Joel Perry Productions

ok, so I woke up and now can’t get back to sleep.  nothing new, but this time I decided to do something instead of just laying there hoping to fall asleep before the sun rises.  Now, I thought that I already had this working, but apparently not… —edit okay, so I need to note I was doing these steps while writing this post and when I got to the step to reboot Fedora, step 6, I fell asleep.

I was and am currently using, a Fedora 12 VM from my laptop, now I thought I had the shared folders from the host OS (Win XP) setup, but could not find the mount point, so I just attempted to re-mount it.  fyi I’m using VirtualBox 3.1.2  so I attempted to remount the shared folder to a simple location…

$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

so I do some Googling and come up with some interesting tidbits…

so, if you didn’t look at the link, here it is in a nutshell, to get the mount to work (yes I installed the VM additions, but did not notice the error…) please read the whole post before trying this, as there are some steps you may need to do a little differently and I have noted this, but not until after I list them!

ok, let me start from the beginning…

step by step instructions for getting shared folders to work in a Fedora 12 VM on VirtualBox (after you get fedora installed)

1. open a console window (I am a huge fan of Yakuake)
2. type “sudo yum install system-config-display”
3. give it your password (you may have to do this every time you type sudo)
4. type “sudo system-config-display”
5. this will open a window in your GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, ICE, whatever) choose the options for your display (if using Yakuake you need to hit F12 to make the console window go away so you can see this new window)
6. type “sudo yum install gcc kernel kernel-devel kernel-headers”
7. restart the VM to boot with the newest kernel
8. goto the Devices menu and select install Guest additions
9. back to the console and type “sudo mount /cdrom /media”
10. type “sudo /media/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run”
11. (special note, if you have already run the VBox Additions from the cd, skip steps 7-10 and  just type this “sudo /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup”
12. now I do not remember if I had to create the share for My Documents in VirtualBox or if it was there by default, but I have one, called “documents” and that is the one I am using in this example. so, type the following “sudo mkdir /mnt/shared-docs”
13. type “mount -t vboxsf documents /mnt/shared-docs”
14. then you can now access your Windows XP My Documents folder from your Fedora 12 install in the /mnt/shared-docs folder!!!

Really not that hard, but nowhere in the documentation for VirtualBox does it tell you that you have to do all of that!

Now, you can type “su -” and give it your password, then you do not have to use “sudo” at all for the entire process.  you may ask why I do it then, and it is because I work on linux and unix systems for a living (or at least I am trying to) and for security reasons they tell you to never su to root (become the root user) as it is too easy to type an accidentally command in that will make the entire system irreversibly broken (with out restoring from a backup) and since I have been logged into some servers that are used in the monitoring/maintenance of the space shuttle and international space station, so making one of those stop working for several hours or more is a really bad idea! therefore you sudo every command you need to run as root instead of becoming root, gets annoying at times, but almost eliminates the chance of accidental termination of your employment!

Ok, so a note, I am running this Fedora 12 VM on a single core laptop with 2GB of Ram (1.5GB given to Fedora, and nothing running in the host except the VM) and when I ran step 5, it practically halted my system and took almost 30 minutes (part of the reason why I fell asleep) it would say it was downloading a 8.6 meg file and take 14 minutes to do so, at 858Mb/s (which is impossible I know, but that is what it did and said) anyway, the main reason I did this, is that I had downloaded some other Fedora .iso files and filled my Virtual HDD and needed to get them off!!

So, now you know… and as we all know… Knowing is half the battle!

[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

First, I went with Occam’s razor on my ATI driver issue.  after reading close to 20 web pages (mostly forum posts, but some blogs too) and came up with renaming the xorg.conf file and rebooting…  This got me up and working again, now I just need to check and find out if it is still using the ATI drivers (I think not, but I’ll get there sooner or later… not on the top of my list of things to do, considering my leg).  So, I’ll get back to that later. Now, on to a very popular topic, the Apple iPad, I love the jokes, made many of my own, but all things considered, I won’t be buying one unless the price drops significantly.  Else maybe when the gen 2 comes out.  My main complaints are the same as most everyone else.  No flash support pretty much kills it, I mean that covers nearly 50% of the web, and closer to 70% of the websites I frequent.  Not that I like having to deal with flash on websites, but there are just too many web pages that will not function at all without flash that I find it to be a major FAIL on any business to not support flash at this point in time.  The multitasking issue is another big one for me, as on my computer I frequently have 20 or so different windows open (mostly web pages) sometimes as many as 30 web pages plus 3 or 4 other programs.  Now I understand this allows the system to devote 100% of it’s processing power to the app you are currently using, but most of the things I leave open need constant, even if its once every 10 seconds, attention from the OS/CPU.  Last complaint… NO E-INK!!!

Now for some good things, I think the price is great for what you get, the storage sizes are fantastic at those prices, they included bluetooth which although I use it semi-regularly with my current devices I find it to be one of those Boy Scout things you need, in order to “be prepared” at all times.  The battery life, well I’ll believe it when I see it.  a 1 GHz processor is also fantastic, although not unheard of, nor top of the line.  I like the fact they kept the iphone’s compass, accelerometer, it auto detects the ambient light to auto-adjust the back lighting (I hope), it supports 720p and can output 576p via component cables.  So there are a lot more good things than bad, but for a WEB and ebook reader (the things I see as it’s main purpose) I think it just plain fails by not supporting flash.  Now if Google can get it’s chrome browser on it, then I may just be tempted to get one.  Else I am holding out for a Android/Chrome OS tablet that’ll rock my socks off…

Ok, so first, sorry I have not posted in a while.  First I was out of the continental united states for a couple of weeks in December, then had some pet problems in early January, followed up with breaking the crap out of my leg January 16th. I cracked my Tibia clean through about 3 inches above my ankle and then the tibia split up the bone about 6 inches, followed by cracking my fibula clean through just above the split in my tibia.  I have a lovely 8″ metal plate in my leg with 15 screws now.  so I do actually have a couple of good reasons for not posting.  I just started feeling somewhat better, I got my appetite back this past Saturday and my pain is mostly manageable even though I rarely find a comfortable position to sit/lay. in

Happier news…

Sprint is finally getting an Android phone with the new 1GHz SnapDragon processor by Qualcomm (extra cool it is capable of going up to 1.5 GHz if I remember correctly). The HTC Super-sonic. Hopefully late March, early April!! finally! I’ve been waiting since October…

Next up, back to my lovely PC, most everything seems to be working just fine now, I am running with the default BIOS settings and it works at least; however the PC sits on the BIOS POST image for almost 2 minutes before it actually starts POSTing.  Not sure what to do about that, I think I need to wait for the next BIOS update to fix that, but for now… it works.

So, I used a bootable CD with Paragon Defrag on it to Defrag my Windows 7 boot HDD and then used the Fedora 12 KDE x64 Live CD to install Fedora on the HDD by shrinking my Win7 partition by 100Gigs and then installed Fedora on it.

Now, the next time I booted into Windows 7 I got a message that my copy of Windows was not Genuine.  Not sure what’s up with that, but I haven’t done anything about it, and I have not gotten the message again.

Now back to Fedora… I added the proprietary drivers for my Motherboard’s ATI Radeon 3300HD in an attempt to try to use wine to play Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and a couple of other things, mostly some older games…  after rebooting, I no longer get a GUI, just a blank black screen and about 8 lines down a blinking cursor.  I can type, I can hit enter, but it does not respond.  This has been going on since January 5th or so.  Today I found out that Fedora has Virtual terminals just like FreeBSD, so very cool, I can at least get to a prompt today.  Now I cannot find any assistance online for configuring the ATI drivers so I can get them to work.  I know that a couple of versions ago they changed the command to configure the drivers, but I can’t find any helpful, current, information for this.  I am lucky I found the aticonfig command again.  I think I can figure it out from here though.  It just bugs me that the only info I could find said not to use the drivers, then if you go to Wine’s website they tell you if you don’t use the proprietary drivers that you can expect your games not to run well.  What a pain. (not as big of a pain as my leg though)  after searching for “aticonfig linux” I found some more info…

Will try and update again this week on how things are going, I am also working on my taxes so who knows… right now I am doing it on TurboTax.com but I think I will try a couple of others before I submit, even though I have used Turbo Tax for 15 years or so.