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I just heard today that RM will be selling a tiny Asus laptop pre-installed with Linux. It’s a very small machine 22.5 x 16.5 x 2.1-3.5cm and will cost only £169.

Instead of a hard drive it will use solid state memory apparently either 2GB or 4GB. Anecdotal evidence from the comments on this page, suggest it will be running a version of Suse Linux.

This is more great news for Linux as it shows that there is a growing confidence that it is a viable alternative to Windows and Mac. We already have Dell introducing Ubuntu pre-installed machines into for the European market. RM are a big supplier of IT hardware and services into schools and this laptop will probably be targeted directly at the education market. Lets hope we see more and more of the education market share heading towards Linux (and Mac) so there’s a more level playing field and kids don’t grow up thinking that computers and Windows are the same thing.

Update: Here’s the link to the product description page on the RM site - RM Asus miniBook. I notice in the features page the operating system is described as an “Asus developed Linux based operating system”. A little Googling turns up a story on Slashdot from from last Sunday mentioning about an ASUS motherboard called the P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n that includes an embedded Linux OS called Splashtop which boots from the BIOS on the motherboard and allows you to use Firefox+Flash, and Skype in under 5 seconds from pressing ‘Power On’. The Splashtop site has a decent FAQ, and even a blog-post with a YouTube vid demostrating the OS. I’m not sure this is definitely the exact technologies the RM machine is using because Splashtop is developed by DeviceVM not Asus. The RM machine is basically a rebranded Asus Eee PC. The Eee PC site doesn’t give specific detail on the version of Linux it uses but it’s support page does link to Xandros Linux.

I know I’m probably a bit behind the times on this one, but I’ll make a note of it anyway. VMWare seem to have decided to make their VMWare Server product free. A few months back it was only the Player tool which was free and in order to use that you had to make use of pre-created virtual appliances.

However, the Server product does allow appliance creation so users can potentially install any OS they like (as long as it’s supported). This is great for me as I have been running Ubuntu as my main OS since it was released (June 2006) and although I could reboot into XP for Windows stuff it’s hassle and interrupts my productivety.

There’s a howto on the Ubuntu forum here: HowTo: Windows (XP) on Ubuntu with VMWare Server, and there are a selection of VMWare related articles on the Ubuntu Wiki. These ones seem the most relevant: VmwareServer, VMware Guide: Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS amd64.

The only downside at the moment compared to VMWare Player is that the Ubuntu repositories don’t seem to have Server packages available only the Player is included in the non-free section. So manual install for the moment. Lets hope .deb packages can be included into the repo soon.

One other thing to note. Before I upgraded to Dapper I was running VMWare player using bridged networking on Breezy. I was also using NetworkManager. I had a weird problem which I never got to the bottom of where bringing network interfaces up and down in NetworkManager would intermittently hang the system. I found a thread on the NetworkManager mailing list which seems to indicate I may have been suffering from a nic driver/vmware incompatibility, the solution to which was to upgrade the driver software. I’m hoping this issue has gone away in Dapper but I’ll need to prove that after I’ve installed VMWare Server.

I used to use FileZilla on Windows before I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Found out today that the FileZilla team are working on a port to Linux. Alpha snapshots are available here:

http://filezilla-project.org/nightly.php.

FileZilla is a great FTP tool, user friendly and very capable. It appears that the team are using the cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit for the UI, it uses GTK+ on linux so FileZilla already looks good on the Ubuntu (Gnome) desktop. I look forward to the official release of version 3 on linux. Here’s a screen shot.

I’ve just set up SQL Server Express on our staging server cause I needed to interface Moodle with a customers existing SQLServer database for authentication.

This wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be, but after some set backs I got it working

Firstly, TCP connections to SQL Server Express are switched off by default to prevent newbie users opening themselves up to potential remote attack. Here’s a link to instructions on how to enable TCP connections: How to: Configure Express to accept remote connections.

Also note from the comments on the PHP mssql_connect function documentation that the hostname and port in the connection string are delimited using a comma ‘,’ rather than the more common colon ‘:’. E.g.

The first problem I encountered after this was an ‘Unable to connect to server’ error. By scanning the user comments on the PHP mssql_connect function page I noticed that a key step in fixing the problem was to replace the PHP5 provided ntwdblib.dll with a newer one from the MS SQL Client Tools. However, this DLL no longer ships with MS SQL Server Express. Luckily I had a developer installation of SQL Server 2000 on my XP partition and was able to pick up version 2000.80.2039.0 from that.

However, I then ran into another problem. When I replaced the PHP 5 provided version ntwdblib.dll of with the new one and restarted IIS, the output from phpinfo() showed that the mssql extension wasn’t loading anymore. I couldn’t see any errors reported in browser nor the system error logs.

By chance I decided to run php -i on the command line. This was lucky cause this way a system error dialog popped up a warning about a missing DLL dependency.

The problem was that the new ntwdblib.dll had a dependency on MSVCR71.DLL which couldn’t be found in IIS’ path. I did a search for msvcr*.dll in C:\WINDOWS and found a copy of this DLL in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\. I copied it into my PHP install dir and restarted IIS. Then when I ran phpinfo() again the extension showed up.

This excellent tool allows you to view the interdependencies between Windows binary executables and DLL files. It also shows which symbols/functions are exported and used by each binary.

Dependency Walker

Found a link to a good set of instructions for setting up PHP on IIS 6.

How to install PHP 5.x on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6

Having to get PHP 5 running with IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 today. I was finding the process quite interesting until I wanted to check the error logs to find out the cause of an HTTP 500 error. It seems the default IIS setup doesn’t provide an easy way to get error logging info out of it. I totally agree with the sentiments expressed here. At least Apache comes setup out of the box to allow developers, developers, developers to do their job.

Then I found this page on the Microsoft site, seems I may have to write a VBScript to coax IIS into outputting it’s errors to the system error log :-|. I’m hoping something in the IIS Resource Kit will make my life easier.

Since upgrading to XP Pro I’ve been wondering why I could no longer access the fine-grained Access Control Lists for files and directories that used to be available in the Security tab of the file/folder Properties dialog in Win2k. Instead there’s this very friendly file sharing tab instead, which although simple isn’t what I want.

However I’ve just located the setting that needs to be changed to give me back control over the system!

First open Explorer and from the menu bar select ‘Tools > Folder Options’ and click the ‘View’ tab from the dialog that appears. Scroll to the bottom of the Advanced Settings panel and you’ll see an option titled ‘Use simple file sharing (Recommended)’. This will be set by default on XP (unless, I believe, it’s XP Pro and has been added to a domain). Switching it off puts back the Security tab.

I’ve often wished I could use Unix style symlinks on Windows for easing path problems while developing software. I wasn’t aware that in fact NTFS does support symlinks but only for directories. Confusingly though, Windows doesn’t ship with ANY tool to actually create them!

Apparently Microsoft intended that you could only use this feature by purchasing an extra set of utilities. However, there is a freeware tool on sysinternals.com called Junction which can be used to create them.

The advantage of symlinks over Windows’ Shortcuts is that they can be navigated transparently from within other software e.g. the command shell or scripts. Whereas Shortcuts are really just files with link data which is interpreted by Explorer (as far as I can tell).

Found a great site today: Sysinternals Freeware. It hosts various interesting and useful freeware Windows system monitoring utilities such as:

Filemon

For monitoring filesystem activety. Watch open files and see the processes which are accessing them. A lot like lsof on Linux.

Autorun

Generates a comprehensive listing of all applications configured to run during system bootup and login. I always knew a lot of stuff ran (cause of the huge time it takes to boot my laptop) so I was impressed to see the entire list finally. Maybe I can now start to work out how to cut the boot time down a bit.

Regmon

A lot like Filemon but monitors real-time access to the registry instead.

This is just a taster of what’s there. There are loads of other valuable looking tools there for exploring Windows’ internals.

One of the site’s owners, Mark Russinovich, has an interesting weblog on the site as well: Mark’s Sysinternals Blog. Seems he’s been digging into the internals of Sony’s DRM root kits recently: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far.