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Apparently Microsoft have changed something that have caused Pidgin to be shut out. I’m not sure what the problem is but according to this ticket it’s a server side thing and limited to MSP15 clients. The quick fix is to switch to the Pecan Messenger protocol for Pidgin. It is available in Debian/Ubuntu as msn-pecan $ apt-get install msn-pecan if your distribution does not include this plugin or you are running Windows, get it from the download page...

I am a big fan of Ubuntu’s Uncomplicated firewall because it is very simple to use. I cannot remember if ufw is installed by default so to be sure $ sudo apt-get install ufw As part of my project to use Sonofon Mobile Broadband as backup for my ADSL I needed ufw to NAT the connections through the ppp-connection. The solution is pretty straight forward: In the file /etc/default/ufw change the parameter DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY...

This is an updated version of the guide to using Sonofon Mobile Broadband with Ubuntu that I made in May 2008. The modem provided by Sonofon is an USB stick marked as an Option Icon 225 HSDPA and is by default detected as an USB CD-ROM (which holds the Windows drivers). Installing the driver First you need to compile and install the drivers needed to use the modem: HSO kernel module Ozerocdoff...

Even though my laptop has an internal DVD burner I needed another because the internal one could not reliably burn dual layer discs. I could have just bought any USB-based burner but I asked around and the general consensus was that the best you can get is the Pioneer DVR-112 (an IDE burner). I did some further investigation and it turned out that DVR-212 is the same drive with SATA interface...

On 17-12-2008 Sun released a new version of VirtualBox, version 2.1.0. Looking at the changelog there are some real significant improvements – these are the ones that make me able to ditch VMware Workstation completely: Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows) Especially the ability to run 64 bit guests on 32 bit host operating systems is something I have been missing....

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) yesterday (31/10/08) I am once again running a stable relase – Which meant I had to find something else to screw up :) I decided to testdrive the latest Firefox 3.1 milestone; it does make it a lot easier that Fabien Tassin has been kind enough to set up a repository as well as keeping Firefox 3.1 and other packages up to date....

Symptom: Various keys not working in VMware Workstation, Player and probably other produtcs. In my case the cursor keys (left, right, up, down) didn’t work. In fact pressing up or down in a Linux/GNOME session brought up the screenshot application. Solution: Add the following line to VMware’s configuration (~/.vmware/config): xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true or as a one-liner: echo 'xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true' > ~/.vmware/config that fixed it for me. More information....