Monday, April 16, 2007

vmware to qemu convert

So we were developing drivers for solaris 10 at our company. Since we didnt have nough sparc machines, most of the dev happened on our vmware x86 solaris boxes. My co-worker (from whom I have learnt more aobut linux in the last 8 months than I learnt in the last few years on my own) showed me the way to convert the VMware image to qemu image. Without further ado, here is the command

qemu-img convert /mnt/1/Solaris10.x86.64/Sol_x86_64.vmdk -O qcow solaris-10-64bit.img

Friday, April 06, 2007

ubuntu and me!

okay, so I bit the bullet and tried something other than good ol' redhat this time. So I tried Ubuntu. one thing about it however I didnt like is all the fancy GUI. Considering I run a WinxP box with 2 VMWare images of some flavor of linux. One for mostly development and other for testing out the drivers.

So the fancy GUI of ubuntu was taxing my systems resources. I like my wmii very much. Convenient and light weight. wmii with ruby is apparently faster. I didn't get around experimenting with it much. Hmm I also liked ion however. Pretty convenient.

Alright so here are the packages I usually install:

vim (no way i am not installing that)
wmii (ditto)
php-apach-mysql (just for some playing around)
svn (need to access source)
screen (another one of those magical creations you can't live without)

thats about it I think. I will post my .rc files sometime. They way I go about them is something like this:

I have a ~/.env directory in which I place my .vimrc .bashrc .wmmirc etc rc files. And in the ~/ I add a link to them or just add a line like:

source ~/.env/vimrc

to pick up my rc files. So when I move to new PC I just need to copy the .env dir and go from there.

What my co-worker does, which I think is a good idea is that he has his git server with the above files maintained by the source control.

stdio.h: No such file or directory

So its me again... with a new installation of ubuntu this time. My co-worker kept saying a lot of good things about debian so I figured might as well try the closest thing to it that I was willing to give a shot.

So after installation and everything. I pulled down the source and tried to compile a simple c program and I got the weirdest of errors saying the system couldn't find stdio.h? Now that shows my experience with devlopment probably, but I hadn't seen that error before.

So a little search got me the solution. Its apparently the package build-essential that includes the required libraries.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

did the trick.