Wowie wow wow! I just tried my free copy of Codeweaver’s Crossover for Linux today for the first time, and I LOVE IT!

“What is this?” you say.  It’s none other than another way for you to play with a Microsoft ball, on a Linux field.  I’m talking about running Windows applications right inside Linux, with no VM.  This is Wine on steroids.

WINE is a free application for Linux which allows you to run MS-Windows applications natively under Linux.  It’s not perfect, a lot of programs don’t run well, but you have to give the developers credit.  It’s not easy to reverse-engineer Microsoft’s proprietary Windows code, and then make it work under Linux.

Crossover is a tweaked, proprietary version of WINE which is designed to make installing and configuring the environment easier.  Along with that, it adds some better compatibility patches and offers commercial support.  It comes in a number of different flavors, but the two I have are the Pro and the Game versions.  The only difference being that Crossover Games is released more often to keep up with the fast-paced gaming industry and is aimed more at performance for better Windows-gaming under Linux

So how did I get this free?  They gave it away on October 28th, 2008. It was part of a challange that Codeweavers posed to the current president.  I jumped on the opportunity and downloaded it, but I’ve been hanging onto my free software for all this time.

So today I installed the Pro version on my work laptop running Ubuntu 8.10, and managed to get Office 2007 Enterprise installed with very little trouble.   I originally had tried to install it from the local filesystem, but I think the copy I had might’ve been corrupted because I couldn’t get it to install.  So, I just downloaded an ISO from Microsoft’s MSDN subscriber site, burned it, started up Crossover Pro, and it installed smooth.

I’m still not sure at this point how to perform updates, but the raw install works well.  I had to manually configure Outlook because under Linux there’s no AD or domain visibility.  No problem, it configured fine.  I’m so shocked to see MS-Outlook working natively, with Compiz Fusion effects on the windows and everything.

I did have an occasional crash with it.  Usually they seemd to occur when I was scrolling through a mail list, or if I viewed an email which had HTML or embedded content that just wouldn’t display under Linux (most likely because it’s missing some Windows libraries or something).  But I really didn’t care, I don’t expect it to run perfect.  There’s bound to be some minor glitches.  I’m just glad it does run as well as it does.

I also got a nice suprise when I started up OneNote, and the screen clipping app that normally shows up in the tray in Windows, also showed up in the top bar under Gnone.  And yes, it works!  I can actually use it to take screenshots under Linux, and then paste them into OneNote or other apps.  I’m speechless!  Amazing stuff.

It looks like there’s a list of supported apps for Crossover.  For the heck of it I figured I’d try to see if I could get Microsoft Office Communicator to work under Crossover.  I haven’t yet found a Linux chat client that’ll do LCS SIP style communication over TLS.  Crossover installed it just fine, and I was able to apply a few patches.  But, when you try to launch Communicator, nothing happens.  It doesn’t crash, or give you an error, or do anything.

I’ll be testing it out more this week as I have time, but so far I’m completely amazed at this product.  It almost remindes me of  the feeling that I got back in 1999 when I tried VMware’s virtualization software under Linux, and got Windows running in a VM for the first time.  Check it out if you have a need to run Windows apps under Linux, but don’t want to use a virtual machine solution.  This one’s a winner.

Technorati Tags: crossover, emulation, have your cake and eat it too, Linux, virtual machine, Windows, Wine

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I discovered a super cool podcast aggregator a few weeks ago, but hadn’t actually put any time into setting it up on my CentOS box at home.  Well, dove into it last night and I have to say (in my best Quicken Loans-speak) “simplicity is genius!”

This thing rocks.  It’s simple.  It does what it’s supposed to do.  It harnesses the power of Linux.  And it’s highly configurable.  Bashpodder is what I’ve been looking for in a podcatcher for a LONG time.  I listen to about 10-15 podcasts regularly, and really wanted to find a way to download them automatically after hours, and then just copy them to my MP3 player in the morning before I head out for work.

I’ve been using podcastready.com for quite a long time to manage my subscriptions to podcasts I listen to.  And the software they offer to download podcasts, myPodder, has been working ok for me.  It’s a portable app that can run in Linux or Windows (making it nice for me…I switch hit all the time).  I run it right from my MP3 Player.  But I ran into issues when I dropped my home internet connection speed down to 768k (yeah, I’m cheap).  It was taking so long in the morning for me to download podcasts, I couldn’t get them all before I had to leave for work.  So I wanted something else that was automated and simple.

I tried their AutoPodder software, but that program is WAY too buggy for me.  It hasn’t been updated in quite a long time (I tried it a year ago), and still has troubles running beyond 2-3 days without dieing or missing podcasts…or just flat out not working at all.

So I found BashPodder (Google rocks!), which is nothing more than a collection of three files:  a bash script, a configuration file, and an XSL file which helps grab enclousre info from feeds.  That’s it!  There’s no instructions, there’s no installation or compiling.  So this truly is one of those DIY type deals, and honestly you should have some experience with Linux, bash, and maybe even vi or nano if you hope to customize it a bit.

So you drop these three on your Linux box, customize the config file with your RSS feeds that you want, and then execute the script and BAMMO!!!  You have podcasts downloaded.  It uses a series of log files to determine what was downloaded, so the next time you run it, you’ll only get the newer stuff.

By default it organizes your downloads into folders that are based off the date the script was run.  But if you check out the developer’s website (who is Linc from the LinuxLink Tech Show Podcast), he has links to modified forms of his script which will allow you to do different things with the script, such as download podcasts into folders based off the name of the feed.

If you’re a Linux user, or someone that’s interested in learning more about Linux, bash scripting, and love podcasts…check this thing out.

Technorati Tags: bash, bashpodder, Linux, podcast

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Holy wow I’ve not visited this blog in quite a while.  Alright, I’ve had some time to settle in to my new digs at work and have been learning quite a lot (too much almost, I can’t keep all this in my brain.)  So I figured I’d start to put some fun stuff out here that I’ve been learning.  Maybe you’ll find some of it useful, maybe not.  Whatever.

Let’s take a look at what is commonly known as a “HERE Tag” in Bash scripting/command line.

In Bash, you can use a “double-less than” combination to tell the shell to redirect all typed text beyond the tag to a command.

wc -l << HERE
line one
line two
line three
HERE

The above sequence would output the result of “3″.  Here’s what’s going on.

The first part of the sequence is just the *nix “wc” command, which is used to count stuff.  We use a -l switch to tell it to count lines in this case.  Right after that is the << redirect and the tag.  In the example I used “HERE” which is traditionally what most people will use, but you can use whatever you like as a tag name (and it doesn’t have to be uppercase either, but to keep things simple you might want to leave it upper).

Beyond the HERE tag, you enter in your lines to have redirected to the command, one at a time on a separate line each.  Once you reach the end of your typed commands and you want to close out the HERE tag sequence, you enter in another “HERE” on a line by itself.  It must not have any leading spaces, or anything following it to be considered the end of the tag.

Once the end is found, the lines are redirected to your command one line at a time, and in our case it just counts how many lines were sent to it…to give a result of 3.

You can try things out both at the command line, as well as inside a script.

Technorati Tags: bash, here, redirection, tag

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No, not Adam Deal… I learned from my Livonia teammates last week that the Unix team used to block off time on fridays sometimes to Drop Everything And Learn.  Well, since I have quite a lot to learn I’ve been dedicating a good portion of my monday and tuesdays as study time for Unix.  It’s been an excellent time to study though, it’s quiet out in the Rock Cottage lately.

I’ve been reading through a Bash scripting book for a few days now.  I already was familiar with quite a lot of what I’ve read so far, but what the book has been doing for me is filling in a lot of the finer details about bash that I’ve just never spent the time to read about.  It’s good though, I want to focus the same kind of intensity on this as I have in the past with VBScript and VMware ESX.

Technorati Tags: bash, Linux, Unix

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I’ve been noticing that there’s a bit of a performance issue with the new setup (Drobo on a Linux box using NTFS filesystem).  I guess I’m not completely shocked.  I mean, I am basically making a Linux box work with a Windows filesystem, and then also present it as a Windows share on the network (via Samba).  There’s bound to be some tweaking that has to occur.

So far the real bottleneck appears to be related to the NTFS-3G module that facilitates the communication between Linux and the NTFS filesystem on my Drobo.  The wife tried to copy 26 GB of video files over the network to the Drobo, and when I checked “top” on the server, there’s a “mount.ntfs-3g” process that was soaking up 88% CPU, and my load average was about 1.4 - 1.6 (on a dual proc system).

So, it looks like there’s quite a bit of overhead to getting Linux to fully interact with NTFS.  I really don’t want to go to EXT3 on this thing though.  Drobo Inc. claims they support it, but it still sounds like there’s issues with it.  I could just buy the Droboshare module that would basically put the Drobo on the network, but that eliminates me having all this fun with Linux and making it do my dirty work.

If I can find time this week, I might research this kernel module a little more to see if there’s some tweaking I can do to make it a little faster.

Technorati Tags: drobo, Linux, ntfs, ntfs-3g, Samba

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Wow, did I have a heck of a time nailing down a solution to get my Drobo to work in Linux and still meet all my requirements.  It previously was on a Windows 2003 server, but since I’m a Unix guy now…that doesn’t make sense anymore.  So I wanted to move it over to Linux, but I had to have a few conditions met:

1. The file system format had to be something that I could easily still move to a Windows box, and plug it in and it would work.  This is just in case my Linux box blows up, and the wife still needs access to the files on her Vista PC.  That limits me to FAT32 nd NTFS.
2. The front lights still need to work.  I’ve read that with EXT3 on the Drobo, it can’t properly evaluate drivespace use.  If you put data on, and the use lights go up…then you delete, the lights don’t change.
3. It needed to be able to be mounted into the filesystem and used with Samba without much difficulty.

I had originally wanted to convert it to FAT32 since that’s natively supported in Linux.  But, I later found out that would limit me to files no larger than 2GB in size.  That’s not possible because I have some TrueCrypt volumes and AVI files that are WAY larger than that.

Then I tossed around the idea of going to EXT3 on the Drobo, but that won’t work because I can’t move i back to Windows easily, and the front usage lights on the Drobo stop working.  Plus, I’m still unsure if removing and upgrading drives in the Drobo will function properly with the EXT3 filesystem, even though the latest firmwares are supposed to allow EXT3 to be supported.

So, decided to leave it in NTFS format (which it already was in), and try to find a way to make CentOS mount it with R/W capabilities.  After some Googling, I found out that a few packages (Fuse / NTFS-3G) was all that was needed to add this functionality.  After some wrestling with kernel versions, compiling, kernel module tweaking, etc..etc..  I finally got the Drobo to mount properly, and added it to /etc/fstab.

I’m still a bit worried about it, but so far I’m able to access everything.  Creates and deletes files/folders just fine.  Has ownership/group of root, and 777 for permissions (which is fine for me for now).  So, I created a Samba share for it, and headed on over to the wife’s Vista PC.  She already had a drive mapping pointed at \\drobolizer\drobo, so I opened it up and POOF!  The damn thing worked perfectly, as if nothing had changed.  Seemless!  On her side of things, she wouldn’t know it’s on a completely different OS now.  Share comes up the same to her.

Mission accomplished.  Now I have to setup some cron jobs to do backups on this thing.  Amanda maybe.

Technorati Tags: centos, drobo, ext3, fuse, Linux, ntfs-3g

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