a presence I’ve not felt since…

As time passes more and more applications are web-based. The World Wide Web has switched from being a place where you basically see static data to a place where everything is interactive.

Good examples of this are wikis and weblogs: two of the most remarkable kinds of applications that have appeared in recent years and can be used with nothing more than a web browser. Web applications are nice as they allow you to do the same job no matter where you are: at home, at work, at an internet cafe, at a friend’s house, …

One of the biggest problems of this is that a web browser is not really suited for all kinds of tasks. Example: a wiki is a great tool because you can edit a page very quickly, but the browser itself is a crappy editor. It lets you do very basic things besides moving around with the cursor keys, cutting and pasting text.

A great solution for this problem is Mozex, a Firefox extension that lets you use external programs for some of the actions that you normally do with the browser, including the editing of text areas. You just press a key combination and a text editor pops up with the text of the area that you have selected. Very easy to use.

Here’s an example of my browser editing the Wikipedia using my favourite text editor (click on the image):

A great tool. I’m sure you’ll like it 😉

Today, 23 April is the 25th anniversary of the greatest computer ever made…

25 years! I’m growing old…

Some friends have been asking me how to use QEMU. While there are many other virtualization packages (such as Virtual Box, KVM or the non-free VMware Player), QEMU has been around for a while, it’s already packaged in Debian stable and it’s really easy to use.

Moreover, the (optional) kernel accelerator kqemu has been released under the GPL a couple of months ago, so it’s a good moment to give QEMU a try.

Let’s see the basic usage:

• Install QEMU.
  $ apt-get install qemu
• Create a hard disk image. It’s 2 GB in this example, but don’t worry about the size of the file, it will grow dinamically as you write data to it.
  $ qemu-img create -f qcow hd.img 2G
• Install things in your new hard disk image. You can boot from a CD-ROM, or an ISO image, a floppy…
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom cdimage.iso -boot d
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda /dev/fd0 -boot a
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda floppy.img -boot a
• Once the system is installed in your virtual hard disk, you can boot directly from it:
  $ qemu -hda hd.img
• Or you can forget about hard disks and just use a bootable CD:
  $ qemu -cdrom livecd.iso

And that’s it! QEMU has built-in SMB, TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers. Everything in user space, so you don’t need special permissions nor additional configuration: no kernel modules, no tun/tap interfaces… nothing!. I said it was very easy to use, didn’t I? 😉

Of course there’s a lot more, but you won’t need it for the basic usage.

If you’re too lazy to install an operating system inside QEMU, you can download a hard disk image built by someone else. Note that QEMU can read the VMware disk format, so you’ve got a really big collection of images ready to work.

And if you want a bit more, you can compile the kqemu kernel accelerator, which will make QEMU run faster.

Now I can remember the old times when I first installed Debian…

DudesConf is starting in less than 10 days!

DudesConf is a DebConf-like meeting for Spanish-speaking Debian developers that will take place in Corunha University from 13 to 15 April 2007.

The program includes several talks, workshops, bug-squashing parties and BOFs. I’m sure that we’ll have a great time and of course it will be a great opportunity to meet Debian people from everywhere.

Just like other free software-related events such as Guademy, GUADEC-ES and GUADEC, DudesConf is sponsored by Igalia.

See you there!!