VirtualBox Indicator Applet for Gnome

As a software product tester at Mindtouch I often need to have multiple Virtual Machines up and running. I use Oracle's Virtualbox, and found it quite annoying to have to open the control panel every time I need to start a VM, or go looking for the VM I need to suspend on the different workspaces. So I decided to create a small indicator applet for gnome. It is programmed using GTK, so it should be compatible with any GTK Desktop Environment. As you can see it is pretty simple in nature and allows you to start and suspend your VM's. I also made use of the notification library to provide clean notifications of user actions.

If you want to try it out for yourself the code is here: github

Compaq Presatio C700 and Linux

Some stats of the laptop:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU T2390 @ 1.86GHz
160GB Hard Drive
2GB RAM

Running: 2.6.26-ARCH #1 SMP (ArchLinux)

I ignorantly loaded Ubuntu 8.04 on this laptop without even starting it up. I did not want to see Windows Vista on my brand new laptop :). The installation went flawlessly.

Most things worked by default. I had a little trouble with the wireless internet card. You have to compile a snapshot of the madwifi driver : madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3698-20080604. Simply compile this or a newer version of the driver and Wifi should work. I did this about a month ago, and I believe the newer kernel supports this card by default.

Note: The internet switch works, however the led indicator on the switch does not. So do not worry if it is orange instead of blue, the wireless card should still work.

Now my problems started... I soon found out that Hibernate or Standby do not function properly. The laptop will do these operations successfully once, but if you try to do it a second time it will freeze when you try to resume it. Here is a detailed bug description : Fedora Bug
This bug has not been solved, and after hours of searching and recompiling my kernel I have not found a solution.

The brightness control on this laptop did not work either at first. However after updating my kernel to the newest version (2.6.26), I was able to use it. Do not try to control brightness from gnome or kde, instead use the keyboard keys provided. For some reason the brightness manager in gnome is buggy on this laptop.

For now I switched to ArchLinux, a much more lightweight distribution which allows me to bootup and shutdown faster.

So if Suspend or Hibernate are important functions to you in a laptop, I would stay away from this notebook. Otherwise, it is a great laptop.

Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP Linux

Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP on Linux

This webcam has had little success on the linux operating system since its release. However the newer kernels are supporting the webcam with little trouble. I am running kernel 2.6.26-ARCH #1 SMP (ArchLinux), and the webcam is working plug and play with the uvc driver.

Many Users have claimed to have the following error in their dmesg output :

uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device (046d:08c2)
uvcvideo: Failed to query (135) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : -32 (exp. 26).

Although this error still occurs even in the most recent kernel it seems not to have an effect on the operation of the webcam. Ealier kernels, as recent as 2.6.24 would only allow the webcam to work on firstboot, but not if you unplugged it, and plugged it back in. So if you are having such an issue try to update your kernel version.

Let me know if you are having any problems or questions concerning this camera, however if you are running a new version of the linux kernel, it should be as easy as plug and play.

I use this camera with Skype, and have had no trouble so far.