Blue Knight Sojourn of the Mind

I use a number of computers and operating systems, and due to the problem with Microsoft file system in place it is hard to use the disks on all systems such as Mac and Linux. The Windows CIFS file system is just not accepted everywhere, and while there are commercial tools to let you read the system for Mac it is not something I want to do all the time.  On the other hand the ext2 file system is supported on every platform besides Windows.  But due to a few people it is no longer a problem.

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Some people like to use the Windows tools to do things but believe it or not it is not always the fastest way to do things. For example if I want to copy a whole CD to an ISO file I would have to open up a program in Nero, then copy the CD Files to the window, which actually makes a copy to temporary space, then name it the same way, then burn to a virtual drive.  This takes time!!!
In Linux/Unix there is a tool that does this and a lot more tasks very easily. It is a block for block copy and it is not only used for disk burning but also to make forensic copies of disks, etc.  The same thing above on a Linux syst Read the rest…

Well as part of using a new laptop at work I decided not to transfer it to Linux and be against policy so instead I will run Linux/Gentoo in VmWare or VirtualBox depending on what I like better that week

I need to customize the Windows System and as part of it is including linux based commands that have been ported in to windows. The problem with command line tools in Windows is that they are not found so easily once you install them somewhere on disk.  Since Windows XP puts everything in C:\Program Files I decided that I would do that as well and add the programs to Program Files.

I created a directory under C: Drive called “usr_bin”  which being a Linux/Unix person makes a lot of sense.  Then I just copy the command line components from all the programs I have in the Program Files in to C:\usr_bin so that I can activate them via command line.

There is one more thing you have to do.  Go to   Control Panel, then to System. Once you have the window from System pop up you can go to the Advanced  tab and then on the bottom of the tab you can click on Environmental Variables.  A new window will pop-up and you can go to the System Variables portion of it and click on Path and then on Edit.  This will pop out a window where you can edit your Path. Here I just add ;C:\usr_bin  save and either reboot or log out and log back in to Windows.

That is it! The Path Variable is now working for you.

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Copyright (c) by BlueKnight

Well an update on Getting Things Done using pocket informant. Due to a number of visitors and my promise I have designed a separate section on this blog that can be updated concerning the System that I created for using Pocket Informant as a Trusted System.

As I update it, I will post on the Blog to the related pages which can be found at the top menu of the page under “Getting Things Done”

I hope you will find it useful, and please provide feedback.

If you have tried to update your system lately you might have come against this bug. When you try to “emerge –update world” you get a block all the time on a particular update of e2fsprogs.

Solving this block is easy, but took a lot of searching and then a test or two on a VirtualMachine (VirtualBox). The block occurs with the program of e2fsprogs and e2fsprogs-libs. This is when trying to update to version 1.41.2.

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Compiz-Fusion is a composite windows manager that aims to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness. The first Compiz

Now that we got the definition out of the way, in my previous post about installing compiz-fusion on Intel cards I sort of gave a tutorial on how to install it on a Gentoo system with Intel Cards. Not too long ago compiz-fusion project released a new version. Unfortunately through the normal portage tree this version is not available. If you install the layman overlays and obtain the “desktop-effects” overlay you can actually install version 0.7.6 which is a ways away from the 0.6.0 version available through standard portage.

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Well I know there is no excuse but I have been neglecting my blog!!!

I have been extremely busy at work which included some travel, and was also working on a few interesting things for the PDA and also for Linux. So I neglected my blog and put things aside to do what I was interested in.

I have plan’s for the blog and within the next few days the following will happen:

• New Page’s for GTD - I am getting a lot of hits and also a lot of questions about the Getting Things Done System that I have developed for the PDA. I have been expending it a lot and now I am going to gather my posts, the comments and my new developments and put it all together under a separate page under the blog. This will give people easy reference and access. I will be changing things to that page, and just blogging the descriptions.
• New PDA programs - I have found a number of nice little tools for the PDA and I think it is time I post about them.
• Some interesting things about PSP Modification’s
• Linux of course, I have to make some additions or modifications to the old pages and also some new tutorials on how to get things working with Gentoo.
• Plus more things as they come up!

Well I hit a little snag when I decided to boot two systems at one time so had to solve that problem.

Not really that hard, but here is the difference.

You need to bring up a tap interface for each of the systems and then you need to assign a bridge to the systems. This is not a big deal, and also lets you set up systems easily for bridging, but I need to look in to that more and do testing as I need it.

For now here is the way to fix it and the config file for /etc/conf.d/net

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So why do I want to share out Samba Shares. This is for VirtualBox, to increase the speed of writing, and also to keep VirtualBox disks small as they can be a bit of a pain to compress.

So to start things off you need to make sure that Samba is on the system. If you have installed Samba before then that is great, if not then this is your chance to emerge it.

After Samba is emerged we need to modify the configuration file. By default there is no configuration file in /etc/samba but there is an example file that can be copied over. For me I copied the file over, but since it is huge I am only going to cut out the pertinent parts and explain them.

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Ok.. first little stumble when trying out Virtual Box but it is not the fault of Sun/VirtualBox.

The virtual folder sharing works but is slow. The way to fix that is actually simple turn up network sharing on a regular virtual interface.

Here is a way to do that!
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