barns.blog

With the imminent arrival of my Acer Aspire One A110, I have been preparing myself for setting it up to my satisfaction. The A110 comes with Linpus Linux Lite, which isn’t really a product for power users. However, the debate is what, if anything, is better, and what will the A110 run.

I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!

Yesterday, I was looking at the VMware site with an intention of getting VMware Server 2 (Beta) and posibly getting pricing for Workstation and ESX Server. As all of this revolves about some of my research, I found myself looking at the VMware Academic Program.

This program allows Universities to obtain VMware software free of charge for research purposes. Of even more interest, it permits publications on this research without prior concent from VMware themselves. This is a major shift from what I was doing last year, and should allow me to redo my work for publishing purposes.

Barry has applied for the program and we should hear back from them within the next week. Read more about the program here.

Ok, so I’m really ticked off. I was all geared to submit my Honours paper to CISSE 2007, but have discovered that due to VMware’s licencing restrictions, I cannot. I’ve worked far to hard on this paper, and feel really deflated, but what happens, happens. I wonder if Nick’s paper will be accepted…

Ok, so I really struggled to get VIX working with perl on Windows, but have finally sorted it out. First of all, its NOT installed by default. Only the C bindings are. So I had to go compile it. That worked ok., but then it still didn’t work. So I had to do this:

• Add the vix_perl directory to the system path.
• Create a perl.exe.manifest file in perl/bin which contains version information about the C libraries needed.

(See: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=100057&tstart=0)