Friday, April 14, 2006

QEMU Windows XP License Problem

Ever since Plex86 died and VMWare cost money I have been looking for a way to run XP inside Linux. After finally finding it, I ran into a snag:

Windows XP without SP2 freaks out when trying to login saying "a problem prevents windows from veryfing precisely the licence of this computer" which prevents a user from logging in except in Safe Mode.

To remedy this problem I did what I always do: google. I found this website:

The QEMU forum :: View topic - WinXP licence check problem

Which tells you that you simply need to install SP2. So I googled for an SP2 download found it. I then used mkisofs to create an ISO image and mounted that as Windows' CD Rom drive and I am now in the process of installing it.

Creating ISO images from command line

If you were ever wondering how to create an ISO image from a command line I recommend you take a look at this site:
ISO, CDR, and CDRW in Linux

Here is the general command:

[root@server /root]# mkisofs -RJ -o image.iso /burndirectory/

the RJ option preserves long file names.

Friday, April 07, 2006

Firefox/Thunderbird Integration

I was trying to find out how to have Thunderbird open links in Firefox and Firefox compose emails in Thunderbird. After googling for a little while I found some great directions here: Troubleshooting

They are as follows:

This is an issue that I believe we'll see fixed in a fairly short period of time, and it has to do with where Firefox sources it's preferences for default browsers from... that is, the gnome configuration. This is particularly not helpful to those of us that choose to use Firefox, while NOT using gnome. Some of use use, KDE, others Fluxbox, or XFCE, or plethora of other desktop environments. Fortunately for us there is a method that is not so hard to side step this sad case of pigeon holing.
Get Firefox To Open Thunderbird As Default Mail Application

1. Open the url "about:config"
2. In about:config create the entry "network.protocol-handler.app.mailto" with the value "path/to/Thunderbird".
1. Right click --> new --> string
2. Paste in "network.protocol-handler.app.mailto" for preference name.
3. Paste in "path/to/Thunderbird"as the string value
3. Restart Firefox

If all went well, Thunderbird should now be your default application to open up "mailto" links
Open Firefox From Thunderbird As Default Browser

1. Following the instructions earlier for installing an extension not on update.mozila.org (adding the site to the whitelist, etc) Install the extension "about:config" from here
1. Right click the install link and select "save as".
2. Save it to a place you will remember and open up Thunderbird.
3. From the menu, select Tools --> Extensions
4. In the extensions window select "install" from the bottom left
5. This will ask you to point Thunderbird towards the path to the extension ***.xpi, select it and hit "open"
6. A new window will now pop up, (similar to the Firefox install window), it will make you wait two seconds, then select "install" from the bottom right.
7. Restart Thunderbird
2. Now that About:config is installed we have easy access to some of Thunderbird's hidden preferences. So, from the menu go to Tools --> About:config
3. This will take you to a new window, from here create the entries listed below, and add the paths as the values listed.
1. Right click --> new --> string
2. Paste in "network.protocol-handler.app.http" for preference name.
3. Paste in "path/to/Firefox"as the string value
4. add "network.protocol-handler.app.https" with a value of "path/to/Firefox" the same way.