Puh, that’s a long title. I’m working on Mac OS X and use Virtualbox to run Windows XP as a guest operating system. Virtualbox runs exceptionally well and it’s even free. But the keyboard mapping is problematic since Windows XP assumes a standard PC keyboard. The layout of the Apple keyboards is different, so if you are not a Windows guy, you’ll have troubles to find the backslash ‘\’ or ‘@’. I was looking for a solution for a long time now, but didn’t find anything until now. Stefan Bohm actually published a solution for the same problem if you run parallels. He provided a new keyboard layout for installation (the layout is called ‘Parallels Keyboard Map’) as well a registry hack so that the ‘alt’ keys work as expected.
Category Archives: Desktop
Workaround for ‘Black Window Bug’ using Beryl on Kubuntu
I recently installed Beryl on my Kubuntu Feisty Fawn distribution and I run into two problems:
1) The window decorations were missing – here you need to add the line
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
to Section “Screen”.
2) My windows were all black and this is a bug in the NVidia driver which doesn’t seem to be fixed soon or at all – the problem is, that if you have a card with not much memory, like my NVidia Go 6200, windows content gets black since there is no memory available. There is a lengthy discussion about that here.
An easy fix for this problem is, right click on the red diamond (Beryl manager) in the system tray and choose “Advanced Beryl Options->Rendering Path->Copy”. This should have an effect on the performance but at least it works :). Thanks Nil.
More info can be found at these links:
An automatic easy solution for nearly (all) problems
Opening too many windows leaves some of them black
Access to ext2 or ext3 partitions in Windows XP
By accident I found a nice website which offers a program which allows access to ext2 or ext3 partitions in Windows: Ext2 Installable File System for Windows (which also is capable of reading ext3 file systems). This project provides a nice installer package, which installs an ext2 device driver in Windows – and it also has write support which others (Expore2fs, LTOOLS – though I just found out, that it also provides write access, but not as convenient as Ext2IFS) don’t provide. I use it for some time now it seams to be very useful though there are some minor drawbacks (no user access rights management).
This comes very handy if you use Linux and Windows on the same computer.
Desktop Search, OpenOffice and Thunderbird (IMAP)
Assume you have a lot of documents and data. Further you use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Work and Thunderbird instead of Outlook. And you use an IMAP Email Account instead of a POP3 one.
Since you have so much documents you decide to use one of these fancy Desktop Searches to find things you need faster (and they are definitely very helpful). Then you stumble into problems, since only one of these various Desktop Searches is up to the task. I tried them all – here are my considerations: Continue reading Desktop Search, OpenOffice and Thunderbird (IMAP)
Disable autorun for CD/DVD drives to prevent root-kits to install themselves automatically
If you enter an audio CD or DVD into the CD/DVD drive of your Windows computer, you might install in that moment a root-kit of a copy control program, which prevents you to copy the audio content, or even worse, makes your system unstable and unsecure.
There are two possibilities to prevent Windows from autoplaying the CD/DVD: Continue reading Disable autorun for CD/DVD drives to prevent root-kits to install themselves automatically