Getting VLC to work with East Asian characters

VLC is a great media player as it plays most media files. However, it isn't perfect. Handling non-English characters seems to be one of its weakness. I always have problem with its play-list, as it displays symbols instead of proper characters. I alway thought it is the problem of VLC as other players handles the same file just file. Yesterday, I was playing with the appearance setting on Ubuntu, and change the default font to Deja-vu San, and to my surprise, this also fix my VLC problems. Now, files with East Asian characters are rendering as it should be.

VirtualBox and Simultanenous Guests

I have been using VirtualBox for a while now, and I like it a lot. Especially when I need to run two guests OS simultaneously. With VMWare player or server, it would bring my system to its knees. However, on the same machine, I can use two guest OSes in parallel without a problem on VirtaulBox. So, if you like me, need to run multiple guest OSes simultaneously, you may want to give VirtualBox a trial.

Just read Google has a repository for their software, and want to share.

http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/apt.html

VirtualBox on performance

I know virtualization with VMWare Player on a slow machine is a pain. I was a bit curious about how VirtualBox flares. I loaded it on my AMD Sempron 2400+ machine, and run a copy of Windows Vista Business Edition on a Windows XP host. To my surprise, it runs very well. Okay, I am not running anything heavy. Vista only configure with bare minimum software. The machine ran as it was natively. In fact, it even runs better than my work machine (P4 2.8GHz, 2GB memory) with Windows XP on it (it loaded with all these craps insisted by C&IT service). I am very please with VirtualBox experience. VMWare may work better if it got hardware support, otherwise, to me, it seems VirtualBox performs better with "normal" machines. By the way, I am a fan of AMD processors, as Windows runs much more smoother on them (I know, Intel processors are faster, but I can swear, Windows runs much more smoother on AMD processors, i.e. less lags)

VirtualBox

I am a big fan of virtualization lately as I have been involved in several development projects and they all need different setup. Instead of loading my system with all these "only use once" or very unwelcome software (e.g. Visual Studio 2008), I installed them into different copies of virtual machines. This allows me to work on clean copies of Windows with only necessary software. Once I finished with them, I simply delete the guest OS image. Very neat.

Until few days ago, I was using VMWare Server as my virtualization platform. Then, I found out VirtualBox from Sun MicroSystem. Now I have been using both of them, I must say for user point of view, there is very little difference between them. What made me move initially was the support of hardware virutlization support, namely Intel VT-x and AMD-V technologies. However, it turns out it does more damages than helping. With VT-x switched on, VirtualBox would crash. It seems the implementation of AMD-V is a bit better. VirtualBox runs perfectly there, but very slow in comparison to VMWare Server I was using. After a quick search on Google, it seems with VirtualBox, enabling hardware support will actual decrease the performance. It is very sad as I really would like to have hardware assisted VM. I don't like the idea of having software emulating function while dedicate hardware supposedly can do it.

Anyway, putting performance issue and buggy VM hardware supports aside, VirtualBox is quite stable and pleasant to use. Especially if you need to run multi guest instances at the same time, it seem to handle better than VMWare Server.

Getting Lazarus to work

For my job, I need to learn Delphi. Instead of getting a commerical version of Delphi, I first checked out the repositary to see if there is on available for my Linux machine. The answer is simply yes, and is called Lazarus using Free Pascal. I download and install it with Aptitude. After it installed, it complained that it misses the Free Pascal source files. It seems the Apitiude does not do its job thoroughly. To have Lazarus to work, you also need the package of fpc and fpc-source, i.e.

sudo aptitude install fpc fpc-source

After, everything works as it should be.

Watching FLV using Media Player Classic on Windows

Although this is not a Ubuntu related topic, I still want to share with others. I have downloaded this FLV file using DownloadHelper. However, FFDShow seems have problem to handle it even I have FLV enabled. After a Google search, it seems the solution is to find and install a splitter called FLV Splitter, and register it with Windows

regsvr32 FLVSplitter.ax

A simple word, it works! So, if you like me who have trouble to play FLV videos using WMP Classic, you may want to give this little utility a try.

Firefox and add-on

Firefox and Opera are two browsers I used on my Ubuntu machine. However, I always thought Firefox is less stable when it comes to Flash heavy website. Today, I finally fed up with all these crashes, and search Google again to see if there is a solution to my problem. Well, it seems my unstable Firefox problem can also caused by bad add-on. So, I went through my add-on list and start to uninstall them one by one. I started by the one which is flash related.

I have this add-on called Download Helper, which I used to get flash videos from site like YouTube. I have been using it on my Windows version of Firefox for a long time now. I don't if it is a coincident or real, ever since I have uninstalled it, my Firefox seems to be a bit more happier.

Getting Skype

Skype can be setup and update periodically by including the

deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

in the sources.list

Windows Troubles

Well got trouble with Windows again. This time Windows won't let me install or unistall programs. This seems to be a well known problem associated with the Windows Installer service. In fact, someone even written a software for it, and I guess this shows how bad it is. Anyway, if you like me run into this Windows installer service problem which blocks to install/uninstall software (including getting updates from Microsoft), you may want to try out this little utility called Dial-a-fix. It fixed the problem for me, hope it does the same magic for you too.