Friday, April 10, 2009

Vboxed

After I have been running WinXP inside Vbox for sometime now there have been several other advantages.
1. 'Efax' does not support linux. There is something in efax that is tied up with the IE framework.
2. Remote login to work as the Juniper client at work doesn't support a linux login client.
3. iTunes as mentioned below.

iTunes

I recently got the iPhone 3G but unfortunately Amarok didn't support it so I had to find a iTunes workaround. Wine didn't look like it would do it either so my only option was go through a Win installation.
There was an iso of WinXP which I had from long back and so I got VirtualBox running and and booted Win up within a 5gig virtual paritition. There were lots of issues initially with initial Vbox not supporting USB at all but got around them by getting the latest debpkg (Thanks Alok) and applying the 'Apple Inc' USB filter. Now everything has worked without any issues so far. Am only waiting for the latest firmware update from Apple 3.0 to see if this was the most foolproof situation.

Mediatomb

Having a large HDD with a ton of movies on it I wanted something that would have provided a better choice than using the Svideo connector to play movies on the TV.
This is where mediatomb came in. Its basically a mediaserver to host anything and stream it thru wifi to the another device which recognises media servers (PS3 in my case). Had some discussions with Dhake around this and now that everything is up and running, can browse through the entire video library more effeciently than even blockbuster/family video.
I still have retained my membership at blockbuster though as I rent games from them.