Tsukasa no Hibi

Cloudy Sky. Occasional Rain.

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Solaris lashing out

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If you’ve been following my twitter feed you probably know that I’m not in a good mood when it comes to OpenSolaris:

Not only does 2009.06 ship with a notoriously broken CIFS server, effectively rendering zfs set sharesmb=on useless for me, it also doesn’t play nice when upgrading to snv_118 from the dev repositories. On 118 I’m getting hit by some strange xc_free_msg stuff that has apparently been fixed in 119 (which I can’t use because the SXCE build for 119 has severe problems, apparently).

Now, VirtualBox on the other hand is only a minor pain in the buttocks. For the entire 3.x series VirtualBox constantly locks up OpenSolaris (preferrably in the middle of the night so I can get to work first thing in the morning). The fix is available (again), you only have to build VirtualBox from source. Since this is not an option for me, I simply went back to the last version of the old 2.x series. Yes, this does fix the problem but it leaves me somewhat unsatisfied.

Makes me hope that Sun fixes a load of things in it’s products till the 2010.02 release, so it’ll be a pleasant upgrade 🙂 .

Short notice: Installing Grub4Dos on USB thumbdrives

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USB thumbdrives are great. They are cheap, small devices packed with a lot of storage to carry all your important stuff. They are also great to boot administrative tools like True Image etc.

On themudcrab there is a great article for those who want to boot ISOs directly from a USB thumbdrive.

Unfortunately the article does not describe one major aspect: Making the stick itself bootable.

You need a little bit of extra software here to make it happen, thankfully the download is small and the software is free.

As I wrote, by default most thumbdrives do not have the bootable flag set. Also, they don’t have an MBR written. If you would try to install Grub4DOS on such a thumbdrive it would moan about an invalid partition table and recommend to use the –skip-mbr-check parameter.

That’s where HP’s tool comes in: Pop in your thumbdrive, start the HP tool and format the stick. The tool will write the necessary portions to the MBR, effectively making it possible to boot off the thumbdrive.

Done? Then follow the great guide on themudcrab showing all the necessary steps from now on. It even has the right software set as an example 🙂 .

Pangya! Vista Icon

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I dig the Vista icons. Unfortunately not all applications come with nice icons. Pangya, for instance, still has a 32×32 low color icon despite getting constant makeovers, patches and improvements.

Since I had to reinstall Microangelo anyway, I whipped up a nice little icon for Vista users:

pangya_vista_compAs you can see, the icon still is the beloved Dolfini, now in all it’s might and shine. There are quite a lot of sizes packed in the icon, so even when scaling the icon size up, it still looks great.

Download the icon file right here and enjoy 🙂 .

Use Mplayer to watch DVDs, browse menus etc.

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One of the weak points of Mplayer always seemed to be the support for DVD menus… or not?

Actually it’s quite easy to watch DVDs and browse menus with Mplayer. All you really need is a version that has dvdnav support enabled.

You can start the DVD the following way:

mplayer dvdnav://0 -dvd-device </dev/dvd | myfile.iso>

Quite easy, isn’t it?