If AnyDVD pops up a big dialog about read errors (suggesting a region-free fimware from rpc1.com, cleaning the DVD, etc), and you're using it inside Virtualbox, then the correct solution is:

Stop the virtual machine. The Settings icon will become available. Click it and select Storage. Select the DVD drive, and a checkbox named Passthrough will appear. Enable that and close the dialog. When you restart the guest Windows, AnyDVD will tell you the actual DVD drive's name, model and region, instead of saying it's a region-free vbox DVD drive. It seems AnyDVD is suddenly a lot faster, too.

The other effect of this change is that Windows now has full rights to your DVD drive.

I need to use Puppet, a system to configure linux boxes (add the right users, install and configure the right services, make sure the right things are running and the wrong things not). Puppet seems good, better than cfengine.

So I read the existing configuration, which seemed to make sense but left a lot of open questions, read the the documentation, felt little wiser, and bought a book (Pulling strings with Puppet by James Turnbull) and (more…)

I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/fax/­copier/scanner, and use it with linux and BSD.

The printer is fine for black and white text, such as I usually print: Fast, crisp text with fine edges, nicely readable. Duplex printing just works. The printer can print quite close to the paper's edge, too. (more…)

WD Caviar Green disks (WD15EADS-00S2B0 in my case) like to unload the drive heads to save power. The ReadyNAS likes to load them again. This causes two problems: Frequent eight-second delays as the drives return to duty, and in my case, the drives would reach their stated lifetime (300,000 load cycles) in less than a year.

Several solutions exist. (more…)

Sad to say, but I recently installed ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S4572. I installed the minimal system followed by xubuntu-desktop and gcompris: xfce is supposed to be better for small boxes and gcompris is the whole point. (more…)

If my Benq M108 mouse is plugged into the USB hub of my Eizo S2100 monitor while linux 2.6.31 (and several others) boots on my Zotac ION-ITX-B motherboard, then the kernel freezes after this line:

[ 0.828204] io scheduler cfq registered (default)

Numlock does nothing, I need to press the any key.

If I unplug the mouse from the hub, or the hub from the PC, then the boot succeeds. (more…)

I bought a ReadyNAS NV+ years ago, and don't like it. It serves files, but does so many things badly that next time I want to add more disk space, I intend to purchase something else. (more…)