Hello Firefox lovers! Here’s some great news for you guys (or gals). Remember I told you about “Flock” in my post “Life Made Easy with Flock”? Well, this time I found an extension for Firefox that lets you post to your blog!

Actually, my good old buddy Chanux is the one who introduced it to me. It’s called “Performancing.” For me, it seems far better than the blog posting tool that comes with “Flock” because previous posts can be easily edited with this… and there’s much more!

Why don’t you guys give it a try?

C.J.

powered by performancing firefox

The first day I met Ven. Ilgo (my Linux guru), the venerable thero showed me a magic trick (it was that surprising for me at the time) with his Linux-installed laptop by booting “Windows XP” within a window of his Debian Linux installation. Although we could see it in a window, “Windows XP” seemed to act as if it were the only OS running at that moment. He had even installed Firefox and a Python interpreter.

“First, I used this to make my machine useful to another monk who refused to work with Linux because he was a great fan of MS Word macros. But now I use QEMU to check how well my Python scripts work in Windows,” said Ven. Ilgo.

After a few minutes in “Windows,” we were shutting down WinXP. Guess what? Windows crashed!

“This is a joke! I can’t believe how people use this in their day-to-day life,” said Ven. Ilgo.

“Maybe it’s because of the emulation?” I replied.

“Oh no. It’s true that QEMU might be slower than a normal Windows installation, but not when KQEMU is installed with 1GB of RAM. At least it’s fast enough not to crash,” said the venerable thero. (KQEMU is a driver that allows the QEMU PC emulator to run much faster when emulating a PC.)

“What if we just close this window without shutting down Windows?” I asked.

“Then Windows will assume it’s a power loss and run ‘the famous disk scan!’”

That was enough for me that day, but it wasn’t enough for me later. So, I started using QEMU after getting a good tutorial from Ven. Ilgo. I always wanted to write a post about this but couldn’t do it earlier because of my lack of free time. Here it is now!

(Important: This is not a QEMU man page. This is just a simple intro to QEMU.)
(Disclaimer: I’M NOT GUILTY IF YOU GET BUSTED OR KICKED OUT OF “LKLUG” FOR USING ‘Windows’ WITH THIS EMULATOR.)

First, we need to install QEMU:

apt-get install qemu

Once QEMU is installed, try typing qemu to check whether it’s up and running.

I assume you guys (or gals) are going to emulate Windows. Normally, Windows will need 2GB of disk space, so let’s create an image file that will act as an HDD during the emulation:

qemu-img create win.img 2048mb

Yes! You can change the name or file size as you like.

Next, create an ISO image of a CD containing Windows XP. You can do this by selecting the “Copy to Disk Image” option, which appears after right-clicking the CD icon. Name the file “winXP.iso.”

Now, to boot your emulated PC from the CD, type:

qemu -hda win.img -cdrom /path/to/winXP.iso -boot d

Make sure to replace /path/to/winXP.iso with the correct path to your ISO file.

A window resembling a normal BIOS will open. From there, proceed as you normally would during a Windows setup.

After installing, you’ll need to boot from the HDD. Type:

qemu -hda win.img -cdrom /path/to/ANY.iso -boot c

If you want to install software or drivers in Windows, simply create an ISO image containing the software and replace /path/to/ANY.iso with the correct path and name of the ISO image.

For further information, check the QEMU manual (man qemu). You can also use a SAMBA server to transfer files between Linux and Windows, though I’m not sure if it supports Windows XP.

Oh! For those of you wondering… Yes! you can use QEMU to emulate another Linux distro too. After all, why emulate just to be a fool?

C.J.

Digg this post!

Hi guys! I’m typing this post with the help of an open-source browser called Flock. It seems interesting because this browser has a built-in blog posting tool that supports not only WordPress but also Typepad, Movable Type, MetaWeblog, Blogger, and Atom. The next best thing is that this browser uses the source code of our good old buddy, Firefox! It looks like Firefox with a new color scheme and some extensions installed.

I’m planning to keep this browser handy for my blog posting, but Firefox is going to stay with me for a loooong time because I’m still using it for browsing. I think the Firefox team should be careful with this competing “twin brother.”

Oh! And for those of you who are interested in my results, check out the comments on my last post. 😉

C.J.

Blogged with Flock