Webcam and VMware

Well in the last year or so, I have been able to find a Linux replacement for almost every single task that I use a computer for.  I’ve even learned of many new apps that I didn’t know about before, but now can’t seem to live without.  Lately, though, there has been one particular issue that I have been trying to find a solution for.  Since I tend to travel to Europe form time to time, I like to be able to keep in touch with people back home.  Skype seems to do the trick for most things, however there are some things that bother me about it, particularly their lack of a decent Linux client.  They don’t support any video calls for Linux yet.  I started to research alternatives, and found some promising stuff, like WengoPhone.  It seems like an ideal solution to everything, but so far testing has yielded minimal results, as I haven’t, as of yet, been able to successfully place a call to my mom using voice, let alone video.  I will keep them in the back of my mind for the future, but I think they are still in their alpha stage of development on their 2.0 version, which looks to be a very promising open-source Skype replacement that is cross-platform.

I purchased a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX, keeping my fingers crossed and return postage handy, because I had no idea if it would work under Linux but I figured I would just take a chance.  Well, I must say that I was completely shocked to open the package, plug it in and open up Kopete to see myself staring back at me.  Props to Logitech for that one.  So now that I had a working webcam with 100% less effort than installing the same device in Windows (requires driver CD or download, a few minutes of intstallation time and a reboot or two), I was ready to test out Kopete’s video chat features and attempted to connect to someone using MSN Messenger, which seems to have pretty nice Video Call features.  This tried to work, but I think my über-restrictive firewall wasn’t allowing something to go through, so I canned that idea.  Gaim unfortunately doesn’t support any video or voice stuff, and I didn’t want to try to convince everyone I know to start using SIP-based VOIP clients, because that is just another hassle for the non-computer-savvy folks in my life, and my goal is to be able to connect to them with all the effort on my end, since I am the computer geek.

So I had an interesting thought.  My webcam works under Linux.  I have an old Windows virtual machine floating around on my hard drive that I haven’t booted up in a while.  Let’s see if my webcam will work inside of VMware and whether I can successfully call my girlfriend using Windows Messenger or Skype, since that is what she uses.

Step 1:  Download VMware Server, register for a license, and install by un-tarring the tarball and running vmware-config.pl.  I just accepted all defaults.  Look for it on ubuntuguide.org.  There are some dependencies like a C compiler and stuff.  I’ll try not to get too distro-specific here, but for the record, I am using Kubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10

Step 2:  Install Windows XP in Virtual Machine.  This requires you to buy a license from Microsoft.  If you don’t have one, I would recommend finding a different way to do video calls under Linux.  Don’t buy Windows just for this reason.

Step 3:  Install VMware Tools. Reboot the VM.

Step 4:  Turn off VM and edit the settings and make sure that you install the USB controller and an audio device.  Turn VM back on.

Step 5:  Once the VM boots up, go to the VM menu>Removable Devices>USB Devices and select the webcam.  Windows will detect the webcam and you can install the software for it (Note: the first time I did this, I had to shut it down and close VMware Server and re-open it before it worked.) Installing the logitech software requires a reboot.

That was pretty simple.  The camera includes a built-in microphone, which also worked and I was able to install a virtual sound card in the machine, so that I could get sound.  Both Windows Live Messenger and Skype worked almost flawlessly inside the virtual machine.  And I was able to call my girlfriend and have a video chat without booting into Windows or messing with my firewall.  Of course this is a huge roundabout way to achieve a small task, but I am very impressed that it works.  Hopefully I can find a nice full featured open-source IM client that will do video with no hassle soon, but until then I have one last reason to keep the old VM around and have now made it unnecessary to ever boot into the Windows partition on my hard drive again.

IT Rule #2: Don’t put your LVM across multiple drives without redundancy…

… otherwise, if one disk fails, you lose ALL your data!  Going for RAID next time…

Google Reader

I usually just manually go to my favorite blogs and news sites to read the new stuff that has been posted, but a friend recently informed me of Google Reader, so I thought I would give it a shot.  So far I am pretty impressed with how well it works and how easy it is to use.  I even made it my homepage so I can get all the news right away.  I think I’ll use this for a while.  It has already grown on me, and now I can clean up some of my bookmarks.  Make sure to subscribe to this one, no matter what you use: xkcd.com!

IT Rule #1: Don’t install beta software on production boxes…

… otherwise I have to go un-install Windows Defender on 400 machines when the beta version expired on December 31st and the application fails very ungracefully.

Next time Microsoft releases beta software for public testing, it would be nice if it would gracefully let you know when it expires and maybe even give an option to install the latest and greatest.  The whole “Application failed to initialize…” evil error message on January 1st doesn’t make my job as an IT Desktop Support guy very fun when it happens to 400 clients at once.  I stand by my previous hatred for Microsoft on this one.

The Last Working Day Before Christmas

Well, the Friday before Christmas is a day that gives all Classified Staff at the university off, leaving only Faculty and Students. Most Students are gone because it is right in the middle of Winter break, and most Faculty are gone for the same reason. This leaves me as the sole tech support worker in my office on Friday afternoon, while all my Classified Staff co-workers have the day off, and my Faculty manager has gone home already, and my student co-worker is home sick. I’m sitting here waiting for someone to break something so I can fix it. Ironically, since my customers live by the same rules as we do, they are all off today as well…

Luckily I discovered DOSBox for Linux. I am now going through memory lane and playing all my old favorite “Abandonware” DOS games from the days of the old 386. I discovered that my all time favorite, “Tony and Friends in Kellogg’s Land” is still floating around the internet and still just as fun as ever. Who would have thought that with all of Windows’ backwards-compatibility and whatnot, I actually finally got this game to work using a DOS emulator under Linux? Good luck trying to get it to run properly under Windows XP.

Well I’m off to do some more DOSing and waiting for phone calls that will never come!

Pictures

As I stated before, I am pretty lazy about adding pictures to my blog posts. Partially due to my lack of a camera and partially due to me being too lazy to actually add a picture…

But I recently installed some cool picture management software on my webspace, so I started putting up some photo albums of miscellaneous pictures that I have. Check it out here.

I hate you, Microsoft!

There is a specific chain of events, which happened to me recently, that couldn’t have been more unfortunate. I was the owner of one of those Samsung smartphones that was running Windows Mobile 2003. The phone was pretty cool, but it had its share of bugs. I could live with most of them, but overall the thing was great as a PDA and terrible as a phone. At best I could get a day out of the battery if I didn’t make any phone calls or use the Wi-Fi or anything like that. This made it a very expensive tool to see what time it was. On top of that, it wasn’t really intuitive to use the phone function. It just seemed like the phone part and the PDA part didn’t really know each other existed. Well I got used to it anyway and just carried around a huge bulky phone that I ended hating after several months. So I went down to the store and found a pretty good deal on one of those new Motorola KRZR phones. This ended up being worse than the Samsung, since all the neat features of the phone had been disabled by my service carrier, and the remaining ones were extremely broken beyond any kind of usability. Failing to find any kind of decent software hack to get the back to its original Motorola functionality, I decided to return the phone to the retailer before my trial period expired. The retailer was happy to exchange the phone for a similarly priced way more functional LG enV. However, they didn’t have a way to copy my contacts from the KRZR to the LG. Not a problem, since all my contacts were still backed up on that stupid Samsung running Windows. Somehow, in the time it took for me to return the KRZR, leave the store with my new LG, and get home to the Samsung (which was working fine before I left that day), the Samsung completely crashed all by itself and did a handy little factory reset on itself, completely annihilating all my personal data including 8 years worth of collected phone numbers!!!

This is strange, since that phone never gave me any trouble like that in the 8 months that I had it. It’s almost like it knew that as soon as I actually really needed it to not destroy my data it did everything in its power to anger me. There was nothing I could do. Now I have a nice new LG phone with the 7 phone numbers in it that I could remember off the top of my head. I am livid!

The only thing that makes me feel better about the situation, is that deep down I am telling myself that Microsoft uses their own software to run their entire network infrastructure, including their backups. That is punishment enough, if you ask me. I severely hope that they lose 8 years worth of code or something.

Well enough ranting for now. If you are reading this and wondering why I haven’t called you in a while, it is because I no longer have your number. Please send me an e-mail with it, so I can stay in touch.

Mozilla

For lunch on Friday, I went down to the Mozilla Foundation.  They were doing a presentation for some Stanford students and had a bunch of pizza.  I got a tour of the office and met some of the people there.  Everyone seemed really friendly and the work environment looks awesome.  If I could program any more than a good old “Hello World”, I would definitely want to work there.  I was so impressed with the company and their mission, that I decided to help out in a small way.  You’ll notice I have a slick looking “Firefox 2″ button over on my sidebar now.  If you’re not using Firefox now, I strongly recommend you give it a try!

That’s actually pretty geeky…

A few friends of mine picked out some pretty geeky costumes for us for Halloween this year. It’s kind of a group thing. We had a lot of fun building these things and wearing them. The most ironic of all was when we were walking along and ran into OSU Linux Guru Alex. There he is as Tux, the beloved Linux Penguin. That’s me, the Windows Logo.

A big thanks to Reed, Luke, Jacob, Micah and Karen for making this a memorable night!

Money

Money can’t buy you love or happiness.  But money can buy you a Bible and a Linux Box and that is all you need.