The Wahyudiharto's Blog

After proceed the last 2 previous articles, now I have a Windows XP emulated over QEMU. In my situation, - I explained again that - it was running with Acer Travelmate 6291 on Linux Fedora Core 7. After last step process, it now should be restart automatically. If it is not, get started manually by pressing Run button on main panel of QEMU.



Now, let's take look at inside of the system emulated hardware. What it displayed on system properties window? For somehow, QEMU interpretive that the system is currently running on Intel Pentium II processor with 39.05Ghz of speed. What a confused display. This is the reason why that the installation process was established (a very) slowly. I couldn’t figured out why it happened.



Anyway, the dual virtual processor logic was displayed correctly. Also the system RAM 256MB was dedicated as so as well.



From Device Manager window, some hardware was detected improperly. The real Mobile Intel 945GM/GU Express chipset family detected as Cirrus Logic 5446 compatible graphic adapter. While the Matshita DVD-RAM UJ-850S are known as QEMU CD-ROM. The laptop are not equipped with floppy drive, but it was emulated not in that way. Broadcom NetLink Gigabit Ethernet detected as Realtek RTL8029(AS) based Ethernet Adapter (Generic).



Summary

After using Windows XP emulated over QEMU for some couple hours I found that the system was running somehow not too stable than it emulated over VirtualBox. For several times it displayed the blue screen errors containing of different unknown problems & sometimes, the system got locked up. The built-in touchpad also act weird. I could not tested further by implementing networking device or installing applications since it has not enough space & the systems runs too slow. This last part articles finished, I suggested to considering using VirtualBox than using QEMU built-in from Fedora Core 7. Hope that soon QEMU will developed more reliable than other VM to support the future of virtual machine.

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Start the VM you had created before, make sure that the installation media is exist. A common installation process will displayed.



From main panel of VM application, you can see the real time display information of CPU & memory usage while you are on a stage of installation process. It's a kind of interesting part of QEMU.



Back to VM Console display. Continue the installation process as is usual & follow the step by step wizard until the copying files started. Some odd graphic displayed during this sessions. It’s a kind of artifact or something. This is not happened using others VM such as VirtualBox. I thought that the GDI or something similar are not optimally emulated.



Wait until the copying files is completed. Now you are ready to first boot the Windows. If your VM is not started automatically, get it on manually. The 2nd stage of installation process in GUI are now established. Again, follow as is usual.



Although it is possible to display & make changes on currently hardware, assigning of any new of it are not recommended. Make sure to power off the VM before adding the hardware.



Back to the installation session, it process somehow needs more longer times than it should be in a real situation. The installation are 20% slower, but it proceed successfully. No big deal with it.



Now, you are ready to proceed final VM. The last stand of reboot process are started with common Windows XP graphical login section. Continued to part III…

Labels: My Share

One great package I found after installing Fedora 7 is the new existence of QEMU. This such toy never exist on previous Fedora series, AFAIK. QEMU is an alternative virtual machine (VM) available on Linux system. Another VM called VirtualBox had been personally reviewed couple weeks ago on my latest articles. This session talks about QEMU compared to VirtualBox in some aspects, including step-by-step, know-how, resource meter & others critical points. A scenario had been made with installing Windows XP SP2 on my laptop (Acer Travelmate 6291).

First of all, create a new virtual system by clicking File :: New Machine. A welcome window will appear, simply click Forward button to continue the next step.



Create the system name with your favorite name. Click Forward again to confirm.



Provide the Windows XP installation media in optical drive or browse the ISO image format type. Select Windows in OS Type combo box & Microsoft Windows XP as the variant. Note that if you select an ISO image source, you will be confused about missing installation media on next boot. I suggested to pick the real CD installation media.



Make storage space for installation process. If you had prepared an empty mounted physic volume of partition, select Normal Disk Partition & browse the device directory. On this case, I tried to create a virtual storage which has 1.5Gb space size. Click Allocate entire virtual disk now? to immediately allocate the total volume as the definitive storage.



As others VM implementing network connection to the host, QEMU also offered 2 option to choose which act as Virtual network or Shared physical device.



On next section, specify the memory configuration for VM. Assumed that my system has 512Mb of RAM, so I decided to set the VM Startup & Max Memory with 256Mb. I also identified that the VM will have 2 logical CPU, the same number of host logical CPU exist.



System resume. Click next to begin the installation process.



Next process is about to create the virtual disk. It remaining time will depend upon the size of virtual storage & how fast the system is.



After it succeed created, now you have a virtual partition & ready to power on the VM. Continued to part II…

Labels: My Share

I’m running my curiosity to exploring the Fedora series on my laptop. Since there were lot of hardware detection failure on previous Fedora version, now I’m working it on Fedora Core 7. The installation comes with DVD setup CD I’ve got from internet & it finished to setup from scratch with much times needed (about 45 minutes) but nothing serious problems happened indeed. Some odd things going through such as:

1. Missing total size of installed packages during package selection. There will be no more information regarding to the total size package needed to be installed. This is important since we can prepared the amount of size of partition system.

2. Missing of mc (Midnight Commander) package. Why the developer loosing this powerful tool from the packages? Peoples are needed this tool so much. Even it can be installed later from yum or RPM portal (such as rpmfind.net or livna’s portal), but the lacks of it is such a great fools.

3. Also (another) lacks of k3b burning software. Is this 13MB size of packages are loaded enough or something so that they wouldn’t include it in DVD? Another reasonable possibly is they just don’t want to stamped as piracy maker(?)

4. As is as previous version, Fedora Core 7 not including with MP3 codec software or others common video codec, but why now home folder are filled with extra multimedia directory? For fools example, even there are Download folder exists, the default download directory of KGet is in Desktop below on home directories.



Anyway, The Acer TravelMate 6291 has small form factor & lightweight laptop. It is powered by the Intel Core 2 Duo processor. This is still “a work progress” since I have not yet finished the configuration of all devices. Come back soon for more detailed version.

Available General Hardware


Others Specifications
Dimensions (WxHxD): 299 x 214 x 27.4 mm
Weight: 1.89 kg
Memory: 512 MB DDR2
Slots: 3 USB 2.0, Headphone-out, Mic-in, VGA, RJ 11, RJ 45, IEEE1394 (4pin), PCMCIA Typ II, Cardreader

or if you like the hardcore way (lspci):

[root@tuxbook /]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0a:01.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
0a:02.0 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0730
0a:02.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0750
0a:02.2 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0720
0a:02.3 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0751
0a:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

Graphic Cards
Works pretty out of the box with the “intel” driver. You may no longer need 915resolution patch since the default resolution comes with 1280x800 as default.



The system well detected the interface such below:

[root@tuxbook /]# dmesg | grep agp
Linux agpgart interface v0.102 (c) Dave Jones
agpgart: Detected an Intel 945GM Chipset.
agpgart: Detected 7932K stolen memory.
agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xc0000000

Below is xorg.conf configuration files:

# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Soundcard
The soundcard detected as 82801 (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller, but I still couldn’t figured out how to make it don’t to keep silent.



The XMMS multimedia player is running as well playing mp3 file but no sound comes out from the speaker. I also have compiled the latest ALSA driver patch Here is below the result I’ve done with alsaunmute:

[root@tuxbook /]# alsaunmute 0 -v
Card 0 Driver snd_hda_intel Volume 75%...
Unmuting ...
Play. Volume master(0) to 48
Play. Volume master(1) to 48
Play. Volume pcm(0) to 191
Play. Volume pcm(1) to 191
Unmuting snd_hda_intel...

Some milist talking about this problem suggested to add the acpi set to off in the end of kernel boot line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6...blablabla... ro quiet splash acpi=off

or

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6...blablabla... ro quiet splash acpi=ht

And some others suggest to add the laptop-eapd or/and 3stack mode on the sound probing command in /etc/modprobe.conf:

options snd-hda-intel index=0 single_cmd=1 model=laptop-eapd

or

options snd-hda-intel index=0 single_cmd=1 model=3stack

Still, above combined or on by one step tricks & hacks didn’t give any changes. I’m so confused about this since there are no mute indicated after running alsamixer tool.



DVD read/write
I wonder why Fedora Core 7 not shipped with burning application k3b? since it is the best burner ever on Linux, I tried to installed it from the yum package updater & it’s worked correctly to burning the Fedora Core 7 image ISO (2.7GB) on a DVD blank. It finished in remaining time 20 minutes on automatic detection burning speed.

WiFi
The default iwl3945 driver works very well. Some said that ipw3945 driver would fine but it is not happened to me. iwlwifi driver is an alternative, but I still don’t have time to try it.



Try to running iwconfig, a similar result you may have is like this below:

[root@tuxbook /]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

virbr0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11a ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.

IrDA & Bluetooth
The IrDA stack is stable & working well. Either the bluetooth stack. The detection of it is going smooth. I tried to searched & paired from my PDA HP 6365 & it’s OK.



Modem
The system comes with Agere winmodem(?) stacks. As default, it has not detected. I though it would run with slmodem driver but I don’t have tested yet.

Ethernet
Works fine. As default, the system using the “tg3” kernel module.



PCMCIA
Also works fine. It has detected as well from kernel.

ACPI
Somehow - I guess that - the ACPI module is not stable yet. It seems that it may break the WiFi connection & have problem with sound detection. I suggested that you must turn off this option, but note that your battery remaining time information will be no longer detected correctly.

Builtin Web Camera
The system detected an Acer CrystalEye webcam running on USB bus. Anyway, I’m not tested yet how to make it working as well as from Windows.



Card Reader
Card reader also well detected. But it seems failed to working since it has conflict probably with the IRQ.

[root@tuxbook /]# dmesg | grep sdhci
sdhci: Secure Digital Host Controller Interface driver
sdhci: Copyright(c) Pierre Ossman
sdhci: SDHCI controller found at 0000:0a:02.1 [1524:0750] (rev 0)
[] sdhci_irq+0x0/0x4b8 [sdhci]
[] sdhci_probe+0x5b5/0x6a2 [sdhci]
sdhci: probe of 0000:0a:02.1 failed with error -16

Anyway, it hasn’t been able to get the driver to work perfectly with ENE controller. For more detailed information, take a tour to http://mmc.drzeus.cx/wiki/Linux/Drivers/sdhci

Miscellaneous Things
Fedora Core 7 also comes with stable version of ntfs-3g device drivers. It allowed you to read & write the NTFS partition from Linux. To enabled it, make sure to add correct line permission mode parameter on /etc/fstab:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda8 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs-3g defaults,rw,umask=000 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/win_d vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/win_e vfat defaults 0 0

Labels: My Share

I know this trick has been old-fashioned or something, but it may be helpful when you’re on the way & expecting more to do some tricky things. All you need is Microsoft Access, MySQL ODBC drivers, optional 3rd party application to accessing MySQL from your desk & an excel files to import.

First of all, open Microsoft Access, create a blank database & save it into anywhere on your disk.



Next, doing importing process from File :: Get External Data :: Import & select an excel file you want to import.



On Import Spreadsheet Wizard form, check the First Row Contains Column Headings check box to make the first row of excel sheet file as field name on MySQL.



Next, select In a New Table option if you wish to store the records in a fresh table.



If you are not sure whether the row has been duplicated or not, select Yes (Duplicates OK) combo box. This will inserting all of records on the table.



Again, select No Primary Key option to by passing the primary key on the table. You might need this to smoothly the processing action. Don’t worry, since you’ll allowed to make any changes of it later.



Next, type in the box with the name of the table. I’m using Test_Import for the name.



If nothing goes wrong, the selected excel files are importing first to MDB successfully.



Now, final step is exporting it into MySQL from the MDB file you just created. You no longer need the first excel file. But, notice that you have to create an ODBC data source link from MySQL ODBC driver first & create a database also in MySQL (to make it more easiest to create, I’m using MySQLFront). Both named by DBImport for my example. Next, exporting process started from File :: Export from Microsoft Access menus. It will show an Export Table ‘Test_Import’ To… wizard form. Select ODBC Databases() from Save as type drop down box.



The Export form will automatically filled with table name. Nothing to do from here, just press OK button to display next wizard form.



On Select Data Source form, select a data source ODBC linked to MySQL you had created once. After pressing OK button, be patient & let the application works for you.



Finished. Now you already have records exported from excel file.

Labels: My Tricks