I’m suprised I completely forgot to post anything about RC 1 here a few days ago, so I’d like to go ahead and introduce the second RC release of Deluge 1.0. Previously known as Deluge 0.6, Deluge 1.0 is a complete rewrite from the 0.5.x branch (which was in turn a complete rewrite of 0.4, which was a nearly complete rewrite of 0.3 
).
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There’s been a fair amount of news online about Canonical’s specialized version of Ubuntu for Atom based laptops, but the current word on it is that Canonical will only be licensing it directly to OEMs. However, there is a PPA that you can use to turn an Ubuntu Hardy install into UNR.
Just add the repository and install the applications that it contains, then log out and in and set up your new desktop.
I have mine configured as close as I can to what the default layout seems to be from the screenshots I’ve seen online.
UNR makes good use of available screen real estate (my screenshots are running at 800×600) by putting each application in a “Tab.” I installed a couple of extra apps, Deluge 1.0rc2 and Banshee 1.0, and sure enough, they automatically conformed to the layout.
UNR places it’s launchers and menus on the desktop, which is quickly accessible from the “Go Home” button in the upper-left corner (it looks like an Ubuntu logo).
I’m not crazy about the look and feel. The desktop has a nice, new, polished look to it while the applications themselves use the standard Human theme. Either are nice on their own, but they seem to clash when used together. The interface was also a little slow, but that may be due to running it inside a virtual machine, as I’ve heard that the interface makes some use of OpenGL.
Overall, it’s a nice product and most tasks are accomplished easily. This will make a great OS for the Eee PC or any other subnotebook.
Fucker wouldn’t sit still for a photo.
So, after I posted my method for building and testing XPe images in Workstation, I was asked to get my XPe VMs working in ESX as well. ESX uses an older version of VMware’s Virtual Hardware, so XPe VMs I created with my previous method will not run if transferred directly to an ESX machine.
Creating the virtual hardware component is pretty straightforward, and follows the same general process as my previous guide. For your convenience, I’ve uploaded my component that I created running XP on ESX.
However, just the component isn’t enough for ESX. ESX 3.x doesn’t support virtual IDE hard drives. Likewise, Windows XPe doesn’t support SCSI drives. So, you’ll have to install the VMware SCSI driver. During a normal XP installation, you can do this by pressing F6 during installation and loading the drivers from a floppy, but because you build XPe rather than installing it, you have to componetize the driver. Again, I’ve already done this for you.
If this doesn’t work for you, you can download the floppy image containing the driver from VMware.com, extract it, and then import the vmscsi.inf file into the XPe Component Designer.
Once you have both the vmware4 and vmscsi components added to your XPe profile, run dependency checks to pull in the required components and build the image like you did in the last guide. After that, move the Virtual Machine onto your ESX box (assuming you didn’t create it there) and fire it up.
Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about the differences between the Nvidia Geforce and Quadro lines of video cards. In reality, there’s very little difference, aside from the drivers. For example, my Quadro 570M is almost hardware-identical to a Geforce 8600M GT. Likewise, my friend’s Geforce 8800GT contains the same core and specifications as a Quadro FX 3700. Such similar hardware, however, had a large price gap. The FX 3700 is an $800 video card, around four times the price of the 8800GT, meaning you’re essentially paying $600 for the Quadro drivers. This got me thinking about another piece of software whose real price is often discussed, OS X. I decided to do a little price up.
I looked at two notebooks, the Apple Macbook Pro and Dell XPS M1530. Both laptops shared the following specs:
The only real difference was that the Macbook came with OS X and the XPS was configured with Vista Ultimate. The final total was $1644 for the Dell and $2049 for the Apple, making the MBP $405 more expensive. While the Macbook Pro is often touted as being extremely well engineered and using only the best hardware available, $400 is a bit of a premium, especially when you consider that the price of Vista is included in the Dell.
Whenever I work out of the San Francisco office, I have to tunnel back to my workstation in Palo Alto in order to do any development. The way I do this is with an SSH Tunnel. While I used to just fire it up manually, the other day I hacked up some shell scripts to automatically connect and start up my most used apps on the remote machine, and I thought I’d share them here.
First, on the local machine:
/usr/local/bin/tunnel:
#!/bin/sh
$IPADDR=0.0.0.0 # IP Address of the remote machine
$LOGON=usrname # Your username on the remote machine
$STARTUP=/usr/local/bin/startup
ssh -X $IPADDR -l $LOGON $STARTUP
and, on the remote machine:
/usr/local/bin/startup:
#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal &
nautilus &
firefox &
pidgin &
xchat &
Essentially, a list of programs to start up. Don’t forget the & on each line, or else they won’t all start at the same time.
Make sure that both files are executable (chmod +x), then you can add a launcher to /usr/local/bin/tunnel and you’re good to go.
It’s a pretty simple trick, but it saves me several seconds each time I connect to the network. Also, as there’s no terminal needed to keep the ssh session open, I don’t accidentally lose my session.