Koha Live CD to USB

We had no problem creating a bootable live USB stick from the Koha Live CD using the ubuntu make bootable usb disk option but a lot of the students were unable to get their bootable usb stick to boot - 'boot error' was the result.

I use standard no frills kingston datatraveller usb sticks as i have found them a reliable cross-platform device. It may be possible that some usb sticks are not bootable?

We decide to remove the ubuntu usb install as a factor - and to use unetbootin to create the bootable usb from the koha live CD ISO image.

We downland unetbootin-windows-442.exe and run it. Nice that it does not have to be installed.

1. Select Diskimage radio button and browse for the koha live cd ISO on S:
2. Select the USB Drive (F:)
3. Click OK

It extracts the files from the iso and installs the bootloader. Very fast. I wonder if it worked on the test stick. We put the stick in another machine and reboot. No joy - didn't think so as this stick had the same behavior as the others that failed, when trying to re-format in windows it returned error of 'you do not have administrative rights, disk cannot be formatted'. This stick had been formatted as FAT on an osx machine like the other one that did not work.

We will wipe this stick and try unetbootin with some other ones.

Update: The key symptom of sticks that do not work is that when you put the stick in a Windows pc and try to format it, it says 'you do not have administrative rights....'. I am wondering if sticks formatted under Ubuntu or OSX have this issue. I can't remember if if formatted the 2 working sticks.

As a test we insert a non-working stick and format it as FAT under ubuntu. Once formatted we put it in a windows machine and try to format it again...

YES - that is the problem, if the stick is formatted on the Ubuntu box it then cannot be formatted on a windows box. And if it is formatted on Ubuntu it returns a boot error.

Ok - we go into the disk utility and delete the partition. Now we plug the stick into a windows machine. It is not formatted but we still get 'you do not have sufficient rights to perform this operation'

Back to Ubuntu - we create a FAT partition and format it as FAT but do not check the bootable checkbox. We run the USB startup disk creator and select the USB device (/dev/sdb1) and reserve 1gig for a persistence file. No joy - it must be bootable and cannot be formatted on Ubuntu.

The current theory is that sticks not formatted on Ubuntu should work...and sticks formatted on ubuntu may work on other machines but not in the GRC...arrgh

Update - confirmed. We created a kingston stick in the GRC using format and install to USB and it did not boot the GRC computer but booted my laptop fine. We don't have a solution to the problem except to remove the format part of the instructions and to see if that works. This means we need some more sticks...

iGoogle

I've been using iGoogle more and more and today made the decision to make it my home page. This meant making firefox on the macs the default web browser instead of safari, which is no problem as i've been using google toolbar which does not run on safari. This means no matter which desktop in the house i go to (windows, linux or mac) i have access to my calendar, to do list, google docs, rss feeds - all in the same place, and when i am mobile with either the mac pro laptop, the windows laptop or the linux laptop i still have access to the same stuff. Excellent!

USB to a Disk Image

Everyone talks about burning a disk image to a USB but i want to make a disk image OF a USB. My first attempt was winimage portable but no joy. Next we download the latest version of winimage and install it on the HP laptop. Here are the steps we took

1. Select Disk, Use Removable Disk E: which is our usb stick.
2. Select, Disk, Creating Virtual Disk Image from physical drive
3. The dialog box displays Disk 1: 7,831,552 kb Kingston DataTraveller 2.0
4. Select the Kingston USB entry and choose the create Fixed Sized Virtual Hard Disk
5. Click OK
6. We choose a save location and name it koha_usb

The question now is what format - there is .VHD (virtual hard disk) which is a windows format, of little interest to us, and .IMA which is a generic image format, and .VDMK which is a VMware image. Since the lab computers have VMWARE player installed the VDMK may be useful. We had problems trying to use VMplayer several terms ago but maybe we give it a second chance. I'd like to have a format that can then be burned to a USB stick. MagicISO can convert ima files to ISO so we decide to make 2 images, an IMA to be converted to ISO and a VDMK. We start the VDMK imaging process, it takes about 7 minutes. Would be useful if it had a virtualbox image option.

Now that we have images we need to:

- test with VMware player (copy images to 9762 on S: and see if can run)
- convert IMA to ISO and burn ISO to USB and test booting the USB

We install and run MagicISO -the free version is limited to 300mb images so this is no good. Let's test it out anyway - it finds the koha_usb.ima image ok. but can't open it - complaining it is not an image file.

Let's try vmware - we download from their site after filling in one of those annoying marketing forms for registration (we select the first choice on all the menus so the data is garbage anyway)

Ok we got the download - let's install. We then run VMware player and select Open a Virtual Machine but it wants a .VMX file and does not see the VDMK image. We can't create a machine as it wants an ISO file.

Ok the other option is to make an ISO out of the libliveCD and then run the ISO as a virtual machine. Ok so now we have kohalivecd.iso on the S: drive in the 9762 folder. Virtualbox (v 3.16) is installed so we:

1. Select start, programs, Sun Virtualbox, Virtualbox
2. Click NEW, NEXT
3. Enter KohaLive in the Name textbox
4. Select Linux as the Operating System and Ubuntu as the version
5. Click Next
6. Set the Memory Size slider to 1024
7. Click NEXT
8. Untick the Boot Hard Disk checkbox
9. Click NEXT, CONTINUE and FINISH

Now we have to start up the empty VM and let it know to use our ISO file.

1. Click START and then click OK
2. Click Devices, CD/DVD Devices, More CD/DVD Images
3. Click ADD
4. Browse to S:\local\courses\mlis\9762
5. Select the KOHAliveCD.iso file and click OPEN
6. Click SELECT
7. Select Machine, Reset
8. Click on the window and click CAPTURE

This positions your mouse and keyboard into the guest virtual machine operating system. To return to the windows host operating system press the right CTRL key.

Success! The liveCD boots ok. To shut down click the Ubuntu power icon and select shutdown. When you exit virtualbox be sure to SAVE the Machine State so that changes are preserved.

We did the following:

1. Select System, Admin, Software Sources
2. Select other Software
3. Select karmic partner
4. Select System, Administration, Synaptic
5. Search for Restricted
6. Mark - Select for Installation
7. Click Apply

It was good the VM picked up the network adapter and USB devices automatically. Virtualbox has come a long way since the early days.

Now we need to shut down the virtual machine and SAVE it's state and then restart to see if our changes are preserved.

More 2morO

Audacity on OSX

Since last summer there is a new version 1.3.12 (beta) so we are going to use that in the lab. So off to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to download.

Hey the new book on Audacity 1.3 from PACKT just arrived as i typed this..how cool is that? Ok we download the 1.3.12.dmg file and open the disk image. We create an Audacity folder in Applications and copy all the files there.

Libraries

While audacity is good as is, it cannot handle MP3 and other files because of IP laws. So we need to download two libraries - LAME and FFmpeg. The LAME library file gets copied to the audacity folder and then in audacity you select audacity,preferences,libraries and click LOCATE and point it to the libmp3lame.dylib file. It will remember the location. FFmpeg comes in a dmg which has a pkg that can be installed. Once that is done click the LOCATE button for FFmpeg and it is automatically detected. Click OK and yer done.

One thing i am excited about is using Audacity to record telephone interviews using Skype or Google talk. I've finally got my external iSight camera hooked up to the mac pro (which replaced the dual G5 this spring) and it's quite impressive. Not as bright as the iSight in the mac pro notebook (which replaced the macbook this spring) but really nice.

Select Audacity, Preferences, Devices and select the iSight under Recording device. You also have to turn off all skype notifications.

Select Skype,Preferences and click the Notifications tab. Untick the Play Sound checkbox.

Enough for now..time for a snack

Media Server III

I've installed the TVersity media server on the HP DV9000 laptop so that i could play with the internet a/v settings and also to be able to demo it in class. First we copied over some pic, audio and video files in the usual my nnn windows folders and set them up in the TVersity library.

Next we dragged liam's youtube videos, my flickr photos to the library. The Tversity media server can be accessed from the program client but also from a web browser:

http://localhost:41952/flashlib/ gets you the very nice flash interface
http://localhost:41952/medialib/ gets you to the plain html interface
http://localhost:41952/admin gets you to the admin panel

The HP remote is a disappointment, it only works in hp dvd player. So we plug in the media center remote which uses a windows ehome infrared transceiver. Of course xp has no driver and can't find one. Off to the web and we find lots of people looking for the driver. Microsoft has one but their web site only works with IE. I goto their update site and it has me download a Windows Genuine Advantage plug-in, to "enhance the download experience".

Ok done. Now microsoft gets me to download some tool and run it. Which gives me a code i have to paste into the page. Geez - how to get in customer's way. Finally i can download Update Rollup 2 for eHome Infrared Receiver for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB912024) which gets me WindowsXP-KB912024-v2-x86-ENU.exe which i run. Which gives me an error message ' setup has determined the service pack version of this system is newer than the update you are applying' No need to install this update' - oh yes there is because windows cannot run the remote! arggh windows hell.

looks like a registry hack solution here http://it.megocollector.com/?p=8 but time for a break
.
We did find that XBMC supports the hp remote, so the win client version works

Greenstone on OSX

With more and more of our students using macs we decide to take another look at the osx version of Greenstone, now at 2.83 to see if it is usable. In the past, we recommended students stay away from the mac version and those who really, really want to use their macbook or iMac ended up installing boot camp, fusion or parallels and running greenstone in XP!

So we download the .dmg and click to install. It defaults to Users/yourusername/Greenstone. No way to change drives so it want to go on the sys drive. We decide that is ok and it gets ready to install. Note that to make greenstone actually work it has a number of dependencies. The problem in the past was users had to install and configure those dependent programs and it was not very straightforward. Now the gs installer adds apache automatically as well as installing imagemagick and ghostscript. Sweet.

We do not use the admin pages in the lab with the windows version but decide here to check it out so we tick the enable Admin pages checkbox and give it a password of admin. Click Install and away we go.

When finished we check out the greenstone folder - lots of files but which one launches the application? We click o nthe readmeEn.txt file for enlightenment...looks like the gli folder has the interface..ok but which file in there - client-gli.sh might be the bash script that runs the thing but how do you know? There is a gli.ico icon file...rather than click things at random hoping it will work, let's read the release notes. Ah....it says

On Mac and Linux, use a terminal (in Macs this is found under Applications > Utilities > Terminal) to go into the Greenstone installation directory and run

./gs2-server.sh

The small Greenstone Server will display. Run

./gli/gli.sh

To get to the Greenstone Librarian Interface

So we open a terminal window to the shell which puts us into our user directory (pwd will confirm where you are) so cd Greenstone/gli and then do ./gli.sh and joy - the usual gli interface launches. Since the gli is written in Java it is quite similar in windows, osx and linux.

One difference right at the start. You do file,new to define a collection and then have to do file,open to open the collection you just defined. We decide to test by creating a collection of midi files of Frank Zappa tunes. So we open the test collection and watch the spinner go round and round...this should not be. Ok it's crashed so we need to kill it.

Not impressed - let's try tomorrow to load the demo collection

XAMPP on the Mac

Last time we did 9713 it was not possible for students to access the web server so they could not copy their project there (for some security reason). We ended up uploading them to the class sharepoint. This time around we are thinking maybe we bypass this by using XAMPP 1.7.3 for the mac. There may be some issues:

The windows version which works on any drive as long as the xampp folder is in the root, so c:\xampp, e:\xampp, f:\xampp all work - in fact you can have multiple different copies of xampp on the same machine, a cheap version of the dev,qat,prd server model for development. The same process also works for xampplite and xampp and xampplite can be on the same drive as they have different folders. This is actually very useful as you can really play around without worrying about losing work.

Anyway, unfortunately the mac xampp version only works when installed to Applications. So we have to test this on lab machines and see what happens. Once installed you click the XAMPP control panel and start the apache,mySQL and even the ftp server. Of course, since you have access to the console you don't really need to ftp.

The students would then copy their content to the /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs folder and access them with Safari at http://localhost or depending on the lab setup they might be able to put their web content in their Home folder and goto http://localhost~username but i doubt if that has been set up.

We shall see...