To round off my mini-series about software I use, I thought I’d do one on Windows Mobile (AKA Pocket PC or PPC).
There are one or two other small utilities I also use and I have a bespoke WM6 installation that includes some tools.
(NB: I’ll add some links and explanations in when I get time).
Following on from my post about what stops me from dropping Windows altogether, I thought that I would put together a more complete post about the Windows applications I find myself using.
Well, it is still a pleasantly small list. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against Windows, it’s just that I like having a choice and believe that real competition is good for everyone both users and suppliers. Further, I cannot really agree with the restrictive licensing that MS are always trying to force on people given the large price they put on both the software and updates. Nor can I really agree with the stifling of innovation that is the result of overly restrictive trade practices. The competition from Linux and open source is good for the market though I would really like to see OpenOffice start to innovate more rather than trying to play catchup with Office.
By default, OpenSUSE 10 & 11 come preconfigured WITHOUT usbfs active. Unlike Ubuntu, everything is ready to go but the fstab setting is “noauto” so it doesn’t seem to get loaded even when VirtualBox wants it.
The fix for this is simple and is listed in the VirtualBox User FAQ. In “/etc/fstab” change the line for usbfs to:
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto,busgid=XXX,busmode=0775,devgid=XXX,devmode=0664 0 0 Where XXX is the group id of the vboxusers group which can be discovered in YAST or from the command line:
grep vboxusers /etc/group That’s it, no other changes should be needed.
Now mount it with:
mount usbfs(All of these commands and edits have to be done by root or sudo).
OpenSUSE 11.0 does not automatically mount the usbfs on reboot so either do it manually after a reboot and before using VirtualBox or find a way to activate it automatically (and let me know hey? 
Update 2008-08-17: Thanks to “timdor” from the OpenSUSE Forums who lets me know a way of automatically mounting usbfs.
“To mount usbfs at boot add ‘mount usbfs‘ without the quote marks to /etc/init.d/boot.local“. Thanks timdor.
This seems to be a problem that won’t go away. It seems inordinately hard to get a good looking set of fonts of the correct size. It is not that there aren’t some nice fonts available; there are, at last, some fonts under Linux that often look superior to the Microsoft ones. It’s just that it is difficult to get the whole look and feel correct.
This is especially true when mixing Gnome based applications (Firefox and Thunderbird for example) and KDE. OpenOffice also refuses to play nicely.
Anyway, grumping over, there is an excellent article on the Mozilla site about how to improve some of this by getting the correct DPI settings for your monitor (this is especially noticeable on my 24″ beast!)
The article is here.
Here are my experiences installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on my desktop PC (I had already successfully installed it on a VM). I opted for a KDE 3 desktop – I don’t like Gnome especially and KDE 4 is not ready for day-to-day use as far as I am concerned.
Finaly got round to installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on my desktop so I thought this would be a good opportunity to keep track of the software I actually use. I’ll edit and update this entry over time.
System
Development Add-ins:
Sometimes used Add-ins:
Security
Office
Graphics & Media
Development
Games
Other
All of the above are available either in the main OpenSUSE repositories or via the build service unless I’ve provided a link (except for plugins of course).
I haven’t looked at the BIOS on my ageing ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard for ages – in fact not since I switched it fully to Linux – so how do you update the Phoenix BIOS without DOS or Windows? I don’t bother with a floppy disk any more and creating a DOS boot CD just for this once every x years job is a faff!
Well there is an article here that might help.
Hmm, apparently that article doesn’t really help – except that it tells you ways to create custom bootable CD’s containing DOS, the BIOS updater and the BIOS file. Ho hum, I guess I’ll get round to it soon as I am looking to put a dual core Athlon in the PC which requires a new BIOS.
When you want to access the hosts file system from a guest OS in VirtualBox, you need to mount the virtual share. However, the default mount:
sudo mount -t vboxsf <VBox-share-name> <mount-location>Will mean that only root can write to the shared folders. You need to tweak things to get a system that an ordinary user can write to. Here is the script I use:
#!/bin/bash
echo " "
echo "Script to mount the host disk under VirtualBox"
echo " "
USR=`whoami`
SHARE='Host-Root'
MNT="/home/$USR/VBoxHostRoot"
echo " Mounting $SHARE to $MNT ..."
mkdir $MNT
sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=$USR $SHARE $MNT
echo " Done."
echo
You can, of course, have this mounted by the guest OS at boot time by putting an entry into /etc/fstab. Just make sure that every user that is set up has the appropriate folder created or move the folder to somewhere central and give it permissions so that all users have read/write access.
I’ve been thinking ahead to a change of job recently. Knowing that I’ll be getting a new Windows based laptop and needing to have development capabilities and having developed a taste for Linux
I’ve used my favourite VM tool VirtualBox (now owned by Sun) to create a sparlkly new OpenSUSE 11.0 virtual machine complete with Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. as well as office tools such as Open Office, mind/concept-mapping and diagraming applications.
Unlike the Windows XP VM that I use on my Linux desktop to give me access to Windows applications – which needs 2GB of RAM to perform nicely, the SUSE VM only needs 1GB of RAM to feel as fast (even though XP doesn’t have Apache, MySQL, etc. running.
Although I’ve created this on my Linux desktop, it should be easy enough to transfer to my new laptop. To help keep file sizes down, I’ve chosen to use three virtual disks. One for SWAP, one for /home and one for the root. This will make it a bit easier to transfer back and forth if I need to – though I’ll probably end up with two separate and different copies as I’m already finding that doing personal development work is much easier on the VM than it is on the host OS thanks to it being a more focused machine with less rubbish installed.
Us old-time Windows bods get used to our keyboard shortcuts I’m afraid. One of the most useful is using the backspace key in the browser to go back through the browsers history.
Unfortunately, this is not the default under Linux (alt-left arrow is the default).
FireFox has an easy way to fix this. Put “about:config” in the address bar and “backspace” in the search entry. You should see the entry “browser.backspace_action”. Change this to 0.