Open Source Software Trail

The problem with writing is that you cannot express feelings on paper, or computer in this case; one cannot be too sure whether I am thrilled or just being sarcastic in the title of this post. To be honest, neither is the case… well I am just a little bit more leaning on the sarcastic side. So the daily newspaper the monitor reported that Microsoft is finally going to start distributing in East Africa through a company Comtel Integrators. Actually the article says that the two have signed a deal that shall enable Comtel Integrators to “to vend its (Microsoft) products exclusively in the East and Southern African region”. Some of the products that Comtel shall be providing - corporate email, data storage, multimedia content, web conferencing, office servers and several others.

As I was reading this article a couple of things made me react internally. First, a Mr Wayne Robinson who is mentioned as the Director of Business Development apparently said that “…the development will now make it possible for local companies, NGOs and other entities to buy and use Microsoft’s software products legally…”. I was thinking to myself, “I would like to see how they pull off THAT one!” Consider that recently, Microsoft had to extend support for Windows XP apparently because of the poor reception of Windows Vista by consumers for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that it is a hardware hog. Now many of the SMEs, and in this case I speak for the few SMEs that I know in Uganda, might own a few computers but they are probably not able to comfortably run Windows Vista. And this hardware hogging issue seems to be a global problem not just for countries where people have less access to computers. Even if we were to assume that the SMEs shall purchase Windows XP, I do not see aUgandan business man spending over $150 on the operating system alone and we have not even started considering other applications that he might have to pay for, when he can get it “for free” from a friend on the street.

The second thing that grabbed my attention in this article was another statement by Mr. Robinson “Today in East and Central Africa we believe we have a calling to impact the population through the way we know best—that is to use computer technology to better the lives of people”. I shall not discuss this too much because it can easily grow into a very philosophical debate, however, I always wonder about these statements about how the computer shall magically better the lives of people some of whom have never seen anything more than a radio!

By the way I had never heard of Comtel Integrators before and so I decided to browse around looking for information about them and came across the client portfolio of Mountbatten Ltd who had Comtel as one of their clients. According to the portfolio,

“..Mountbatten Ltd. implemented a full Joomla! installation including VirtueMart, an opensource e-commerce solution. Now ComTel is selling their catalogue through the web, thereby lowering their costs of sales…. On top of that, ComTel sales and support staff is using SugarCRM to manage their daily work.”

This was a pleasant surprise and then I read the “fine print”.. “Due to a change in Comtel’s strategy from a hardware vendor to a service provider, the Comtel website has been redesigned.” How I wish they had taken on the open source strategy to their product lines!

I recently made an installation of VMware workstation on ubuntu and I do not use it very regularly but I noticed that almost everytime I get around to using it, the software just does not start.  I attempt to launch the application and it shows up in the task bar for a few seconds and then disappears.  The times it has happened I have run the vmware-config.pl utility and that seems to fix everything.. so I started wondering what that is all about and after some digging I came across reasons to reconfigure vmware.  One of them says if you upgrade the host operating system kernel then you are likely to require a restart.  I have been downloading some updates for Ubuntu but none of them were to the kernel as far as I can tell.  Strange….

I found a nice tool.. camstudio that is able to take recordings of activity on a computer screen and save them as videos.  It seems a useful tool for making video demonstrations of your work.. better still for making video tutorials of how to use some software.

“Necessity is the mother of invention”, the saying goes but as far as experiments with software I would rewrite this and say “necessity is the mother of installation”… (I know… real lousy joke.. ) Anyway I had heard about (and even downloaded a while back) VMware software to try running multiple OS’s on my computer but not until this very moment did I put in time to get it running. This is the scenario in brief. I have a machine running Ubuntu and I am working with a group where once in a while I need to edit/exchange some documents in MS office format. I have (barely) tried running wine but I do not really like the way it looks so I thought it was time to experiment with VMware. In otherwords, I am using a bulldozer to get rid of an anthill… looking at it another way, I also get the chance to explore testing software on multiple operating systems, all hosted on this one PC.

Basically I needed to have an installation of VMware in which I could run a windows XP OS as a guest and be able to share files between the windows guest OS and the host Ubuntu OS. For this task I figured I need only the VMware player that is available free. This player is able to run existing virtual machine (VM) configurations but does not allow creation of new ones. I was able to create and download a VM configuration using a VM creator at http://www.easyvmx.com. I found another website “how to create a windows XP virtual machine” which was also very handy for supplying the needed files and base instructions. So I shall not go into rewriting what I found there.

1. Installing the VMware player: The .tar.gz supplied by VMware Inc is pretty straight forward. It requires unzipping and uncompressing and then running the file vmware-install.pl. A lot of the options are suggested by default and most of them I only had to agree with.

2: Installing the guest OS: Using the files and instructions from “how to create a windows XP virtual machine”, I managed to get the windows XP guest OS running without much trouble.

3. Defining shared folders: I run into a wall when it came to creating shared folders. The instructions say that you should start VMware player and choose from the menu Player > Shared Folders. However, when I did this I found no shared folders defined and no possibility to define them from within the player. NOTE: This was because I had used a VM configuration from the “how to create..” website. If you create your vmx file from easyvmx.com, you are able to specify whether you want your virtual machine to have shared folders. I created a sample virtual machine from the easyvmx.com and copied out the section with the information about shared folders.

sharedFolder.option = “alwaysEnabled”
sharedFolder0.present = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.enabled = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.readAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.writeAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.hostPath = “/path/to/shared/folder”
sharedFolder0.guestName = “name-of-shared-folder”
sharedFolder0.expiration = “never”

This seemed to work. When I tried the Player > Shared Folders menu, I found the shared folder defined.

The last part to defining the shared folders is to locate them within your windows guest OS and map the shared folder as a network drive. I found that the shared folder was under \\.host\Shared Folders\name-of-shared-folder. Note that the only thing that changes in this address is the part “name-of-shared-folder” The rest stays exactly the same.

There is, however, one thing I am not 100% sure of… is whether you shall be able to see the shared folders with only the VMWare player installation. I did not have a chance to test this because initially I had no idea that the address for accessing the shared folders was literally the one mentioned previously, i.e. \\.host\Shared Folders\name-of-shared-folder; plus somewhere along the way I found a recommendation to install VMWare workstation so as to enable sharing of folders. I installed the workstation (trial version), in the same way as VMware player. After this I installed VMware tools using the menu VM > Install VMWare Tools; with that I was able to easily find the shared folder as described above.

So now I am able to use my windows guest OS and can edit files that are resident on the host OS.