Monthly Archives: November 2006

OLPC in QEMU under Linux

By | Published: November 30, 2006
The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) people have made available a VMWare image to show off their software. I don't run VMWare, but I do use QEMU which can open VMWare disk images. Here's what I did to make it work.
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Channel 4 Restrictions On Demand

By | Published: November 30, 2006
So the people at Channel 4 are testing out their new On demand service http://test.geo. channel4.com/ 4od/get4od/index.jsp for watching TV programmes on your computer. (I have deliberately broken that link so as not to help drive traffic to their site.) Lets look at the minimum requirements:-
  • Windows XP
  • A broadband internet connection
  • Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher
  • Windows Media Player 10 (if it’s not already installed on your PC, the installation process will help you get it)
  • Macromedia Flash 9 (this will be installed automatically if it is not already on your computer) Microsoft.net Framework 2.0 (this will be installed automatically if it’s not already on your computer)
  • A minimum of 10 MB of free disk space to install 4oD. You will need 70 MB of free disk space if you need to install Windows Media Player, Macromedia Flash Player 9 and .Net Framework 2.0
Posted in Linux, Rant | 3 Comments

Helping Windows Users

By | Published: November 22, 2006
I work in the IT sector. My job involves support and consultancy for SAP. As such people often ask me computer-related tech-support questions in my private life. I also get asked questions by colleagues at work about their home computers. Naturally as part of my job I also get asked tech questions by people at work which relate to their work computers. Even though I don't actually work in desktop support, people recognise when someone in the office is tech-savvy and they ask the geek questions. I don't mind this, it's of course great to have ones talents recognised. I don't actually work in tech-support as part of my job, so really it's an aside to what I am getting paid to do. Helping to fix problems with colleagues desktops means they can potentially get on with their work and do their job better as a result, I figure a few minutes here and there to sort desktop problems isn't overall a bad thing so long as it doesn't adversely affect my ability to complete other tasks.
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 9 Comments

Compiling kvm Under Ubuntu Edgy i386

By | Published: November 15, 2006
kvm is QEMU with support for the VT Vanderpool or Virtualization Technology. This means you can now run QEMU on CPUs that have the VT instructions and you get a super quick emulated environment. Yay! Previously to get spritely performance out of QEMU you needed the closed-source KQEMU kernel module. Now you don't. This interests me because I use QEMU quite heavily with my little screencasting project with Ubuntu-UK. Having a totally Free (GPL) and easy to use method for running virtual machines is essential. Of course there's Xen but kvm is a great drop-in solution with very little requirements on the host, no replacement kernels for example.
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Ubuntu | 4 Comments

Creating Screencasts on Linux

By | Published: November 11, 2006
Edit: I have updated and moved this guide to here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/RecordingScreencasts. I recently created a couple of screencasts for the Ubuntu-UK LoCo team, of which I am a member. I've been tinkering with screencasting for nearly a year now but only recently has everything come together in such a way that I find it easy to make the screencasts. I've been asked to write a guide showing how I created the screencasts at quickones, and here it is. Before I go into the detail there's some technical things I should outline up front. Various tools and utilities have been suggested to me over the last year and I have discounted many of them for a number of reasons. Hopefully this will explain what those reasons are so that you can understand why I used the tools I did. In a previous blog post I talked about screencasting in general - part 2 of that article is in the works. This post is more technical, showing how to actually do it for real.
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 6 Comments