Yep, its April fools day. According to the headlines the Google homepage just crashed (see to believe), Ubuntu is going to become an RPM distro and several other stupid newsstories that only prove that you are a complete idiot if you believe them. So I'm not even going to bother with telling you that I just got an official MCSE-certification and am going to accept a position in Belgiums top Microsoft board of executives in a project to kill open source once and for all... nothing of the sorts !

I am however going to point you to a nice tool a friend of mine pointed me towards : EXT2 IFS for windows ! 

So here is the situation. you are running a dual boot scenario with both Windows and Linux on the same system. You would like to have your "documents" available in 'both' operating systems. Not just your "my documents" in Windows and your "home folder" in Linux. Well , its not very hard to do. The first alternative that you have is to have Ubuntu read the NTFS partition of your Windows XP machine (don't work with Vista)  To do so go HERE. The downside is that this is not a very "fast" way to work. File-access is not very speedy and thats because they need to 'reverse engineer' the closed source standard of NTFS in order to get it working. Sure you can mount your NTFS partition in Linux , but why would you ? 

The other alternative is to store all your data on your "linux system" and enable WINDOWS to read the Linux file format . you'll need to install the tool called EXT2 IFS for windwows and this will let you read and write to your Ubuntu partition (download it HERE ) Once installed the program will ask you to assign a drive letter to the EXT2 partition of your Linux system and TADAAA , you'll be able to access the files.  

The next step is easy, Go to your mounted linux partion and look for the folder called /home/your-user-name ,  Next create a folder in there called "my documents" and remap your my documents folder to this very folder. This will transfer your data from your Windows system to your Linux system. That way you'll be able to access your data using your 'my documents' shortcut on the desktop in Windows AND by going to the "my documents" folder in your homefolder when you are working in Linux.

Its THAT simple and it ain't no April fools joke. 

Some problems have the simplest solutions, some are unsolvable.  And some problems seam unsolvable and have the simplest solutions at the same time. One of those problems is the one I have with Itunes in "sharing my music directory" in Itunes on our mac so my wife can access the music on that machine and on other machines in the house. Before I go into great detail i'll describe the setup we have. At our home we have a couple of mac laptops and an Imac. On that Imac we have out entire music collection. (we don't have any cd's anymore) we just play everything from the imac. The itunes library that we have sits under my account. So whenever I am logged in we can access it via Itunes. To make it available to other computers in the house I enabled the Itunes functionality to 'share my library' Thus every time I was logged in other computers in the house running Itunes would be able to access the music. Here comes the problem. Both Nyana and  I use individual user accounts on our macs. Where it used to be a case of 'this is YOUR laptop , this is Mine' its now something like 'this is A laptop and i'll use it under my account". So whenever my wife was home and logged into the Imac she was unable to access the music stored under my user account. It also meant that the library would not be shared out to the other macs when I was not logged in.

So what did we want : We wanted to share out our Itunes library to other macs in the house AND to other accounts on the same machine. Apparently Apple's "all to easy" approach seems a little over-simplified in this case, resulting in a situation that is mega hard to solve. I did some googling and it made matters worse. Apple suggests putting the library in a shared directory, but whenever user A adds something (music, podcasts, ripped files) this is not visible to user B, It would solve part of our problems, but the risk of having a borked up library is something that is very real. The problem is that Itunes stores the music files in a folder, but keeps an index of this file in a different xml file .. FOR EACH USER. So instead of just ONE index file, you have TWO , hence the risk of mismatching music and missing out on things.  Other hacks spoke of scripts, terminal commands and even running a linux machine with Itunes running in whine. Complex stuff !

On my way home in the car I thought of the solution. There is such a thing as 'fast user switching' that allows a SECOND user to log in while the applications and processes of the first user are still running. Why not enable fast user switching, have my account (and the subsequent ITUNES) running in the background as we "fast user switch"' into nyna's account. That way she can log into the Imac and access the music via the shared itunes library (that appears as a network library) and she can access the library when she logs into her mac laptop. So problem solved ! Ok, before 'fast user switching' I terminate as much programs as I can under "my account" leaving only Itunes running. Next up Nyana fast user switches to her account and away we go. When she is done working with the computer she just logs out and I can log back into my own (already running) session.

So we leave my own account running in the background, it eats up SOME system resources, but our state of the art, 4 gig Ram Imac does not realy care about that and we can listen to our music anywhere.

Link : Fast User Switching.  ( Ps : this is something that also works on Vista and XP machines) 

The beginning is a delicate time. So says the princess at the beginning of the Dune movie. And some truth can be found in that statement. Yesterday I treaded carefully into a delicate beginning when I went looking for a linux distribution to install on my ten year old Toshiba Satellite for our little "how low can you go" experiment. With only 128 megs of ram, a celeron 366 processor and only a wired network interface, it was kind of challenging to find the right distribution to get started.

I started off with Googling around for a linux Distro that could do the trick. A little googling around brought several possible candidates to the table like DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppylinux. I had tried the last one and was pretty pleased with the results some time ago. However its not a .debian based distro, so all the apt-get stuff that makes it so easy to install software on my system would not work. So i went looking for "ubuntu flavored" alternatives.

2 immediately popped to mind being Crunchbang Linux and ELbuntu. The difference with '"standard" ubuntu is that they sport a lighter GUI. Elbuntu uses the E17 gui (famous from the GOS linux version that was hyped last year). After downloading and burning both I came to the conclusion that my system was too light for these light distributions. Crunchbang took ages to boot, Elbuntu took forever to give me its installation screen.

So I thought I would start from the ground up and begin with a Command line version of Ubuntu and choose one of the seperate distro's on top. Hitting F4 at the installation menu of Ubuntu server provided me with 'install a minimal system" and that is what I went for. The installation took most of the evening and when I get home tonight I should have a working (command line only) system to start from. 

So next up its time to choose the GUI and find one that makes the old sattelite a little usable.

Links : Crunchbang  ELbuntu and the orginal article .

With the whole medium of "video" becoming popular and available on the internet, its truly a feast if you need to "explain" how something is done. Sure with the KWTV screencasts we are doing just that, but sometimes you don't realy have to re-invent the fire. Browsing around with MIRO yesterday, i stumbled on this wonderful video on setting up a DYNDNS account and accesing your machine from anywhere, even if you get a dynamic IP address from your ISP. 

This little video is a perfect companion to the KWTV 008 and 009 episodes on setting up your own linux server. So if you are following these episodes, make sure to watch this great episode from these guys from systm on setting up your own DYNDNS account so you can access your server from anywhere. Enjoy. 

Link to the Video

Link to the Systm Website.