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Scott's Column
Apple TV Should Be Free, Crashed Hard Drive,
Oracle 8i to 10g, Virtualization
June 1, 2007
By Scott Lewis
It's time to write more compelling introductions. This month I will talk about why Apple TV should be FREE. I will cover virtualization software and how to build VMware virtual machines for FREE. I will also cover repairing my sister-in-law's computer... and hey I did it for FREE. Did I grab your attention. Good! Then why not read about my Oracle 8i to 10g migration, which was free as far as not having to buy anything to to the switch itself.
Introductory paragraph goes here.
Current Topics:
- Apple TV - Why It Should Be Free
- Recovering From a Crashed Hard Drive
- Migrating Oracle 8i to 10g
- Virtual Machine Software
- Creating VMware Virtual Machines for Free
Apple TV - Why It Should Be Free
I both like and hate the Apple TV. It sounds like a great little
device. Apple has done its usually job of stripping down the features to
the essentials and then making them work so smooth anyone can do it. I
really applaud this. So, why do I hate it? And why should the Apple TV
be free?
I hate it because it is only good for watching iTunes content. Granted,
with three iPods in my household there is a lot of iTunes content, but
none of it video content. Also, the vast majority of that content is
music that was ripped to MP3 format before iTunes came along. I don't
need Apple TV to play music on my TV. The only video content purchased
on iTunes was the pilot of Aquaman, a "spin off" series
from Smallville. It never made it and iTunes was the
first place I learned you could see the video. I paid the $1.99 for it
and watched it. So did my sons. My sons liked the fact that the actor
that played Aquaman in the pilot was not the actor that played Aquaman
(A.C.) in the episode of Smallville. In fact, the actor that played
Aquaman in the pilot plays Green Arrow on Smallville. Clearly I am
rambling here.
So I hate Apple TV because I can't watch anything on it. Can I watch TV
shows? Only if I buy them from the iTunes Store. Can I
watch movies? Again, only if I buy them from the iTunes
Store. iTunes RIPs songs from CDs to load into iTunes.
I can play those songs on the Apple TV. iTunes
does not RIP movies from DVDs that
I own to play in iTunes... and in turn play on Apple TV. And that is why
I hate it.
This also leads to why it should be free. Cell phone companies will give
you a phone for free, because they get you with the money you spend for
the service. Since I have to buy movies and TV shows from the iTunes
Store just to watch them on Apple TV then Apple TV should be free. They
will get their money back from Movie and TV show sales. Right!
Apple has the best chance of making movie ripping an acceptable thing to
the movie industry. Let's see how we should rip movies. First, a little
background. I am a Netflix subscriber. Some of the
movies I get from Netflix are labeled as NetFlix DVDs. They do not look
like the DVDs in the store that I buy. Why? Are they really different?
How many copies of a movie does Netflix and Blockbuster buy? Hundreds?
Thousands? Why not put some secret bit on the rental versions of DVDs
that say they can't be copied. DVDs you buy would not have this special
bit. iTunes would look at this bit and allow you to rip the purchased
DVD, but not the rental DVD. This would be a huge leap for the MPAA's
piracy fear. To stop you from passing the RIPPED version of the movie
around, iTunes could imbed the same copy protection that the songs from
iTunes have... with one exception. The exception would be that you could
watch the video on as many devices as you want as long as you provide
your iTunes account information. I can't imaging people passing out
their account information with copies of movies they RIP. This will
minimize piracy.
So why doesn't Apple RIP movies to iTunes? Because they only
want you to buy movies from the iTunes Store... therefore the
device to play those movies should be free.
Recovering From a Crashed Hard Drive
My sister-in-law came to me when her laptop would not boot. It gave
an error message that a file was missing. The message read something
like "The following file could not be found. Please replace the file or
repair the installation." Then it listed a folder and not a file. Ouch!
I tried booting off of a Ubuntu 6.06 Live CD. I figured
I would be able to look at the hard drive and see what was missing. (Oh,
the repair did not work when using her Windows XP Home CD.) Ubuntu was
scrolling a lot of errors on the hard drive when
booting. It took about 20 minutes to boot from the CD. When I tried to
look at the hard drive I got errors about it not being mounted. I did a
little digging on the Internet and found this article:
How To Recover
Files from a Non-Bootable Windows PC using Ubuntu Live. The
instructions required you to enter a few commands to mount the local
disc, and then instructions for getting Samba downloaded, installed and
working to access a network drive.
I was digging through a draw cleaning out old copies of Vista Beta on
disc. After all, the beta version of Vista expired at the end of May. I
came across a Freespire CD. I booted from that and I could browse my
sister-in-law's hard drive easily. I don't know what tools
Freespire comes with out of the box, but it was easier than
Ubuntu Live CD. A post in the Ubuntu article mentioned Knoppix.
I decided to download and burn Knoppix Linux to a CD and boot my
sister-in-law's laptop from that. Knoppix is well known for being used
as a recovery tool.
When I had the time to work on the laptop I booted the Knoppix CD. It
was able to detect the wired network card, and was able to see the hard
drive. I could not find where to map a network drive. I was having
trouble getting the answer on the Internet, so I just started poking
around. The file manager program had a menu option to "Go To
Location..." When I clicked on that I just typed in the server and share
name to my fileserver. It prompted me for my user ID and password and it
just worked. I could now see both a share on the network and the local
hard drive. Time to start copying files.
Nothing. When I navigated to the Document and Settings folder and then
to my sister-in-law's user name it was empty. I can only assume that
this is were the hard drive had crashed and all her data was lost. Since
there was no data to find I informed my sister-in-law and told her all I
could do was reformat the hard drive. The formatting process should mark
the bad parts of the drive and then data would not be written there.
It took at least 6 hours to format the hard drive. The Windows install
CD saw the drive as 38.1 GB. When I finally got Windows installed it
said the drive was 37.2 GB. I can only assume this laptop had an
advertised size of 40 GB. Anyway, I was able to install Windows XP. It
took a long time. The machine has a 2.80 GHz Celeron, but only 256 MB of
memory. Windows shows 192 MB, so the rest must be part of the video.
With the operating system fully installed the machine takes about 30 -
40 minutes to boot. I assume this is time checking the hard drive. But
the laptop is running. I told my sister-in-law that it would not be
worth the cost to replace the drive. She would be better off with
another laptop.
During May we migrating all the data from the Oracle 8i server I am
(was) responsible for to an Oracle 10g RAC system. RAC means Real
Application Cluster, which basically means we have multiple
servers/nodes running against a single database. Cool!
We migrated all of the schemas I could identify as
actually used. A schema is a user with database objects, in this case
tables, triggers, etc. We got a lot of errors doing a direct export of
8i to 10g. I have always known that Oracle is very bad about letting you
skip major versions when doing conversions like this. We ended up
exporting from 8i into an install of Oracle 9i running on a Virtual
Machine. Then we exported from 9i and imported into our 10g server. We
manually brought over the grants based on scripting from the
DBA_TAB_PRIVS table. Since we didn't want all the schemas the import
would fail on the grants and not finish them. Running a script to get
all the privileges for the schemas we were exporting made the operation
a lot smoother.
We did drop one table from the schema. This was a history table. It was
originally going to work like the history on our HP mainframe. It was
never implemented, but it grew to a very large size. I don't know
exactly how large it was, but dropping this one table from Oracle 9i
produced an export file from 9i that was 1/3 the size of the 8i export
file. Wow!
Even running a script to get all the privileges did not get them all. We
ended up bringing up the 8i database and needed to look for a couple of
roles that had some more privileges. Once the privileges and roles were
all set correctly everything worked.
We had already added entries to the tnsnames.ora files on all the client
workstations. The tnsnames.ora files contain information about the
database the client software can connect to. Then we editing the
connection string for the applications stored in INI files. Even old
clients running the Oracle 8i client had no trouble connecting to the
Oracle 10g server.
A couple of weeks after the data migration we took one final backup of
the Oracle 8i server and shut it down. The rack space they were taking
up is going to be used for a new UPS system in our server room.
I have mentioned in past that I would like to try Linux. I even
thought about loading Linux on my laptop (my primary machine at home).
However, I need some Windows software, so a total emersion in Linux is
not possible. I should state that I hate dual booting. I have done that
in the past and it works, but it is inconvenient.
The above foray into using virtualization software to solve our Oracle
migration reminded me that I could try and run Linux as my primary
operating system and run Windows XP in a virtual machine. Virtualization
software is an application that will create a virtual environment, a PC
within a PC if you will. Hmm. This would allow me to run Linux with
maximum performance as the host, while still having access to my Windows
applications running as the guest.
Microsoft has Virtual PC 2007. I have used this in the
past, and actually use this at work to maintain test environments and
special virtual machines for compiling special programs. It is very
handy. Virtual PC does some things very well, while some things not so
well. I really like the variable sized hard drive in Virtual PC. When
you build a virtual machine you can tell it what size hard drive to use
for that instance, yet it will grow as needed. VPC seems to work best
with Windows Virtual Machines. Image that! However, it can be used to
run most flavors of Linux as well.
VMware is another very popular virtual machine vendor. They have a
number of products, including a free application called VMware
Player. VMware Player does just that... it plays a virtual
machine. You cannot create a virtual machine with VMware Player. You
need the VMware Workstation application, which is expensive ($189), to
create the virtual machines that VMware Player can use. However, there
are tricks around this that allow you to easily build empty virtual
machines (see below) that can be run with VMware Player.
I have tried running Linux in a Virtual Machine in the past using
Microsoft's Virtual PC. However, some Linux distributions don't work
well in Virtual PC. Mardriva 2007.1 for instance will not work.
Something about the video. I used to have this problem with Ubuntu, but
that seems to not be an issue anymore.
Virtual PC requires that your host operating system be Windows. What I
want to try is Linux as the host, so VPC will not be a possible
solution. VMware Player is available for Linux. I have been using VMware
Player for Windows to build a number of Linux Virtual Machines. The idea
here is to get used to Linux and VMware so I can decide which flavor of
Linux I want to use for my main machine.
And that is where this will end this month. How do I test a Windows XP virtual machine running in Linux? Stay tuned this is not over yet.
Creating VMware Virtual Machines for Free
So, you are like me and are 1) a cheapskate, and 2) want to use
VMware Player to build virtual machines for free. You
have come to the right place.
In researching what it would take to build a VMware Virtual Machine I
came across easywmx, and it is
too easy to pass up. This is a web site that will
create the base files for an empty VMware virtual machine for you. You
provide a couple of parameters (a name for the virtual machine, the
operating system and how much memory and hard drive space you want) and
easyvmx provides you a zip file with all the files that make up
an empty virtual machine.
There are still a couple of trick you will need. Although you can use
easyvmx's Super Simple Virtual Machine Creator to build a virtual
machine that will boot off of a Live CD (a CD that can boot and run,
many Linux distributions work this way) I found it better to use the
easyvmx Virtual Machine Creator and manually point the VM to a Live CD.
The Super Simple version does not create a hard drive for your virtual
machine, and is not a good way to build a full VM.
Here are the steps to create a new virtual machine from scratch using
easyvmx and VMware Player:
Go to easyvmx and click on
easyvmx. Enter the name you want to give your virtual machine,
the operating system and the memory. There are other options, but this
is enough. Scroll down and click on the button Create Virtual Machine.
You get a link to a zip file. Just download the zip file and unzip the
files into a single folder on your computer. If you run this VM (double
click the .vmx file) it will report that no operating system is found.
If you want you can boot from an ISO image. Most
operating systems are downloaded as an ISO image file, which is a full
copy of a CD or DVD image that you can burn to a disc. But let's save
some plastic and boot our virtual machine from an ISO image without
burning it to CD.
Edit the your_vm_name.vmx file. Although this is a text file it will not
load correctly in Notepad (assuming you are following these instructions
on a Windows machine). You need a better text editor such as
Notepad++
or else use Wordpad (free with Windows) to edit the file. Look for a set
of lines near the bottom of the file that look like this:
# Settings for physical CDROM drive
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
Change cdrom-raw to cdrom-image and change auto detect to the name of a your bootable ISO image. For example, this is what I used to boot the Ubuntu 6.06 Live CD ISO image I downloaded:
# Settings for physical CDROM drive
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
Make sure the .ISO image is in this same folder as the VM files and
run the VM (double click the .vmx file). It will boot the CD (Ubuntu in
this case). At this point I clicked on the desktop icon to install
Ubuntu. All went flawlessly and it asked me if I wanted to reboot. I did
that and it booted into Ubuntu just fine. However, there was one "clitch"
for lack of a better word. It booted Ubuntu from the VM's hard drive,
but when Ubuntu came up it saw the Live CD. I tried ejecting the CD and
rebooting, but it came up the same way. Manually editing the entries
above to their original values solved that issue.
What if you don't have an ISO image file? What if you want to boot the
virtual machine from a physical CD? That's easy, just modify the .vmx
file as follows:
# Settings for physical CDROM drive
ide1:0.present = "true"
ide1:0.deviceType = "atapi-cdrom"
ide1:0.filename = "D:"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
Of course, you need to replace D: with the actual drive letter of the
physical CD drive you are using. Once you save these setting your
virtual machine will boot from the actual CD in your drive and you can
install the operating system like normal. Once again, I would re-edit
the .vmx file back to the original state after installing the new OS
into the VM.
Except for a little editing of a text file it is easy to build and run
virtual machines using the free VMware Player. Now I have to experiment
with the various flavors of Linux and see which one I like best.
I'll get back to you on that.
Conclusion
That's it for this month. I spent a lot of time with virtual machine software. I have been looking at least 6 Linux versions, and I am looking to see what more I can find. I will report on how the various flavors of Linux stack up for this hard core Windows programmer/user. I will also tell how I setup Windows XP to run in a virtual machine under Linux.
Come back next month (or better yet, subscribe to my newsletter), it looks like we are in for a fun ride.
Upcoming topics:
More On Vitualization
Office/Outlook 2000 on Windows Vista
Switching to a Mac
Dreamweaver vs Expression Web
