xdd is not “extreme dd”
While the ladies and gentlemen at IO Performance Inc. are busy with their 7.0 “Phoenix” release, they have left their website in disrepair including the disappearance of their product, source code and documentation.
Since I make heavy use of xdd and apparently I am not the only one that needed the documentation, source and binary; I have provided it here for everyone.
Make your external screen your primary screen
Or how to move gnome panels to a different monitor in Ubuntu.
In my particular setup, I have a laptop and a much larger external display. I like having my main Gnome panel on the external display and use the laptop display for other things like Skype and email.
To make this change perminant, I use some gConf magic: Read more
Upgrading the CPU in a Dell Studio XPS 1640
While the default Dell Studio XPS 1640 is fast and is a decent work laptop, it needed to do one extra thing, run virtual machines (VMs). I spend a lot of my time debugging, hacking and otherwise trying to make software behave in ways that the developers had not intended.
Tools like VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and QEMU make this job less tedious. The problem is that with the Intel T7350 CPU, I cannot run 64 bit VMs. Turns out that T7250 is a 64 capable chip, but without the VT-x extension which allows for hardware assisted virtualization.
Look your Intel CPU up to see if it supports the VT-x flag.
Read more
Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on Dell Studio XPS 1640
The very first thing I did when the company I work for gave me a laptop, a Dell Studio XPS 1640, was to install Ubuntu Karmic on it. No need for windows on this thing, I plan on working, not playing.
Dell is very good about their laptops. Whenever I had a question, everything I ever needed to know about their hardware I could easily look up on the online. The 1640 is no exception with their manual.
Read more
vNES for J2ME on your mobile
If you have ever wanted to play a NES game on your mobile, then you might have heard about vNES. There is a J2ME version which allows it to run on most mobiles available today.
There are however a few rough edges to this application as it requires assembling the necessary files together and running a windows batch file. From a Linux point of view, I have created a replacement shell script that does a better job. It requires unix2dos, rename, and bash.
Read more
