Rodney Fletcher’s Blog

After upgrading to Firefox 3 (which I love, btw), I have been troubled by the use of my old extensions.

Being a web developer, I miss some of my old plugins for validating HTML and I really missed the snipshot plugin, which is so handy for quick image resizes.

So here’s how you can set Firefox to ignore the plugin version and just use it with your updated install:

• Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
• Rich click on the white background that comes up, anywhere you like.
• make a new boolean, called extensions.checkCompatibility.
• Assign it to false.

That’s pretty much it. You just restart Firefox and your old plugins should be back. If you have problems with any of them… well then, I guess you need to get updates for those plugins or find alternatives; however it’s pretty rare to have problems with common plugins, even when doing the above.

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I have recently been in the very unfortunate position of needing to get data off a deceased Linux system, which was running a software RAID-1 Linux LVM.

Normally, getting data off such drives is fairly simple – you put them in another build and copy the data. However for a long list of reasons, this wasn’t possible. In short, the only option I had available was to boot the dead system of a Live CD of Fedora 9 and then attempt to get the data onto a USB hard drive.

The problem was, my external USB hard drive was NTFS and couldn’t be made FAT as the files I needed are all larger than 32GB (which is the largest size a FAT partition can get to, let alone file size, which I think is around 2GB). The large files are VMWare disks, if you’re wondering.

The disk needed to remain visible to Windows, so I could load up the VMWare sessions ASAP, which meant NTFS it needed to stay.

So here’s the “howto” bit, in keeping with my policy of blogging anything I think I might need to remember in future.

How do you mount an NTFS permission in read/write, within Linux?

Firstly, you need ntfs-3g installed. If you don’t have it, you should be able to grab it with up2date, yum, apt-get etc. On a RedHat variant, like Fedora, you can see if it’s there as such:

{please note: all as root}

rpm -q ntfs-3g

Fortunately, I can see it happily sitting there: ntfs-3g-1.2506.1.fc.x86_64.

Now all I needed to do was mount it. This is just the mount command, with a few extra options:

Firstly, find the drive:
fdisk -l (that’s a lowercase L btw)

Here I see I am after /dev/sdb1

Now I just make a folder to mount it to:
mkdir /media/ntfs
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/ntfs -t ntfs-3g -rw -o umask=0000

If that tells you the drive wasn’t shut down cleanly (and it probably will) and you need to tell Windows to let go kindly, just repeat as follows:
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/ntfs/ -t ntfs-3g -rw -o force

There. Pretty simple. I can now copy my precious files to my NTFS drive and use them on my Windows PC, while I wait for Linux to reinstall on the crashed box.

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I have found my Windows VM sessions clock are often way out of whack. A bit of investigation found that this is actually related to the Linux OS host OS I am running VMWare on.

SO how to fix it?

VMWare have a thread on this issue.

Basically you need to:
1. Stop VMWare. This can be done as follows (assumption RedHat variant):
[root@selene ~]# service vmware stop
This will stop your VM services and any running sessions – so close them gracefully first.

2. Find your maximum theoretical CPU frequency.
[root@selene ~]# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq
This will give a result something like: 2000000.

3. Edit your VMWare config file /etc/vmware/config and insert the following (with your CPU speed):
host.cpukHz = 2000000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

4. Restart VMWare (service vmware start) and you’re done.

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