BowerStudios.com

My air conditioning unit sets in full sun for half of the day. I was wondering if putting a shade over the unit would help at all. Apparently not according to this article by Allison Bailes

I like VirtualBox and think its a great tool, however, this was necessary for me because of work.

Installation

Installing Vmware Workstation 10 on Ubuntu 12 (Works for Ubuntu 13 as well)

Conversion

You can convert VirtualBox images to Vmware ones with the following process:

1. Export the machine from VirtualBox as a standard ova
2. Import to Vmware, which will fail right away, until you hit "Retry" whereupon it will work just fine
3. Look at the settings and remove anything that looks unnecessary (Floppy controller, sound card if it's a server)
4. Start the vm, you may have to resolve a hardware issue (ide mounted in wrong location or some such)
5. Install the vmware tools
6. Optionally, uninstall virtualbox-tools

Vmware Fusion network settings

If you want to match an apple wielding colleagues vmware fusion network settings, you can find your colleagues network setting on their mac at: /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion

Windows Guest Display Resolution

If you are running a Windows Guest, you can set any resolution of the Desktop by using VMwareResolutionSet.exe
I have two scripts that I can run on a windows Host based upon if I want a full size screen or a half-sized (width):
full:
"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareResolutionSet.exe" 0 1 , 0 0 1900 970
half:
"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareResolutionSet.exe" 0 1 , 0 0 940 970

Ubuntu Key mapping restoration after exiting a vm

If you are having difficulties with the Ctrl/OS/Alt keys after coming out of a vm, you might be experiencing this issue. You can restore some functionality by entering the following command in the terminal:
setxkbmap

References:

• howtogeek.com
• Networks in Vmware Fusion
• VMwareResolutionSet.exe

I'm not sure how it occurred, but, the day was off on my thermostat. A quick call to Honeywell's Tech support resolved the issue quite quickly. Here are the steps:

1. Select System
2. Press and Hold Fan
3. Should see 0120 with setting 20 blinking
4. Press next to 0130, this is the year
5. Press next to 0140, this is the month
6. Press next to 0150, this is the day
7. Press Done.

You should be good now :-)

Checking out a handy utility for my sanity: F.Lux
It adjusts the color of your monitor based on the time of day.

An Ubuntu PPA for F.Lux

The Gui didn't work that well for me, but it installs the command line app as well.

Running the following by itself will give you all the args
xflux

I ended up running with
xflux -z 43119

The BowerStudios.com web server was down for a couple of days this past week. We had a power outage here, and when I returned and tried to power it back up, it was dead. My guess is the power supply is fried. I took the opportunity to just pick up a new box instead of reviving the old hardware as it has been running for about 5 years. Got a very nice deal on a return at Microcenter.

I powered it up once to make sure everything was in order, and then got to work. Out came the original hard drive, and to be safe, the dvd drive. This little box only has a 250 watt power supply, and I'm plugging in 2 hard drives for a mirrored raid array. In goes the Raid Array, and that's all the hardware tinkering that needs to be done.

Next, I fired up the machine, and Ubuntu comes up faithfully, although with a message about a degraded raid array and a missing network interface. I used:dmesg | grep net to find out that my network card was no longer eth0, but eth1. I edited /etc/network/interfaces, and replaced the references to eth0 with eth1, restarted the box and networking is back. I started apache, which is the only thing I require to be started manually due to my protected ssl cert.

I updated my router to forward to the new ip address that my server was pulling down due to the new MAC address, and noticed that my website was still broken due to the database not being accessible. It turns out that the only app with the ip hard coded was mysql. I updated the configuration in /etc/mysql/my.conf and everything seems to be in good shape for the most part.

I had gotten the degraded raid array message, so I started looking into it. sudo cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sda1[1]
976759936 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: none
It appears everything is in good shape, no error messages at least, but I'll need to test some more to be positive.

Only thing left to do now, is actually mount the raid array into the chassis (raid array is still sitting in old server with cables - power and sata - strung over to the new one) and plug in the printer.

For some reason, I didn't run across these guys when I was looking for a laptop last year. I hope to give them a try next time I'm in the market.

The only issue I had with installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my Studio 17 was that the headphone jack didn't seem to output any sound. A quick googling solved the issue:

From LinuxForums.org
Hi guys, I have a workaround to get sound in the headphone jack.
At the command line:
sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Add the following line at the end of that file:
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6-dmic

Now, reboot and that's it, you should have sound now for your headphones. Enjoy!

(Verified on Ubuntu 12.04 on 9/19/2012)
(Verified on Ubuntu 13.04 on 5/17/2013)

The Problem: VirtualBox will not let you copy a hard disk in its media manager, and if you do so manually (via the filesystem) it will complain about the UUID. I can't think of a good reason why they would do this. However, there is a work around provided from:

From the VirtualBox Forum

1. First copy the Virtual Disk in the .VirtualBox/HardDisks Folder
2. Name it something appropriate like Magento.vdi
3. If you are on windows, run "C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" internalcommands setvdiuuid Magento.vdi

Change your path accordingly if your VBoxManage executable is somewhere else.

An interesting KM solution... While you would usually see a kVm solution.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

CPU History
1
2
3
4
5
6

Relative Speed