r3dux.org

Saw this on the net somewhere and it made me grin so I thought I’d share…

1. We admitted that we were powerless over Microsoft Windows and that our computers had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that an operating system greater than Microsoft Windows could restore us to greater productivity.
3. Made a decision to turn our hardware and data over to the care of better software as we understood it.
4. Made a fearless and searching inventory of our wrecked data, wasted time and thrashed hard drive.
5. Admitted to our higher power, ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of Microsoft Windows.
6. Were entirely ready to have Linux remove all of these defects from our computers and from our working lives.
7. Checked that our hardware was compatible with Linux.
8. Made a backup of all files that Microsoft Windows had harmed.
9. Corrected data to such files where possible, except where such corrections would harm other files.
10. Humbly installed Linux onto our hard drives.
11. Searched through man pages, HOWTOs , the Internet and Slashdot, to improve our understanding and use of Linux.
12. Having had a productive awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to windowholics and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.

Flippancy aside, once you make the switch to Linux, I’d say that it’s pretty unlikely that you’d ever willingly go back to running Windows as your main OS – because overall, and once you get used to it, Linux is simply better.

This isn’t to say that a *nix system will do you for absolutely everything – I still run a little MS Office in a Windows 7 virtual machine (via VirtualBox) because it makes life easier to be able to natively edit docx files and powerpoints for work, but that’s pretty much it. So I guess the message here doesn’t have to be abstinence but moderation. If you’ve got high-end Windows-only applications that you can’t live without and which require 3D hardware acceleration, then you’re pretty much stuck, but any other 2D Windows apps tend to work just fine under virtualisation (Flash, Photoshop, Office etc). The only thing that’s not so good under Linux is gaming (and this can be a deal breaker for many people), but if I want to game these days I just get on the 360 or PS3 anyways, and if PC gaming’s really your thing then you can always run a large number Windows games under Wine.

If you’re going to try out a *nix, most distros (Linux distributions i.e. flavours of Linux) allow you to try out the OS entirely from CD or DVD and make zero changes to your hard drive, and then you can install it later if you like, or not. Linux will also happily sit beside Windows in a dual-boot configuration so you can choose which OS to boot at startup. One thing to add though is that you shouldn’t judge the performance you get from a live distro instance as anywhere near the performance you’ll get from a proper install – running an OS from a disc (as opposed to hard drive) is really pretty slow and clunky, but the facility exists if you just want to have a look around, or take a Linux distro around with you. A better solution (even for trialling a distro) would be to find a USB stick which is a couple of GB in size, and then install the distro to that and boot it. If that appeals, then a list of USB compatible distros can be found here (Ubuntu’s included via the bundled usb-creator tool).

The main problem with trying to convert people to *nix (apart from the whole zealotry thing, and that Windows users are commonly happy with their lot, as they [usually] don’t know how much better things can be) is that it’s different to Windows. The interface is different, things work a little differently, and if something doesn’t work perfectly out of the box then it can be tricky for newcomers to fix. Also, nobody likes change – so there’s definitely an inertia thing involved too. But if you stick with it, put in a little time and effort, and look up how to fix stuff on sites like UbuntuForums, you’ll be rewarded ten-fold with an OS that does exactly what you want, when you want it done, quickly and stably – for free!

There are stacks of distributions out there, geared towards things like multimedia, stability, security, flexibility or ease-of-use – why not have a look to see if there’s one there that speaks to you? I mean, what have you got to lose? If I had to recommend one, I’d have to say most standard to advanced users should be happy enough with either stock Ubuntu or Linux Mint (a customised version of Ubuntu with tweaks and improvements for eye-candy and ease-of-use).

Finally, if you want to see how people have customised their *nix desktops, check out UnixPorn (tagline: It’s not Porn, it’s Unix!) – I even have an old desktop up there

Bonus Gubbins: That UnixPorn desktop was kinda old and Windows-y, so I’ve just posted my current desktop setup which uses Jix’s Artistic Wallpaper HD no logo along with Kouri1977′s Streets theme for conky (which uses the bring tha noize and the B.O.M.B fonts):

The CPU/RAM etc. counters along the bottom update at 1 second intervals - conky is sweet =D

Anyways, if you’re not already converted, are you maybe tempted? If not, why not? I’d love to know, and as always, comments/flames are always welcome =D

I got this working in Linux in about ten minutes, while the same thing in Windows took me closer to three hours… The difficulty I had was that I need to get this working on multiple machines which all get wiped and reset on each boot, so it had to be entirely stand-alone with everything necessary to build in the same project. And the difficulty with that is that Connector/C++ needs the boost library to compile, which I wasn’t too keen on involving. In the end I couldn’t find a way around it and just threw the entire boost library into the same directory as the project as well as the libmysql.lib/dll and mysqlcppconn.lib libraries.

So now it works. It’s a little ugly, and the project folder comes in at 62MB, but it works. Really it’s not all that bad, if you just wanted to build and deploy something you’d end up with a couple of hundred KB executable plus a few MB of dlls. I guess I could go in and strip out some parts of the boost library which aren’t being used. But to be honest it’s been a long day and I’m sick of fighting with it, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Reminder / Info

• This code is tested and working on Windows XP 32-Bit.
• The project (i.e. download, at bottom of post) is for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express
• The version of the libs/headers included are:
  • libmysql.lib from MySQL server v1.5.36 32-Bit
  • boost library v1.45.0
  • mysqlcppconn.lib/dll from Connector/C++ v1.1.0 32-Bit
• I really, really hate having to work with Windows.

Anyhoo – here’s the junk…

// Standard C++ includes
#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
 
// Include the Connector/C++ headers
#include "cppconn/driver.h"
#include "cppconn/exception.h"
#include "cppconn/resultset.h"
#include "cppconn/statement.h"
 
// Link to the Connector/C++ library
#pragma comment(lib, "mysqlcppconn.lib")
 
// Specify our connection target and credentials
const string server   = "tcp://127.0.0.1:3306";
const string username = "root";
const string password = ""; // No password - thanks, WAMP Server!
 
int main()
{
	sql::Driver     *driver; // Create a pointer to a MySQL driver object
        sql::Connection *dbConn; // Create a pointer to a database connection object
        sql::Statement  *stmt;   // Create a pointer to a Statement object to hold our SQL commands
        sql::ResultSet  *res;    // Create a pointer to a ResultSet object to hold the results of any queries we run
 
	// Try to get a driver to use to connect to our DBMS
	try
	{
		driver = get_driver_instance();
	}
	catch (sql::SQLException e)
	{
		cout << "Could not get a database driver. Error message: " << e.what() << endl;
		system("pause");
		exit(1);
	}
 
	// Try to connect to the DBMS server
	try
	{
		dbConn = driver->connect(server, username, password);
	}
	catch (sql::SQLException e)
	{
		cout << "Could not connect to database. Error message: " << e.what() << endl;
		system("pause");
		exit(1);
	}
 
	stmt = dbConn->createStatement(); // Specify which connection our SQL statement should be executed on
 
	// Try to query the database
	try
	{
		stmt->execute("USE mysql");              // Select which database to use. Notice that we use "execute" to perform a command.
 
		res = stmt->executeQuery("show tables"); // Perform a query and get the results. Notice that we use "executeQuery" to get results back
	}
	catch (sql::SQLException e)
	{
		cout << "SQL error. Error message: " << e.what() << endl;
		system("pause");
		exit(1);
	}
 
	// While there are still results (i.e. rows/records) in our result set...
	while (res->next())
	{
		// ...get each field we want and output it to the screen
		// Note: The first field/column in our result-set is field 1 (one) and -NOT- field 0 (zero)
		// Also, if we know the name of the field then we can also get it directly by name by using:
		// res->getString("TheNameOfTheField");
		cout << res->getString(1) << endl;                
	}
 
	// Clean up after ourselves
	delete res;
	delete stmt;
	delete dbConn;
 
	system("pause");
	return 0;
}

*** REALLY IMPORTANT: Build the following project in Release mode if you want it to work!! No, really. The libs and dll’s that the project uses have been built in Release mode and you can’t mix n’ match. ***

Download of Visual Studio 2008 Express project including all necessary headers/libs/dlls (i.e. it’s ready to go – and 12MB): MySQL-Connector-Test.zip

Credits: Thanks to TidyTutorials for the guide that got me started.

I’ve got some Windows virtual machines I use for when I need to do MS Office stuff or a brief bit of Win32 programming, and noticed earlier that each time I reboot Windows, ZoneAlarm Free decides to nag me to upgrade, and there’s no option to switch it off. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they’d gone a bit talkie-toaster… I can see why they’d do it, but I’m not going to upgrade to a full, paid security suite for a virtual machine I fire up only if and when I have to (which isn’t that often) – it’s a no-sale. So I did a bit of googling and found the solution.

The trick is that you need to modify the following registry keys and flip them from 1 to 0:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\RunSwitchbackWizard
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\RunUpsellNotice

However, the problem with doing so is that Zone Alarm has these keys locked, and quiting ZoneAlarm doesn’t unlock them, so you need to reboot Windows into Safe Mode to do it by stabbing F8 during boot a few times and then selecting to boot in Safe Mode.

Once you’re in Safe Mode, you can either go and flip the flags manually using regedit, or you could dump the following into a file with a .reg extension and then execute it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm]
"RunSwitchbackWizard"=dword:00000000
"RunUpsellNotice"=dword:00000000

Or, you could download and run a version I created earlier (Right click and Save As…): ZA-NoNag.reg

Done & done.

Credits: Many thanks to oldsod on the ZA forums for the fix!

When you create a VirtualBox virtual-machine, you get the option to choose either a fixed sized hard drive (in which case the entire amount of space is allocated and fixed immediately), or a dynamically expanding hard drive for the virtual machines OS and file storage (i.e. you specify a maximum size for the hard drive, it starts at 0 bytes, and increases as necessary up to the maximum you gave it on creation – at which point the drive is full).

This is all well and good, but the problem with dynamic storage is that although it’s more than happy to increase in size, it doesn’t come down in size again when data is removed. So, to give an example, if you created a 10GB dynamic disk for a virtual machine it starts off at 0 bytes, you install a 1GB operating system and the drive is now 1GB in size (and hence taking up 1GB of space on your actual hard drive), you rip a 4.7GB DVD to the virtual drive which makes its size now 5.7GB, you delete the DVD rip so only the OS remains – and you might think that the “dynamic” drive will automatically shrink back down to 1GB, only it doesn’t. You’re holding on to 4.7GB of unrecoverable* bloat. Lucky you… =P

You could rip another DVD and re-use that space without the drive expanding any further, but really, it’s just going to increase and increase, and you’ll know in your heart of hearts that when you’re running low on disk space you could really do with that space back to your real hard drive. In VMWare you can compact the drive image as a menu option, but in VB we have to do a three step process… So, shall we?

* = unrecoverable unless you jump through the below 3 hoops, or create a new dynamic drive image, expand it to a size just over the size of your data on your original drive, then raw-copy the data across, that is… IMHO the steps below are easier!

A-B-C, Easy As…

1. Defrag your Windows guest machine
2. Now we need to replace all the “blank” (but still taking up space!) areas of our drive with zeros so we can recognise them to be stripped out later. Thankfully, this is really easy. Just download free (and tiny – 47KB) command-line utility SDelete from Microsoft and run it from within your virtual Windows guest machine with the following command (the -c switch is important!):

   sdelete -c

3. Once that’s finished running shut down your virtual machine, navigate to the folder where your virtual machine hard drive is (such as ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks) then from your host system run the following command to compress the hard drive down to a more reasonable size:

   VBoxManage modifyhd NAME-OF-YOUR-VIRTUAL-HARD-DRIVE.vdi --compact

   So if your virtual machine name (and thus by default the hard drive name) was “XP_Client_1″, then you’d use:

   VBoxManage modifyhd XP_Client_1.vdi --compact

With that done I trimmed down an excessively bloated 25GB .VDI of Windows 7 into a still excessively bloated 15GB – but that’s just in the nature of Microsoft OS’s… =P

Update: If you get an error stating things along the lines of:

VBoxManage: error: Cannot register the hard disk 'BLAH' because a hard disk 'BLAH' with UUID {LOTS-O-HEX} already exists

then you can fix it like this:

1. Detach the drive from your virtual machine,
2. Edit the file ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml and remove all lines with the drive you want to compact mentioned in the HardDrives section (Note: be careful you don’t delete the virtual machine entry itself from the MachineRegistry section! Only remove the drive from the HardDrives section.),
3. Now you’ll be able to compact the drive, and when it’s done you can re-attach the drive to your virtual machine. Good as old! =D

Snap Happy

Another thing you can do to decrease the disk usage of VirtualBox machines is get rid of all your snapshots if you don’t need them anymore. Each snapshot is basically an entire disk image which you can roll back to, so if you have Windows 7 installed it’s about 7GB or so after a fresh install, if you then put on 500MB of patches and take another snapshot you’re storing another 7.5GB. If you then install Office or something and that takes up 2GB and take yet another snapshot you’re burning through yet another 9.5GB, so we’re up to 23.5GB already for a single 9GB drive!

You should definitely be careful when merging snapshots into the main image (basically getting rid of the snapshots), as it has the potential to break, but more likely it has the potential to confuse and cause you to throw away data you didn’t mean to. This is because of some particularly ambiguous and misleading phrasing used in VirtualBox circles – the crux of the matter being:

• When you restore a snapshot, it will throw the current state and/or any subsequent snapshots away and leave the machine in the state defined by the snapshot you’re restoring. This can mean a lot of changes which currently exist in the image being undone, and lot of files disappear, for example – the only copy of important documents created since the snapshot you’re restoring was made. Use with care.
• When you delete a snapshot, it will actually merge the current state of the machine into the snapshot before removing that snapshot and leaving the machine at it’s current merged state but without the snapshot existing…

Yeah, I know it’s confusing, so just be careful, okay? If you’ve got the space available just take a copy of the .VDI file from the HardDisks folder AS WELL AS a copy of the snapshots by copying the folder with the name of your VM from the Machines folder, and then merge in the snapshots – this way if it all goes nuts you can’t throw away the knackered copy and replace it with your pristine pre-merge copies.

Cheers!

Credits: Thanks to Damien for his article at MakeTechEasier for the initial information (you can also find out how to compress Linux guests there too, but just be aware that the technique he outlines involves cloning the drives then shrinking and re-importing them) and to Alphatek’s article for the simplification!

How nice would it be to have the view out of your windows be, well, anything? I’d have something with the ocean in it I think. The Golden Gate bridge bit looked really nice & that’s got water, so it’d be a good start. The train journey one would prolly make me a bit nauseous though!

Where or what would you have?