Previously, I had posted about good ole Windows 1.0. Oh the memories! Well, if that wasn’t enough retro for you, here’s some Windows/386 nostalgia.
In addition to running multiple Windows applications, Windows/386 was able to run multiple DOS programs simultaneously utilizing the 80386 CPU’s protected (a.k.a. virtual 8086) mode. Each program would get its own virtual address space as if it had all the RAM to itself (less a few kilobytes of overhead for the OS to manage everything). And it looked like…OS/2! Even the promo video lauded that fact.
And here it is, the Windows/386 promo video. Warning: Make sure you’re sitting down.
Download a copy of Windows/386 (1813 KB). Oh, you only have an old 286 PC (a.k.a. IBM PC/AT) handy? There was a 286 version of Windows as well: Windows/286 (2041 KB).
For some reason, Pidgin, which is included in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, has no notification sounds even though other applications do play properly. Whether I selected Automatic or ALSA as the output method, no sounds would play. Here’s how I fixed it.
In Pidgin, select Preferences from the Tools menu (or press Ctrl+P)
Click on the Sounds tab
In the Method drop down list, select Command
In the Sound command text box, enter the following: aplay %s
Select an event with an assigned sound from the Sound Events list
Click the Test button. You should now hear the notification sound
Click the Close button
Aplay is the command-line ALSA sound player. I tested it on the command line and it played audio files just fine. So, it also works in Pidgin.
Normally, I install programs from the Ubuntu repositories but today I needed to install a VPN client from a tarball using a shell script. When I ran the included install.sh file, I got a couple syntax errors:
install.sh: 22: function: not found install.sh: 24: Syntax error: “}” unexpected
Looking inside the script, I saw that it runs /bin/sh. Nothing unusual there. Well, it turns out that on Ubuntu, sh is a symlink to dash. Apparently, since the Edgy version of Ubuntu, sh has been pointing to dash and causing various compatibility problems with custom scripts meant for sh. I’m running Gutsy so my sh points to dash as well.
Two quick ways to fix the problem is to either change #!/bin/sh in the script file to #!/bin/bash (which I did) or change the symlink for /bin/sh to point to bash instead of dash. I may opt for the latter but the former worked just fine to get my VPN client installed.
For some reason, Pidgin, which is included in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, has no notification sounds even though other applications do play properly. Whether I selected Automatic or ALSA as the output method, no sounds would play. Here’s how I fixed it.
