Articles from March 2010

If for some reason you are stuck trying to run the latest Ubuntu (9.10 right now) on top of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1, you'll probably notice that while Virtual PC is a great virtualization solution for Windows and DOS, Linux isn't quite supported.

While earlier Ubuntu version had some issues just getting installed, you can just mount the 9.10 ISO file to the virtual disk drive and install the OS through the default installation process. As soon as the process completes, Ubuntu should be able to boot up (sometimes the reboot appears to hang — in that case just hard reset the virtual machine and Ubuntu will boot up).

Some features require some fiddling in order to work and — if like me your linux sysadmin skillz are pretty weak — the following instructions could turn useful.

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Panasonic Lumix LX3

Last month my father bought a Panasonic Lumix LX3 digital photo camera. It's a really nice compact camera that shoots great looking pictures. Among its many features, it is also capable of saving pictures in RAW format instead of JPEG: unfortunately, the format used by Panasonic is RW2 and there's no official codec for 64bit operating systems.

Luckily, there is a complete codec pack that relies on the new Windows Imaging Component (WIC) system that was released with Windows Vista: the Fast Picture Viewer codec pack. The codec supports a whole bunch of RAW picture formats (including the Lumix's RW2) and since it is so well integrated with Windows, every modern application (Windows Explorer of course, but also the default picture viewer, Live Picture Gallery... and every .NET 3.5 based program) can use the codecs to load pictures.

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In these days I have been working on a multicast streaming server that will run on a Linux box and needs some kind of web frontend. Being a seasoned ASP.NET MVC supporter I naturally picked Mono to run an ASP.NET website on Apache. A combination that — unbelievable, I know — works remarkably well!

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