jeffrey's web log

I set this up in Fedora 13 but it applies to pretty much any Linux distribution. It is helpful if you have Firefox installed and Flash Player working inside of that. The directions I am going to post don’t require this, but it will help you determine if you have all the correct dependencies installed. Also, I am using Google Chrome 5.0 but this may work for older versions too.

First, download Flash Player. You might want to check for the latest version as this post will become outdated.

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Unpack the Flash plugin

tar xzvf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Make the plugin executable and move it to the proper location

chmod +x libflashplayer.so
mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
mv libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins

The final step is to change the shortcuts for Google Chrome. Using something like kmenuedit or gnome-menu-editor, adjust the Google Chrome shortcut to enable plugins! Make your launch command look like this:

google-chrome --enable-plugins %U

So, this is probably the long route but, I mostly use Linux, particularly CentOS, from the command line. I am sure installing Google Chrome from a GUI package manager would work just fine too. When it comes to adding a new yum package repository and installing packages, this is the method you can use:

First add your repository (mine is for 64bit)
Add this to the file /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo

[google64]
name=Google - x86_64
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

Next, install Chrome.

yum install google-chrome-beta

This applies to the scenario where you may have a two or more network cards in a Xen hypervisor and would like to add a second bridge for guest machines to use. This is useful if for instance, your Xen server is attached to two networks. This solution applies directly to CentOS 5.x however, I am sure it would apply to many Xen configurations.

Place this following bit into a the file /etc/xen/scripts/my-network-bridge

#!/bin/sh
dir=$(dirname "$0")
"$dir/network-bridge" "$@" vifnum=0 netdev=eth0 bridge=xenbr0
"$dir/network-bridge" "$@" vifnum=1 netdev=eth1 bridge=xenbr1

Next, you will want to edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp

Find this bit of code and make it look like the code below. Here is where we call our my-network-bridge script instead of the default.

# It is possible to use the network-bridge script in more complicated
# scenarios, such as having two outgoing interfaces, with two bridges, and
# two fake interfaces per guest domain.  To do things like this, write
# yourself a wrapper script, and call network-bridge from it, as appropriate.
#
#(network-script network-bridge)
(network-script my-network-script)

I migrated an XP virtual machine from Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V running in Windows Server 2008. Of course the mouse does not work by default. You must insert the Hyper-V Integration Services to enable mouse capture.

Well of course moving from one virtual server host to another caused my XP virtual machines to deactivate themselves. I had this great dialog after typing my password that said “Do you want to activate now? YES NO”. Of course it was a silly, flashing dialog that ended up out of focus (mouse focus, meaning I could not click on the buttons).

This is a bit of a rant just to say I went looking (1 minute on Google) for keyboard shortcuts so that I could ALT+TAB (to ALT TAB in Hyper-V where there is no mouse capture, use ALT+INS instead) and here it is, straight from the horses mouth: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/14/virtual-machine-connection-key-combinations-with-hyper-v.aspx

If you are running the x86_64 release of CentOS 5.4 and wish to use XAMPP for your LAMP stack, you may run into trouble. XAMPP does a 64bit check and claims to only work on 32bit systems. On Debian and other flavors of Linux, installing the ia32-libs package may solve the problem.

Since we are talking about CentOS, it is worth mentioning that many folks report that simply installing glib will solve the issue. This did not work for me. So I decided to investigate further. I had glib, glib-devel, glib2, glib2-devel in both i686 and x86_64 flavors installed. I was pretty confident that my system should have the same packages that apt-get install ia32-libs on Debian should have. Perhaps I missed something. You are welcome to use the e-mail form at the bottom of this site if you know the answer to this.

Instead of fighting with libraries, I decided to just tiptoe around the silly 32bit check. Assuming you have installed XAMPP into the /opt folder like the instructions mention, take a look into the /opt/lampp/lampp script. You can comment out the following lines and all will be fixed. The block below is pre-commented if you wish to just paste it in place of your current lines.

# XAMPP is currently 32 bit only
#case `uname -m` in
#       *_64)
#       if /opt/lampp/bin/php -v > /dev/null 2>&1
#       then
#               :
#       else
#               $de && echo "XAMPP gibt es zur Zeit nur als 32-Bit Applikation. Bitte verwende eine 32-Bit Kompatibilitaets$
#               $de || echo "XAMPP is currently only availably as 32 bit application. Please use a 32 bit compatibility lib$
#               exit
#       fi
#       ;;
#esacp