Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I stumbled across a great piece of software today called “Ext2 Installable File System for Windows.” This program allows you to mount a Linux partition from your Windows Explorer. How? Simply download the file from www.fs-driver.org/download.html, run the install program and assign a drive letter to the partition. You also have the option to have it reassign the drive letter on each boot. This works great on my laptop since I’m having to dual-boot Vista to get dedicated CS4 support. I’m able to pull all of my source files and assets directly off my Linux partition. It works great and it’s fast. This is a practical way to avoid having to create a FAT32 or NTFS partition that is just for sharing -or- having to use your Windows partition to store both your Linux and Windows files.

Sometimes Windows wireless printing has been a breeze. Other times, like today, it is not. My host computer is a Dell XPS 420 running Vista Home Premium SP1. My wireless computers are a Toshiba Satellite M49 running Windows XP Home Edition SP3 and a Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910) running Windows XP Home Edition Sp3. This is often a mystery to me as I have had mixed results on many systems large and small. On my home and work network, it was as easy as turning on file and print sharing across the networked computers and then browsing and adding a new network printer form the client machine. I’ll update this article as I attempt to find the answer.

I have been struggling with blogs and forums trying to find the working solution for my dilemma since I originally installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I needed USB support for my virtual machines in order to really smooth out my work flow. My guest OS is Windows Server 2003 and my host OS is Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to be able to clone the virtual machine’s hard disk using Clonezilla and my external Western Digital, USB 500 GB hard drive. I realize that it is possible to “clone” a virtual machine through VirtualBox but, as I work on multiple physical machines, I needed the disk image to be able to install a fully configured guest OS without having to worry about the ID conflict that is common with cloning virtual machine’s the wrong way. I have compiled a step-by-step process on how I was able to successfully set up USB support. If at any point, your not seeing the same results I saw, just reboot. It is recommended by everyone who wrote an article about this. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19.generic. Here we go…

Welcome back Hardy Heron. I’ve been using 8.10 on my Toshiba Satellite but after the upgrade, I was having issues with the suspend - or standby - process. Sometimes I would be able to bring my laptop out of the suspended state and other times I would lose my work and the work located on my virtual machines. Not good. I suppose that explains the long-term support (LTS) version of 8.04 that makes it so stable. I had read that your graphics driver can cause issues with the suspend stand. Since I am using an ATI Radeon X1200, I attempted to use both the open and restricted drivers that are available for that model. No luck. I also adjusted power management settings but that had no affect.