Rubénerd!

If you've attempted to get your broadcom-wl device working on 32bit Fedora 15 and NetworkManager subsequently hides wireless connections completely, you may be running a PAE kernel. In which case, you need something else :)

Whoops

First, check your uname to confirm you're running a PAE kernel. If PAE doesn't appear in the string, you aren't. If it does, you are. Cheese Steak Jimmys.

% uname -a

I'm not a full time Fedora user so I can't confirm whether all 32 bit builds of Fedora 15 (or previous) had physical address extensions, but installing it on an older Athlon machine this afternoon with less than 4GB of memory still installed a PAE kernel. Interesting.

Installing

Make sure you've enabled the rpmfusion free and non-free repositories as per their FAQ. If you've installed kmod-wl already, remove it first:

% su -
# yum remove kmod-wl

Then install the PAE enabled version.

# yum install kmod-wl-PAE

This will pull across the broadcom-wl dependency. Restart, and you should have working wireless, assuming you have a BCM(4311, 4312, 4321 or 4322) based wireless card and that broadcom-wl is what you need.

So you want to get sound working in your Windows NT 4.0 VirtualBox virtual machine to relieve the glory days of your electronic youth, or some other reason you're too embarrased to discuss? Don't we all.

Caveats, mmm, must be Russian for bug larvae

Before we go any further, two quick points.

Unlike newer operating systems, Windows NT 4.0 is accorded VirtualBox additions that don't bother to set up the sound system. How dreadfully inconsiderate. Fortunately, after you've installed Service Pack 6 and the VirtualBox additions (in that order), it only takes a few minor adjustments to get sound.

The other point is, these instructions work and are current as of VirtualBox 3.2.10, build r66523. That's very close to a satanic number, just saying. I've been using NT 4 in VirtualBox for many years and the software has a habit of requiring different sound settings and drivers with subsequent releases.

The procedure

1. Click your Windows NT 4.0 VM and hit Settings. Under the Audio tab, change the Audio Controller to SoundBlaster 16.

2. Start the VM (always helps). Navigate to Start → Settings → Control Panel and choose Multimedia. Under the Devices tab, click Add....

3. Choose Create Labs Sound Blaster 1.X, Pro, 16 and hit OK. You'll need to specify the location of your Windows NT 4 installation files. I installed mine from CD, so I mounted the installation CD at this point, then hit OK

4. Leave the I/O Address at "220" and click Continue, then under MPU401 I/O Address, change the value from "330" to "Disable" and hit OK.

5. If you've mounted the installation CD, unmount it now otherwise when you restart it'll boot into that instead of your VM!

6. Hit Restart Now. Surprisingly for a Redmond product, this is an example of a voluntary restart.

Now go grab yourself a 2.x series version of Winamp from OldVersions.com and relive the old days!

Link arms, don't make them

• VirtualBox
• Microsoft Downloads for Windows NT
• Winamp 2.95 from OldVersions

Like the way it turned out, but guess I should have cleaned the fingerprints off the screen first!

After I had decided to replace Arch Linux with the latest version of FreeBSD on my Armada M300 (reasons for another post), I decided during the partitioning stage to save 512MiB of space. Why? So that instead of relegating my DOS nostalgia to virtual machines on my MacBook Pro I could dual boot this subnotebook with it! Genius right? Don't answer that.

When I first bought Connectix Virtual PC (Wikipedia) for my first iMac back in the day it came with a fully licenced ISO disc image of IBM PC DOS 2000 which essentially was PC DOS 7 with Y2K and Euro character support, so this morning I burned a copy of it to disc and loaded it up!

Even 2002 era, 600MHz hardware with 320MiB of RAM is still ridiculously high for DOS so it loads instantly. I'm also pleasantly surprised by how much of it works right out of the box! The generic drivers for the CD-ROM let me access the optical drive in the docking station; the bundled MOUSE.COM detects and lets me use the touchpad; and the bundled HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE can assign high memory without any the problems I had when running PC DOS in VirtualBox. When I've had more time to play around with it (and when I swap in UMBPCI, Cute Mouse etc) I'll post my experiences here. Suffice to say preliminary results are extremely encouraging.

Before anyone comments here asking why, I decided not to use FreeDOS because their Windows 3.x support is still in the experimental stage and it's still has some issues with some old games. Even though we also still have a valid licence for MS-DOS 6.22 I also chose not to use it because PC DOS 7 has some really nice features that can save much more conventional memory, plus it comes with all the tools Microsoft omitted from MS-DOS 5 like the DOSSHELL and I prefer the IBM E Editor to MS-DOS EDIT. I'm also intrigued by REXX having never used it before.

I think it was my good friend Felix Tanjono who said on Twitter that no amount of virtualisation is good enough, sometimes you just have to go all the way and dual boot! I agree. There's something cool about being asked whether you want to boot PC DOS or FreeBSD... the first OS I used versus the latest. I'm a sucker for symbolic crap like that.

So what'd you do on your Sunday? ^_^

DOS messages after a successful boot with generic CD-ROM drivers

Time for another eccentric, pointless how-to post concerning a topic probably nobody cares about! Once I've installed DOS in a virtual machine for some ridiculously fun nostalgia, the first thing I usually want to do is get the virtual CD-ROM drive working so I can more easily load in my ridiculous collection of old software from my childhood.

If you have a Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition boot disk, you're already half way there. If not, the easiest thing to do is grab yourself a pre-made disk image.

ASIDE: I'm not sure as to the legality of downloading old Microsoft disk images; to play it safe I suggest you have a legal licence for Windows 98. I am not a lawyer though, so don't take this as legal advice!

Boot your MS-DOS guest, then mount the virtual disk image. You'll need to copy over A:\MSCDEX.EXE and A:\OAKCDROM.SYS. I like to keep my file system organised so I copy them to C:\DOS\DRIVERS.

Now we need to edit C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT and add a line to load the driver with an 8 digit identifier and available drive letter. If you don't have a high memory manager installed, drop the LOADHIGH/LH command.

LH C:\DOS\DRIVERS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:LISAONO

Then edit C:\CONFIG.SYS and add the new device driver with the same identifier you used before. Again, if you don't have a high memory manager, swap DEVICEHIGH to DEVICE. You'll also need a LASTDRIVE command so there's a free drive letter to use:

LASTDRIVE=Z
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\DRIVERS\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:LISAONO

Unmount your disk image and reboot... and enjoy a CD-ROM on DOS! Most people didn't have CD-ROMs at the time of DOS, so consider yourself lucky!

Since the older DOS days there have been some more memory efficient device drivers developed than these Oak and Microsoft ones, but generally these are a good pair to start with because they're the most compatible. In a future post I'll be talking about alternative drivers.

The FreeBSD Debian drivers rant episode!

Relevant links:

• The FreeBSD Project
• Debian GNU/Linux AMD64 Port
• NVIDIA UNIX Drivers
• DistroWatch

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 27:00, 12.4MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

For my university studies and to keep up to date with what's happening in the Linux world (given I'm a FreeBSD guy mostly) I decided to dual boot my new desktop machine with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch. In the past I'd always used Slackware to fill this role, but I figured I'd just try something new.

ASIDE: "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch" just doesn't roll off the tongue as well as "Slackware Linux 12" or "FreeBSD 7.0 Release". A ridiculously pointless observation, but one that I believe deserves recognition. And it would look just fab printed on a shirt.

Within a few minutes of starting the initial install, I got the following error:

No common CD-ROM drive was detected? Are they serious?

Using the exact same optical drive I've been able to install the latest versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Slackware Linux, not to mention a creaky old version of Windows 2000 and even IBM OS/2 Warp! And yet Debian GNU/Linux cannot even detect the drive after the initial boot phase?

I took it to be a sign to keep using Slackware for my Linux partitions. It's a shame, I was looking forward to seeing why people seem to love apt-get so much; I guess it's back to my FreeBSD desktop with the ports collection, and Slackware Linux with pkgsrc. Not that I'm complaining, it's still my favourite distribution!