I found Sun’s VirtualBox and thought I’d try it out. As everything is going virtual and having used it in Mac I thought it was time to step it up in Windows so I can start running things like Linux and maybe other Windows under my main desktop. This allows me to play about without worrying about destroying my main PC and spend a day restoring everything.

For this review I am using Windows 7 as the host environment and Ubuntu 9.04 as the guest.

VirtualBox VM Setup

Creating and installing Linux under VirtualBox brought some interesting concept which I have not seen and would love to see in VMware Fusion. The Virtual Media Manager was a great idea. This allows you to control virtual HDDs to Floppy disk images. This means you create your home HDD which can be mounted on multiple virtual environments for example. All the steps in creating them is done once and can be re-used many times.

To get Ubuntu installed I decided to create a root partition which would also contain the swap drive and a separate partition for the home directory. Also I had to add the ISO image of the install CD.

The next step was to create the VM itself. Pressing new in the toolbar starts a wizard which prompts for the settings of essentially the emulated hardware the virtual machine would run and allocate resources. The wizard made it user friendly and easier for beginners to create. Once created the system should be ready for the install. The only criticism I have with the wizard is the defaults it presents to the user. For example the default video RAM is set to 12MB which is very low.

Starting the VM shows a similar boot and install process to a physical computer. The VM locks the mouse cursor to the VM window and by default pressing the right ctrl will unlock it from the environment back to the host. Simply clicking back inside the window locked it again.

The install process went smoothly and I proceeded to install and set up the VM on post install with no problems.

VirtualBox Drivers

The VM comes with Ubuntu compatible “Addtions” which installs some drivers and software to make it interact with VirtualBox. The most noticeable advantage to installing the additions is the display drivers. Without it Ubuntu’s X Windows system limits the max resolution without some hacks.

Performance

VirtualBox doesn’t look to suffer from any performance or hardware issues. All sound and other hardware related devices seem to work well without any glitches.

Virtual Machine Management

VirtualBox’s first screen shows a list of virtual machines set up on the left hand side and the selected VM settings on the right. This is a very simple yet effective display of information about the VM and the toolbar makes creating, changing settings and starting VMs very simple.

The screen allows the user to also delete the VM listed. Once a VM is running in a separate window, this screen can be closed without closing the VM itself.

Snapshots

VirtualBox features the ability to take “snapshots” of the VM state. Once created, the snapshot is a freeze of the current state and allows the user to restore back to the state at any given time. This makes trashing and restoring a VM a trivial process hence great for development and testing things.

Summary

For a free tool it does all the basic things I need in order to run Ubuntu / Linux. I do miss the seamless mode where it integrates the guest OS with the host and the program does not run in a window. Besides this factor there is not a lot more negative points about it and it can only get better.

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu No Monitor Defaults To 800×600
2. Installing IPP Printer On Ubuntu
3. Installing Ubuntu 8.10 From USB Stick

To include a local image, you have to add the following attributes:
moz-do-not-send="false" border=0

It automatically had a border around the image which I did not want. This may have only been the case because I added a link to the image and the moz-do-not-send="false" tells Thunderbird to send it with the email. The file source path has be absolute too meaning you have to type the full path starting with file:/// e.g:
src="file:///C:/Signature.gif
The end result was:
<img moz-do-not-send="false" border=0 src="file:///C:/Signature.gif">

The HTML file itself does not need the , tags at the top and bottom of the file.

To set the signature in Thunderbird go to Tools > Account Settings and under the account name itself tick “Attach this signature:” and click the choose button and find the HTML file.

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1. Dropbox Causes Duplicate Folders In Mozilla Thunderbird
2. Sync Mozilla Thunderbird Using Dropbox
3. Mozilla Firefox & Thunderbird Spell Checker

It has been released under the GPL license so feel free to take a look at my messy code and leave some constructive criticism.

http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/

Related posts:

1. energy@home Project Update v0.4a
2. energy@home 0.4
3. energy@home Twitter Integration

I have (finally) got my project to a working stage so I thought I’d write a bit about it. After buying a CurrentCost CC128 device I was not happy with the software on the Internet for extracting the data. The FDI chip used on the USB cable to the device did not support 64 bit Windows 7 so it crashed on me and the Linux alternatives were basic and look fairly complicated to set up.

Planning

I want the data to be accessed via a web page. I decided to use JavaScript to implement the graphing and AJAX to do a client – server architecture. Also it’s the most popular way of generating dynamic web page which I hope the graph would be done in near real time.

I have not decided what technology for the server side script which would handle the AJAX requests but I ended up using PHP. The PHP script retrieves data from the database, formats it and sends it back to the web page to be graphed.

I have a LAMP stack configuration so I’m using an Apache web server with a MySQL database. All the device data will be stored in the database by a another script which I wanted to use Python for.

The Python script listened for the XML strings sent via a USB cable from the CurrentCost device. The script would then extract the data from XML and store it into the database.

From the start I wanted my software to run on a Linux based system because I want a server at home running on Linux 24/7. This would allow my other devices to be freely turn it self off etc. Also most of other services were on Linux.

Implementation

The FDI chip from the USB cable takes care of the USB to Serial conversion which makes reading data a lot easier but also it uses an up to date connection. Using a terminal and example XML documents found on the web I could see what the XML format looks like. All data is sent every 6 seconds over USB to a serial port. Ever 1 minutes past the hour e.g 15:01 historical data is sent over the cable or by pressing a button on the device.

Once received the Python script parses the XML, extracts data it needs and inserts it into the database.

When a user views the web page, an asynchronous request is sent to the PHP server side script, gets the data from the database and returns it to the web page. The web page then formats it correctly to be parsed into a JavaScript Graph. The web page is currently set to refresh every 10 seconds but this may change depending on how the server holds up.

Problems

At the moment there are loads of problems and improvements that can be done. This is just a brief post of what I have so far. The Python script can’t handle the historical data and falls over so it won’t run longer than 1 hour.

The AJAX response returns a formatted string. I want to convert this to an XML response so it’s easier / cleaner to retrieve multiple data.

I want to limit the data by date / time because the graph will look tiny / there would be a lot of information being sent back and forth every 10 seconds refresh.

I’m not happy with the scaling of the graphs. It’s using dual axis for energy and temperature.

Some sort of statistics besides a graph like total engery consumed for x days/months/years, etc.

Eventually the Python script will become a Linux Daemon but this is only once it’s stable enough.

Twitter Integration would be nice. I would use the Python script to post a tweet every hour with a simple message. The profile will be protected so that only I can see what it says.

Summary

Still got ways to go but it’s getting there. It’s nice to finally see something from my days of work. Especially if I have never used Python or PHP from scratch before.

CurrentCost previous post

CurrentCost Website

CurrentCost XML Specification

Dale Lane’s Blog on how to get data from a CurrentCost device

Related posts:

1. Current Cost CC128 Envi Review
2. energy@home 0.4
3. NAS Requirements

Here are my picks for free software on Windows (currently Windows 7). Free and open source (two different licenses applied to software) have come a long way and have come to replace my ageing proprietary and non-free applications. I list my choices below in this post.

Multimedia Player

VLC – stands for Video Lan Client is an open source player that runs on all 3 major platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac). It supports a very wide varity of codecs and video formats. The player has plugins for web browsers and can be used to play music and videos.

I use it as my video player as it does not have a library component to manage my music and videos but does have a playlist feature.

Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox – I have been using Netscape 6 browser back in the day when the company still existed. Even though it was slow and crashed every so often it did not deter me from trying a different browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I leapt straight onto Firefox (what was called Phoenix at the time of it’s alpha launch) version 0.6 and stuck with it since. Whilst Safari and Opera has improved over the years along with Firefox moving to 3.5 very quickly.

Email

Mozilla Thunderbird – An open source using standard design I have used it for well over 2 years now. Whilst it feels lacking in terms of polish and that bit of TLC compared to Mozilla’s web browser offering it still forefills the task as a good email client. I do find it lacking development and features sometimes for example the lack of naitive calendar integration so I’m less likely to hold onto the software if a new and better software came out.

File Compression

7Zip – This is a free and open source software (FOSS) which handles a lot of different compression protocols from 7zip (it’s own format) to zip and rars. The UI could do with some work but it does have context menu built into Windows.

Drawing

Paint.net – Initially developed to replace paint in Windows it uses the .net framework and is free. The software does a lot of effects and enhancements to images all for no fee (but please donate to the project). It does all the simple things like cropping drawing to slightly more advanced tools like, layers, lots of undo levels and controls with good fine controls.

CD/DVD Burning

CDBurnerXP – Despite it’s name it does handle DVDs too. The software is not as good as Nero but does the job well enough. The software UI flow needs a bit of work but the burning part is faultless. When creating a project it detects the current media in the drive to determin the size. In my opinion I prefer to set what type of media I am going to burn because I don’t always take out pre-burnt or non writable media in the drive which means it will always say you don’t have enough space. Despite this it is free so I’m not going to complain – too much. It does not support any cover editing or light scribe burning.

PDF Reader

Foxit Reader – A much lighter version than Adobe’s PDF reader. It has all the features I use in Adobe Reader so it’s a perfect drop in replacement. The reader has plugins for web browsers so you can view PDF from within the browesr. It does have a tiny advertisment in the top right corner below the windows border.

FTP Client

Filezilla – A free and open source FTP program. It has a lot of options and clever download / upload queue which you can specify what you want to do with file conflicts. Transfer limites can be set by the user from number of simultaneous file downs to the speed at which it down / upload files.

Remote Desktop

RealVNC – It’s one of the stable tools in Linux but it is available on cross platform. The server application isn’t as secure but if you hide it behind a firewall and tunnel in it should be safe. It’s very basic but it works and quicker than Remote Desktop on slow connections. There is a free and paid version depending on your needs.

TODO

I still have use non-free software because I have yet to find an alternative to fill it’s place. A good site to search for alternative software is at AlternativeTo.net

These are the following programs I need to find a good replacement for:

• Text editor – I would love Notepad++ to be 100% compatible with Windows 7 but it’s not quite there yet.
• RSS Reader – I’m using Feed Daemon but I would like an RSS reader than supports Google Reader and on all 3 major platforms including the iPhone.
• UPNP Player – Not quite figured out what I need or how it will work but I want to move all my video and music collection to one central place and accessible on my computers for personal use.
• Podcatcher / Podcast Aggregator – I’m still using Juice but there has been no updates to it since early 2000 but I have yet to find a replacement.
• Music Player – A good all round music player with library support. I also want to be able to play podcasts in accelerated mode.
• Diagram Tool – A good FOSS alternative to Microsoft Visio. It seems I’m alone on this one as there are hardly any out there and the Linux Dia program is too basic. Dia also shows it’s age.
• Office Suite – I’m using Microsoft Office and have used Open Office in the past but found it lacking in terms of stability or usability.

I would like to use agile light weight applications where it does not require say Mono on Windows but keeping them as independent as possible. Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome. I will try and update the list in the future.

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