looked at a few units, went back the next day and signed a lease and moved about two weeks later.
The move went fairly well really – as good as such can go. Syd was able to get a huge share of the pre-move packing done and by the time moving day came our nephew had come to live with us for a bit, so his contribution was a big help too.
Our new place is quite nice having just been fully remodeled. While they did not use the best possible fixtures, etc. they are still pretty nice and the cabinets are of good quality. One thing however is we went from about 1,100 square feet to 920 or so – and while not a drastic change it is enough to cause us to consolidate in some ways – which is not necessarily bad. (Do I honestly need three copies of the same book, and papers from three years ago?)
We have been getting settled in, but have yet to unpack the last few things. We do like our new place though. Although there are many more units than our last, the environment is quiet and the people are friendly.
Moving is always nice for us too – we enjoy the change of environment and welcome the change of new stores, restaurants and places to explore.
If we by chance accidentally neglected to update you on our new address, please let us know by email me at swiftsnowmane_at_earthlink_dot_net
Sago Cloud Computing
by admin on Mar.30, 2009, under Sago Labs
Cloud computing is receiving increasing attention and shows great potential in the correct application. At Sago we are in a perfect situation to deploy clustering and cloud solutions and are currently conducting a feasibility analysis using a few different technologies and we wanted to let you know a bit more about these projects.
Virtualization has done a great deal of good in enterprise and data center environments, consolidating server footprints, increasing power efficiency, reducing hardware investment and maintenance costs and offering low priced virtual private servers to customers who do not require dedicated hardware. Despite the many advantages of virtualization however, it remains true that no virtual machine can exceed the resources of the underlying hardware. This is where dynamic or cloud computing can come into play, provisioning additional resources dynamically to meet changing requirements.
We are currently deploying a cluster of Linux servers using Rocks Clusters. This allows for easily adding nodes to the cluster and managing them. Cluster solutions in the past have been fairly complicated affairs and the stability and manageability was not optimum – and I am happy to say we have been extremely impressed with Rocks. If you have any clustering projects, or would like to learn more about clustering I would encourage you to check out this project. We are also experimenting with Eucalyptus cloud computing, which holds significant potential in flexible computing that can open the door to our offering completely new services to suit our customers needs. In the future, you might be able to run your servers as Virtual Machines in a cloud – responding to higher load demands and increased traffic by smoothly provisioning additional resources, without incurring the long term cost of permanently adding new hardware.
Eucalyptus is going to play a central role in the October release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the release announcement of which caused a stir of interest in the Ubuntu community. There is a distinct buzz in the IT community about the possibilities of Cloud Computing and how it can help businesses in many ways, integrating with SaaS and SOA platforms, etc. Being able to leverage Cloud Computing in your business, or offer it to your customers could be a distinct advantage in the near future.
We will continue to build out our existing cluster, testing it in a variety of scenarios and deploying Amazon AMIs on our internal Eucalyptus cloud and will tell you more about this in the near future and let you know about what Cloud services we may be offering soon. See you up there!
OpenSolaris 2008.11 Acer Aspire One Install
by admin on Mar.09, 2009, under IT Adventures, Netbooks
After my previous post about installing Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) on my Aspire One, I decided to give the Indiana 2008.11 release a try. The community edition was working fine, but I wanted to play around with IPS which I had trouble making work on SXCE, and also I just wanted a Gnome base install and the opportunity to see how 2008.11 installed and worked on the Aspire One.
The install is of moderate difficulty (easy of course once you have done it.) There are a few speeds bumps you may hit however and so I wrote this how to. This takes you step by step through installing OpenSolaris and you will end up sporting Solaris on your Aspire One. Compiz, ZFS, TimeSlider, DTrace, and working wifi are all your’s to be had.
+5 Geek Bonus to any who complete this quest, so saddle up, burn that .iso and start your quest.
One particulary fun thing to do is try a remote install from another system by X Forwarding the GUI Installer. That was kind of fun. (Screenshot of this to come.)
When the 2009.06 release is out I may attempt to use the Solaris Distribution Creator and make an .iso of an Aspire One Image that is ready to roll and put it up on bit torrent.
I encourage you to test drive OpenSolaris, and hope you find the guide usefull. Please leave feedback on how it goes and I’ll try to help – if I can (I’m a Linux guy and still pretty new to Solaris). Also, do check out Dave Clack’s excellent blog. Dave has worked with the Sun engineers helping to bring us driver support for the Aspire One and helped me with with my SXCE issues.
I would also like to thank Aaron Houston (Sun: Menlo Park) for hooking me up with some OpenSolaris advocacy materials – including a great device driver guide, some metallic “Powered by OpenSolaris” stickers and other goodies – another post to come on that.
Cheers,
Pete
