Kai Mai's Blog - Take Back the Web - Nodes for windows

Ubuntu 8 on VirtualBox Hosted on Windows

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:57:49 -0700

I recently got a Macbook Pro. But I can no longer use VMWare on Mac to run Linux because VMWare charges for its Fusion player on Mac. Fortunately, I can use VirtualBox which is free for all platforms.

Here are the steps to get Ubuntu 8(Guest) up and running in VirtualBox on Windows(Host):

Download the ISO version of Ubuntu 8
Open VirtualBox. Create a new image. I gave it a 16GB virtual disk.
Attach the Ubuntu ISO image as cd-rom
make sure the boot sequence starts with cd-rom

Tags: linux windows ubuntu vmware virtualbox

Windows 2000 can’t boot because of \Winnt\System32\Config\System missing error. Knoppix to Rescue

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 14:28:54 -0700

Two days ago, I rebooted my windows 2000 laptop. It showed me a blank screen just right after I saw the windows booting message. There’s a flash of a screen showing some error messages. But it went off t oo quickly, and I couldn’t really see them.

I used a Knoppix live CD to boot up my laptop and did “fsck”(it’s like scandisk in windows) on the drive. But it doesn’t help. Then booting the laptop with Knoppix, I mounted the windows partition as writable. I edited “c:\boot.ini” to add “/fastdetect /bootlog /sos /safeboot /debug” to the end of the line “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" “

Tags: windows

Fun with Windows Live

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:30:20 -0800

You can have some fun with Microsoft's live.com which just went live.

Click here to see a fun message. In case you don't see anything fun because they fix it already, here's
the screen capture

The trick is found at digg.com.

I am amused by the use of this kind of trick to display an error message at live.com, which is supposed to provide web 2.0 services to combat Google. Isn't that Microsoft has been emphasizing on security for a long...long time? It seems Windows Live just made phishers' life easier.

Tags: windows live security