Posts Tagged: linux

Mount a VHD or VDI in Linux with vdfuse

My old post on mounting VHDs in Linux is rather outdated. I don’t think it even works anymore. So revisiting this on a newer Ubuntu version now. These instructions are for Ubuntu 14.04, so for other OS installs. You’ll also need your compiler installed, so you may need to run sudo apt-get install build-essential to get them before proceeding.

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CherryPad America Factory Reset

The CherryPad America is a tablet running Android I plan to write up a review for later, however a quick note for anyone who might be searching: Yes, if you do a factory restore, the default language will be Chinese.

You can change it to English by pressing the change-language button in the lower-right hand corner of the initial start screen where you are asked to press on the android. (But you can’t read that since it’s in Chinese. 😛 )  Then you can pick English and be good to go for your initial boot.

Rythmbox Sync to USB Device

I have a sizable collection of music, so sizable in fact that I can’t store the full collection on any portal media.  Since I only use Windows to play video games, I use Rhythmbox to manage my music and found myself in need of a way to sync to a USB thumbdrive.  Now, the issue with this is that, by default, Rhythmbox doesn’t treat just any USB mass-storage device as an audio player, so I stumbled upon a post titled “Rhythmbox and USB mass storage sync” dealing with a similar problem.

All you need to do is create a file called “.is_audio_player” and add some content to it that’s something like this:

audio_folders=music/
folder_depth=1

…and then scan removable media.  (Should be in the file menu)  One caveat you should be aware of is that I’m not sure if Rhythmbox will do any audio file conversion for you during the sync to your device.  But for moving a play list from one computer to another, this is plenty fine for me.

Mounting a VHD in Linux

The vdfuse instructions have been updated, please view the more up to date instructions for vdfuse here: Mount a VHD or VDI in Linux with vdfuse.

Let’s say you have a VHD file you’d like to access while in Linux without attaching it to a Virtual Machine.  There are many reasons you might like to do this, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do so with Linux.

There are two ways I know of:

You can use vmware-mount provided by VMWare Server.  I don’t actually like this method because VMWare Server is huge and I don’t use VMWare.  However, if you do, take a gander at this: http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/loopback_linux.html

The method I ultimately went with was vdfuse since I use VirtualBox.  It allows you to mount any disk image supported by VirtualBox.  Basically, if you follow the instructions at that the vdfuse forum link I just provided, you can mount the VHD to a mount point in your filesystem.  Now, this alone doesn’t yet give you access to your files yet.  It provides the partitions as standard files (and a file for the entire disk as well).  The partitions are named Partition1, Partition2, etc.  You can then mount the partition you want as a loopback device.

Ubuntu 9.04 With Compiz

It seems most appropriate to post my screenshots of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 with Compiz-Fusion right now right after replacing Windows 7 Beta 7000 with it.  I went through and turned on quite a few custom effects, including my windows burning up when they are minimized or restored.

I suspect that it’s having all these animations and effects on that make the WordPress editor terribly unresponsive.  Or it could be something completely different since CPU utilization only spikes when I interact with the windows.

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