Today, I tried again running Virtual Box, hoping it will be able to run a small OS like Puppy. The same thing happen, it crashed. I was forced to turn off the machine manually. After that, I did a little Google search. Finally I found that this problem also happen on another AMD Turion powered notebook, and not only on Virtual Box, but also on Virtual PC.

I found that it seems updating the BIOS might solve this issues. That raise my hopes up. But unfortunately, search in MSI website returned that I have the latest BIOS version. So no update is available, thus no solution. Good things that now I know the problem is related to the processor, further search found that hardware virtualization is the culprit.

Now that I have hardware virtualization disabled, I can finally run any OS I needed. To disable it, go to setting on each OS, click on System and move to Acceleration tab. Uncheck the Enable VT-x/AMD-V option.

Reference:

• Virtual PC crashes Vista on AMD Turion :: Virtual PC
• XP mode Freezes/Crashes Host

Thanks Google!

Well, this is a little unusual. I got two times of Google sorry today, while I actually never got one before. This happened when I’m trying to search a query in Chrome address field. Weird… It might be my network though.

And of course, I don’t have any bot program to run search repeatly. And I also didn’t do any ping to their server. Is that means Google have increased their security for overuse of their search engine? Well, whatever. I just hope that it won’t happen again.

Last month, I bought a notebook by credit, a MSI GX633. This notebook is made for gamer, so should work fine for designing job and of course, for drawing and even better for programming. My old Pentium 4 PC is so slow when it comes to run an IDE, such as Aptana and Netbeans, and even worse when I’m drawing, and it lags a lot when I run many browsers (usually 3 version of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) together, IDE and a graphic software. LOL. To make up with it, I used Linux, so at least, I got a better performance than I was on Windows XP. Now, I can run Windows 7 pretty well, have a lot of windows opened together, and still work fine without lag.

Well, this is the first time I experienced Windows 7 anyway. I skipped Vista since I heard a lot of complain about it, and I heard a lot of compliment for 7. XP is a very good OS, and works well with everything, while in 7, I need to care about compatibility. But at least, I have almost every software I need worked just fine. The thing I hate for XP is the windows management. It especially worse when we have a lot of windows opened together, when working, I got more than 10 (sometime can be 20 and even more) windows opened together. In 7, it works a little better, though it is only grouping the same software together (which is available in XP as well), but a lot more eye candy. Eye candy is good when we tired on working in a long time… LOL . But well, I still missed workspaces feature in Linux.

The things I don’t like about this notebook is the keyboard, I loved the numeric pad there, but just, the space is too small for all this button together. Also, touch pad is placed in bad position that made it easy to be touched while writing. But thankfully, we have a function key to disable touch pad. So I usually disable it when I use my Wacom tablet.

About the tablet, 7 didn’t work well with my Wacom Bamboo tablet. The tablet suddenly stopped working after sometime, and there is a performance issue too. I searched and read a lot about it on the net. I hope I got it fixed. The solution I found is from this post and this post. Also, for the performance issue, it is related to the Tablet PC service from 7 (and Vista as well). See this thread. Now it worked a lot better.

Okay, that’s it for the notebook and tablet.

It has been more than one year since I started working as freelancer. Thanks God that I performed better lately. I want to share my first year experience as freelancer, but I’ll write about it later, in another post.

And finally, this is the only art I draw this past two months.

For comment and full size, please go to my deviant art.

Tthat’s it for now. Thanks for reading.

The first day – upgrading the current Xubuntu

So at the start, I have a well working Xubuntu 9.04. Updates for 9.10 came in October 29, but I do upgrade on the next day. My internet was running slowly -it probably just my connection to Ubuntu server, since I got a great download speed on others- to download all of the updates (which surpassed 800MB), that takes more than 12 hours to complete. Well, during that time, I can do everything in my PC until, the upgrading process which takes another hour to complete, at this time it loads heavily and almost impossible to do anything. It seems everything run smoothly and it asks me to reboot.

Before I reboot, everything is still fine. But I can’t wait to reboot to see what have changed in my new Xubuntu, so I reboot immediately. My feeling is getting worse when there is some weird text with broken graphic came up before the splash screen, if I recall, it is the same screen while the Ubuntu is checking the disk drive, except that it happens in blink and the graphic is broken, then the splash screen load. It was all fine until I got into the login screen, and login also fine. Oh right, I have removed my Wacom Bamboo before that since I read some issue of it on upgrade notes.

Then, weird errors pop up on the screen, Xfce is loaded slow, and I got a repeating pop up that said the trash applet error. I can’t go anywhere, the pop up keep repeating, and no menu is working, including the shutdown, so that forced me to push the reset button. Next, I loaded into Gnome session, there is still some error pop up, but I can get rid of it. The Gnome is working fine, but I can’t enable any effects and actually, it is slow (well, fast since there is no effect, but when I got into a more heavy task, it is too slow). I tired so I just go sleep. That’s the first day…

The second day – reinstall the Xubuntu

On the second day, I decided to reinstall my Xubuntu using a fresh installation. My install procedure is from Wubi, then I move the installation to a dedicated partition. This way, I will get a two working Xubuntu which the Wubi one can be used as backup if somehow I messed the installation again. Downloading 600MB more for the iso is quite painful, since, it is downloading in the same speed as when I upgrading, but fortunately, thanks to torrent, I can get full download speed. It still takes 3-4 hours though.

Installation from Wubi is going smoothly, it is also working well after installation. So I just setup everything I have before, simply by using the Read marking menu on sypnatic that was saved before. I ended up downloading 600MB files, again, with slow speed. That is another 10 hours or so. But everything was working great, I can finally get the same feel as I have in previous installation -that messed up-, except that the screen resolution is working on maximum 1152×864, while I usually use 1280×1024. But that’s fine as long as it can work. Then I reboot to see everything is going well and will move it to dedicated partition.

But another disaster came up, yes, disaster. After I reboot, I can’t load the Xubuntu (that installed from Wubi) anymore. The error that came up now is kernel panic. The reason is unable to mount the rootfs, if I can remember correctly. Trying Google around, but none of the solution worked. I even defragment my disk drive, since I read it was the solution somewhere, but no effect at all, and that cost me another 2 hours or so. Then, I gave up, too tired of it (after setup everything and….) so I go to sleep, that’s the second day.

The third day – reinstall the Xubuntu again

The third day came. I decided to reinstall the Xubuntu again, but now, instead of using the Read marking, I just choose only the necessary application to install. Right now, everything is working. Rebooting also have no problem. Then I move it to a dedicated partition. At first, I used LVPM. The process was going smoothly until the end, it asked for reboot. So I do, but after reboot, I can’t find the Xubuntu from the grub -in 9.04, I use the grub from Wubi-, I tried everything I could, adding the menu.lst and so, but none of them works. Now I just realize that it is now using a different version of grub.

After giving up with LVPM, I tried the wubi-move-to-partition script that I taken from here. This one also going well. Reboot and then, I just saw that my grub is installed in my main drive, so I lost the Windows MBR and even, there is no Windows options anymore there! Oh, another disaster. It doesn’t happen in LVPM, in previous 9.04 version, LVPM add the menu to my Wubi grub menu, but it doesn’t work this time, and now I lost the MBR… another Googling time. Oh, well, the good thing is the new moved Xubuntu is working fine.

Next mission is to restore the Windows MBR and use the Wubi grub menu instead of installing the grub. Oh, forgot to mention it, my Xubuntu, both from Wubi and partition is installed in my external hard disk drive. Sometime, it just doesn’t load fine while power up, ended up with error 22 of grub. Also, it is not always connected to PC, so that’s why I need the Windows MBR back, if not, I will always need to insert my external HDD only to load grub. Before that, I want to make sure that my Windows is fine, so I inserted the line for Windows on grub menu list, fortunately it is fine, that light me some hope.

I managed to restore my Windows MBR by this:

sudo apt-get install mbr
sudo install-mbr -i n -p D -t 0 /dev/sda

Yippe, I got my Windows MBR back. But now I just back to where I begins. Nowhere to access my partition installation of Xubuntu. Finally, I managed to add the menu in grub by editing the grub.cfg from Wubi installed Xubuntu. I have done it before actually, but no success. Now, since I have the menu.lst from the partitioned Xubuntu, I can copy and adapt it to the grub.cfg. And yes, it is working! Finally………..!

Next one, is to configure the Wacom calibration and the screen resolution. For Wacom calibration, I just use the same .xinitrc file as before, but need a little change on device identifier. Bad thing is the wacomcpl didn’t work anymore, fortunately I have found the best setting for me so it is not a big deal. For screen resolution, I finally able to add the 1280×1024 resolution by editing the xorg.conf file. Here is the final xorg.conf file from me:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Driver      "intel"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Modeline "1280x1024" 109.62  1280 1336 1472 1720  1024 1024 1026 1062 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth 24
		Modes "1280x1024"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Hopefully, that is the end for it. The new Xubuntu is also working faster than before. This is the third day, really feel tired of it, will gonna got a sleep after posting this. lol. What a long post…

One of the feature I missed while migrating to Ubuntu Linux is the fully functional Wacom tablet. Good things is with Ubuntu 9.04, it has pre-installed Wacom driver, so it works out of the box for my Wacom Bamboo. However, not all features we have on Windows (and Mac) are available on Linux, the only one I missed is the stylus scrolling (by default, in Windows, when we hold the stylus button and drag, the scroll event occur). Since I do browsing all the time, sometime it is hard to allocate the scrollbar, especially in a looong page, that is painful. Up until now, I use the keyboard to scrolling that looong page but it is not efficient, and finally I found the solution by using Mouse Gesture add-ons on Firefox to emulate it. I love Chrome better though, but the only solution I found is with Firefox.

So this is how I do it. First install the add-ons called Mouse Gestures Redox on Firefox. Next we setting it up.

Open the preference, select Tools, then Add-ons, navigate to Extension tab, then choose Mouse Gestures Redox and finally click Preference. The new window will come up. Select the Middle button on the Make gestures with, like shown in the picture

Next open Edit Gestures. Edit the Scroll Down, Scroll Right, Scroll Left and Scroll Up. New window like this will show up when you choose Edit.

Click on the button Recognize Gesture (right from the Gesture code), then do the gesture you want (for scroll down, I drag to top). Or you can just use the same Gesture code as I am. Next, remove all gesture you didn’t need, for me, I remove all of them. If you want to keep them, make sure you don’t have a conflict with another gestures. This is how my final settings look.

Now, I can emulate the same behavior as I have on Windows. Even though, it is only on Firefox. Well, the cons is we don’t have a nice smooth scrolling, but well, at least, it works better than using the scrollbar. You can play around with the configuration and see what working best, for example I feel better by decreasing the minimal gesture size to 5 pixels.

Anyway, GIMP, Inkscape and another software, especially the imaging software already worked well with my Bamboo. Also, others Wacom tablet has equipped with mouse, so this trick will probably needed for the classic Bamboo user. Oh, other things, Wacom Bamboo Touch has launched now. I would like to upgrade, but still, I wonder if it can works well with Linux.

Aptana Studio is a powerful IDE for web development. It supports HTML, CSS, Javascript and the server side script such as PHP, Ruby and Python. Even more, it support a wide variety of Javascript library. It based on Eclipse and available as a standalone application or as a plugin for Eclipse. Aptana Studio is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. And the best of all is, Aptana Studio is free. Here I will post how I install the recent version of standalone Aptana Studio, 1.5, on 32 bit Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

First of all, download the Aptana Studio on http://www.aptana.org, choose the Linux and 32 bit version, or change it accordingly to suit your machine. Before we start installing the Aptana Studio, we need to ensure we have installed the sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-plugin. To do that, simply type this in terminal

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

To install Aptana Studio, first create a directory /usr/local/aptana or simply type this in terminal

sudo mkdir /usr/local/aptana

Next, unzip the Aptana Studio archive you downloaded in the first step to /usr/local/aptana directory.

cd /usr/local/aptana
sudo unzip /home/keaglez/Aptana_Studio_Setup_Linux_x86_1.5.1.zip

Change the /home/keaglez/Aptana_Studio_Setup_Linux_x86_1.5.1.zip to the complete directory of your downloaded Aptana Studio archive. The installation is done, now you can run Aptana Studio in Terminal.

cd /usr/local/aptana/Aptana\ Studio\ 1.5
./AptanaStudio

If it succeed, now you can see Aptana Studio running. At first, it will ask you to install additional plugin. I actually failed several times when installing some plugin, the Aptana Studio just keep crashing while installing the plugin. So I just try to install the plugin one by one, and keep only the plugin I needed. Finally, I’m able to install PHP and jQuery plugin.

The final step is to create the launcher for Aptana Studio. To do that I simply right click on desktop and choose Create Launcher, then I fill every field like in the picture. Oh, btw, I’m using Xfce desktop or also known as Xubuntu, but I’m installing Ubuntu at first and change the desktop after that.

Also here is a short review of the Aptana Studio. Beside of the several crashes on installing plugin, the Aptana Studio runs quite slow in my machine. My machine running on 2 gigs of RAM and old Pentium 4 processor, basically it passed the system requirements from Aptana Studio. However, the fact that it is powerful can’t be denied, even though it runs much slower than an average text editor (I was using Geany before). Well, it is not only a text editor, but a complete all in one development environment, so a sacrifice in speed is worthed.

After all, there is still some way to improve the performance, and as for me, instead of running Gnome, I chose to run the light-weight Xfce instead, it is proven to have a better speed and more stability (right, I was changing to Xfce just to use this IDE ). I run Google Widgets, Screenlets, Avant Window Navigator, XMMS and some application I used all the time, and of course Aptana, and it still run in an acceptable speed.

The cool things is it has an internal browser to review inside the Aptana Studio, the Linux version has only Firefox, while Mac version has Firefox and Safari, and Windows version has Firefox and the ugly Internet Explorer. It also has a wide variety of Javascript library which I found great. The debugger and on time validation is also cool. Another great feature is, it recognized the Javascript and CSS script inside an HTML document.

The only feature I missed is the inability to hinting the method name of a static classes and objects that returned from a function (correction: static methods and properties from class will be showed there if defined correctly ). However, it does great for the object itself.

That’s all of it, I’m still not finished exploring all of the Aptana feature. But it is a great and powerful IDE indeed.

Then again, Google helps me to find the answer. This bug has been reported and some workaround has been made. Simply by modifying a DLL will make it works fine. However, I’m not gonna get into this thing, thanks to the ready DLL by Voon, it makes our life easier…

Now download the DLL from above links. You will have libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll. Then, open your Inkscape installed path, usually it is C:\Program Files\Inkscape and replace this new DLL, backup first if you want. Done.

Finally, the Inkscape works fine with my Wacom Bamboo. Please note that I’m trying this on Inkscape 0.46.

Okay, back to the client. During the installation, there is some ads and a few application that you need to install. There is total 4 application (free and trial, including Digsby), but I uninstall all of them leaving Digsby alone since I don’t need the other. This is fine though, since it is available for free, the important thing is, there is no ads anymore after this…

The interface is nice, pretty cool actually, but at first it is a little messy for me. I prefer a clean look one, so I’m searching for the customization. There is many customization (skins, emoticons, conversation themes and sounds) available at Digsbies. Hmm… I started to love it now.

The skin can be changed easily by downloading the skin, then place the folder in C:\Program Files\Digsby\res\skins, while for emoticons and sounds, you need to replace the default folder (backup first of course). The buddy list also can be customized to the way we want. Yep, and now I make it look cleaner…

Now I also didn’t use Thunderbird anymore just for reading new message… All in one, I can say that this is one of the best IM client out there. And don’t forget, it is still in beta…

Two or three days ago, my internet connection starting to perform better, then I started to download both Avira and Malwarebytes. But again, both application can’t connected to internet. So I have no choice instead of manually updating it. But now, I know the reason why my application refused to connect.

What is it? After seeking for answer on Google (the answer I got is from Yahoo! Answer lol), I finally know why. It is the Windows Firewall that block it. I’m not sure why, but both Avira and Malwarebytes is not listed on the exception list. Could it be the evil software that remove it? Probably, after I add both to the exception, they works fine. And for sure, both software detect infected files. But now, it seems fine. Yes, it is better now.

For you who got the same problem as mine, but aware of how to do fix it, then here I go.

Open Control Panel and double clicks on Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall window will pop up, now click the Exceptions tab, you will find all application that used network connection there. If you didn’t find your protecting software there, then you need to add it. Click Add Program button. List of installed application will show up, select your application, for Avira, I need to add Start Avira AntiVir Personal. Repeat add all software that you need. Done!

And a screeny to help you!