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Life with walls

Too few posts ago, I mentioned that I would have to use a certain Windows-only program to do work for my digital logic class. As a Linux user (Ubuntu, to be exact), I of course find this detestable. I first considered trying to run it under Wine, but the all-knowing app DB reports of a show-stopping issue when doing so: USB operations don’t work. Or, actually, maybe they do if you pull the right strings. I don’t know. But I was going to need to use a special USB peripheral to program circuits, so there was no room for maybes.

I decided to virtualize. As an engineering student, I’m allowed to download copies of popular Microsoft software (except Office) for free, including Windows itself. I figured I should pick Vista over XP because I’ll probably need Windows for a while in the future. I picked Vista Business, the most basic variety they had available. When it came time to download it, I hit a little snag. They couldn’t provide a simple download link. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to download a downloader, which itself is a Windows program. Vicious cycle??

Not quite. I installed Wine to run the downloader, and it worked fine, as I could expect. Next, I downloaded VirtualBox OSE, the free software version. I’d never run a virtual instance of an operating system before, so it was a little scary. But the installation went well, and in half an hour, I had Vista running inside Ubuntu. It was then that I found out that the free version of VirtualBox doesn’t have USB support. So I uninstalled the free version and installed the non-free version. For once, I’m glad that programs leave their configuration files behind after an uninstall; I was able to keep the same virtual machine.

As is custom when I’m putzing around with my Ubuntu system, I now provide the gritty details of what I did, both for my future reference and for everyone’s benefit. (This is for Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex,” by the way. I don’t think I know what an ibex is. It sounds like a six-dimensional ibis or something.)

First, in the Settings window, I went to “USB” and created an empty filter so that the virtual machine would recognize all USB devices. After that, I was able to mount and use my printer from Windows. VirtualBox recognized my other USB devices but wouldn’t let me select them, so I had to do more tweaks. These fixes came from various sources and I found that they worked when applied together.

I edited /etc/udev/rules.d/40-basic-permissions.rules and replaced the two USB lines with

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

For good measure, I added myself to the vboxusers group even though I think I was automatically added already.

sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a `whoami`

For my next trick, I had to go to Users and Groups to find the number of the vboxusers group. On my computer, it was 127. Thus, at the end of /etc/fstab, I added the following:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=127,devmode=664 0 0

Then I think I rebooted, and everything went swimmingly. I was able to mount multiple USB devices from Windows.

I still hate Windows. But even when I get mad, all I have to do is think back to Tuesday, when I was at work with my friend Mark and we were watching live streaming video of Barack Obama being sworn in as President of the United States. That’s something to be happy about. Now whenever I’m unhappy about something, I can just say to myself, “Barack Obama is the President,” and I’ll feel a little better.

Here’s a computer simulation of that airplane landing in the Hudson River. (Via The Presurfer)

During the inauguration on Tuesday, the new incarnation of whitehouse.gov went online. Jason Kottke examines the country’s new robots.txt file. (Via waxy.org)