lefty mouse mess in Fedora under VM on Mac

OK. So here's a little humorous incident that happened to me while I was getting the Fedora virtual machine to run under the Mac.

The Fedora VM that I imported to my MacBook Pro was originally created on my PC. On my PC, I occasionally swap the left and the right mouse buttons, depending upon the amount of carpal tunnel I am experiencing in either hand. At the time I built out the Fedora virtual machine, Fedora was configured to use a left-handed mouse. When I moved the VM over to my MacBook Pro and started it up, I saw that when I clicked the mouse button, the alternative/properties menus appeared as if I had clicked the right mouse button in a left-handed mouse configuration! Yarg! Navigating the menus proved frustrating this way, because clicking on the menus just gave me the few dumb right-mouse-click options:
Help
Edit
Remove From Panel
Lock to Panel

Also, in my ignorance, I didn't know the correct key combinations to get to the menus. I poked around on google a bit on which Core 6 system file on controlled the left/right mouse selection and found some reference to /etc/sysconfig/mouse. This file didn't exist on my system. Next, /etc/X11/xorg.conf could have had some mouse configuration commands, but alas, my xorg.conf was clean of any mouse controls.

What was an idiot to do?

Well, when you don't know what you're doing, redo the setup! So, I re-ran "setup" and changed the Xconfiguration in a terminal window.

Lame? Of course! But sometimes you just get tired of researching ALL the time.

Mental note: for next time, find out the key combination to get to the menus in Fedora Core 6. Life will be SO much easier that way.

Fedora Core 6 in Parallels on a MacBook Pro blowup

I've been away at Web2.0 in San Francisco, but I thought I'd drop a quick entry regarding my experience with Parallels Desktop for Mac (Intel Mac) and my new MacBook Pro. In order to run Cinelerra, I installed Parallels on my brand spanking new MacBook Pro and wouldn't you know it, I got this lovely message when the new install of Core 6 booted up:
(0)Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I briefly googled that message, but you know, when you just need to get something working and are tired of doing the research, fall back on the tried and true. In that vein, I found that VMware's Fusion product was available in beta for the Mac. Oooh. Beta..that might not be so good. But since I already had a Fedora Core 6 installation that had everything I needed already running in VMware Server, I thought I'd give it a try. Here's the URL for the beta download..you'll have to register first:
http://register.vmware.com/content/beta/fusion/registration.html

Once I downloaded and installed fusion, I needed to bring over my 8GB Core 6 virtual machine from my PC. I zipped up the entire VM directory and found that zip very kindly reduced the size of the VMDK file from 8GB to 2.8GB. Cool! As I copied the zip over the network, I noticed it was taking a very, very long time. So I stopped the transfer, unplugged my network connections from my PC and Mac and wired them together with a crossover cable. Wired in this way, I increased my download speed from 500Kbps to 5400Kbps! Sweet!

Once the zip file had copied to the Mac, I unzipped it to my home directory and then created a new virtual machine from my pre-existing VM.

This process was a bit confusing at first. But what you need to do to utilize an existing VMware virtual machine is to select "Use an Existing virtual disk" under the Advanced Disk Options on the Virtual Hard Disk step of the create new virtual machine process:




Once I figured that little tricky bit out, I was good to go! I clicked Start on my newly created virtual machine et Voila! She came up! I turned off debugging as this seemed to slow things down a bit and made sure to install VMware tools for better mouse and graphic behavior.

Long live VMware!

ntfs kernel for Fedora Core 4

Ah yes..it IS this simple!
yum install kernel-module-ntfs-$(uname -r)