Open commend prompt at the current directory

In Windows XP, there is powertoy which lets you to open a command prompt window at the selected directory. However, there is none for Windows 7. After a bit of searching, it seems this is now an in built feature of Windows 7. You can simply open a command prompt at a selected directory by SHIFT+right click. This would bring up a more advanced pop-up menu which has the Open Command Window Here option.

Problems with Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was behaving very badly today. It crashes whenever I tries to use widgets linked to database. After a search with Google, it seems that this is caused by corrupted caches file used by DW

Dreamweaver creates a cache file called WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat inside your personal Dreamweaver configuration folder (the asterisks represent a series of letters and numbers that might differ from computer to computer). This occasionally gets corrupted causing instability, unpredictable error messages, and even crashes.

http://progresstechlabs.com/?p=666

Anyway, I followed the instructions as above, and now it back to behaves as it should be.

exim4

XAMPP is a great tool for quickly setup LAMP infrastructure for web application development.  However, getting the mail function to work under Linux can be a bit challenging.

After many hours of battle, I finally got it working.  The step I used on my Ubuntu setup are:

1. Running the dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config, and follow the onscreen instructions.
2. Editing the /etc/exim4/passwd.client file to setup the authentication details if your smtp server needs authentication (ref: http://www.lexspoon.org/linux/smtp-relay.html).
3. restarting exim4 by running /etc/init.d/exim4 restart
4. cross your figure and hope mail works!

Sound works!

I am only an average user of Linux, and hence I pick and use Ubuntu. There are few things I found troublesome in using Linux and they are:

• video - it is painful to use VESA driver as it makes every slow. It really hurts the first impression!
  
• sound - well, it works, but the sound control is a mess! For instance, there is a slider for main volume, but it doesn't work. You need to use the PCM slider to get things work.
• FLAC + CUE

I am happy to report that the last two has definitely be rectified in the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10. I now can use Audicious to listen to CUE+FLAC archive I have. It was a bit of a joke before, FLAC is a very popular format for audio, but the support for cue+flac is almost not existing. In fact, many has resorted to using foobar2k under WINE.

Also, sound control has finally got the polish it needed! There is a slider, and a slider works!

Just for these features alone, Ubuntu 9.10 is a worthy upgrade!

Migrate to Karmic Koala

Just finished all the upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic Koala, and all went without a problem. Though don't know if it is because the new version gets a better error reporting, I seem to get more "crashes" from application before. Other than that, things seems just work. I even took the risk of converting the file system from EXT3 to EXT4 and upgrade GRUB to GRUB2

Create split virtual HD for VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a great tool and I like it a lot.  However, the inability of creating split virtual  hard drive into 2GB chunks can be a problem at times.  Most flash pen drives use FAT32 to maximize its compatibility with different OSes, but at the same time this limits the maximum file size to 2GB.  The inability of spliting virtual drive into 2GB blocks makes transporting  native VDI image files used by  VirtualBox impossible.  However, there is a workaround as VirtualBox is also compatible with images created by VMWare which allows split images.

Today, I found this website which allow people to create empty VMware compatble images without using a VMWare product.

http://www.easyvmx.com/new-easyvmx.shtml

With the help of this link, you can now create virtual machines with split file feature under VirtualBox.

Fix VFS Invalid Compression Format

Today my laptop lookup while it was updating, and I had to hard reset it.  However, the system won't boot up properly, and instead, it gave me the Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block error.  I have tried a number of suggestions found in Google, but didn't have much luck.  Eventually, I managed to restore my system by the following.

1. Boot up the system using a LiveCD.  (I was using the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop live CD)
2. Open a command prompt, and sudo -s to become a super user
3. Mount your boot partition, i.e. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
4. Use chroot to become the root user of the newly mounted partition, i.e. chroot /mnt/
5. Use aptitude search linux to find out the available images package on the repository
6. Reinstall the image, i.e. aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic
7. After it all done, get your fingers crossed, and reboot the system

With some luck, you may be able to get a working system back like myself.

To be on the safe side, I have rerun the aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic command again after I booted back to Gnome.

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