Installing Windows Live Messenger 2009 on 64-bit XP

Posted in HowTo - Windows on March 17, 2009 by aristomagnus


Windows Live Messenger MobileImage via Wikipedia

Since Microsoft’s own installer refused to acknowledge WindowsXP 64bit as an appropriate platform to install Windows Live Messenger 2009, we have to find a few tricks to get around the limitations.

  1. Download the MSI file here
  2. Download the Segoe UI Font here
  3. Download Windows Live Communcations Platform here
  4. Download Microsoft Visual Studio Runtime here
  5. Download Microsoft Application Error Reporting (32-bit and 64-bit)
  6. Just drag and drop the Segoe UI font from the ZIP file in step 2 above into your Fonts folder. You can ignore the rest
  7. Double-click on all the other MSI files (step 3, 4, 5) to install them
  8. Now double-click on the Messenger 2009 MSI file to install it.

Voila~! Now you have the new Windows Live Messenger 2009 installed on your 64-bit XP, and ready to run :)

From:  http://micro.foxtwo.org/post/71089074/installing-windows-live-messenger-2009-on-64-bit-xp

Thanks dude!

How to install iTunes 64 bits on Windows XP 64 / Work with iPhone!

Posted in HowTo - Windows on March 14, 2009 by aristomagnus

From: http://yukichigai.googlepages.com/iphonex64
A guide for lovers

With the release of iTunes 7.6 comes official support for the 64-bit versions of Vista, a feature which has been long overdue given the rising number of 64-bit supporters out there.  Unfortunately in their infinite wisdom (and, really, a move that was sort of expected given the idiotic way they’ve handled Windows support in the past) Apple’s 64-bit iTunes installer doesn’t support XP x64 or Server 2003 x64.  Or so it claims, anyway.  Turns out, the 64-bit version of iTunes contains no drivers that are not XP/2k3 x64 compatible, save for the CD-burning drivers.  With some free utilities and a little bit of effort, it’s possible to get iTunes – and more importantly iPhone support – working under XP/2k3 x64.

* * LAST UPDATE – 10-27-2008 – iTunes version 8.01 (Screen shots not updated) * *

Getting iTunes fully up and running on XP/2k3 x64 isn’t a precisely straightforward process. First of all, it requires the use of a couple additional utilities (all free fortunately) in addition to having the iTunes 64-bit installer saved on your computer. For this process you will need to download the following things:

The latest x64 version of 7-zip

Microsoft Orca (Or get it out of this CAB file)

The latest version of QuickTime (7.4.0.91 at writing time)

The 64-bit version of iTunes (You can always get the most current link from here)

You should also consider downloading these files, which are generally a good idea for running iTunes in a 64-bit Windows environment:

GEAR Software 64-bit CD burning drivers: Apple uses the 32-bit versions of these drivers to enable CD burning/ripping in iTunes. Installing these after installing iTunes should allow you to use iTunes’ built-in CD burning option in XP x64.

Xiph.Org: QuickTime Components: This package allows you to load up any of the Xiph-supported formats (Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc.) in QuickTime, and thus in iTunes as well. You’ll still have to use iTunes’ “Convert to AAC” option on these files before you can sync them with your iPhone or iPod, but at least they’ll show up in your music library.

Once you download all the files, do the following:

Install both 7-zip and Orca. 7-zip won’t overwrite any of your file preferences if you prefer something like WinRAR; however, I highly recommend you set it to handle all compressed file types (save for .CAB and .ZIP, as they have integrated Windows support) since it’s free and 64-bit native. If you downloaded the CAB file for Orca, extract the file that starts with “ORCA_MSI” and rename it “ORCA.msi”, then run it.

Now you need to use 7-zip to open the iTunes installer file. If you enabled 7-zip’s shell integration, just right click as shown in the image above. Otherwise, run 7-zip, navigate to the folder where the iTunes file is, then select it and go to “Open archive”.

Unless your iTunes installer is corrupted you should get a window like the one above. Select all the files and extract them to a separate folder somewhere. (I made a sub-folder simply called “iTunes”)

From the files you’ve just extracted, select “AppleMobleDeviceSupport64.msi” and run it. Click through all the usual screens, agree to the license agreement, and after waiting a while dismiss the Windows warning screen that tells you the driver being installed is unsigned and thus may cause your computer to explode or make your face melt off like that Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Congrats, you’ve just installed the 64-bit iPhone driver in XP x64. (Though you still need to force the iPhone to use the new driver, described a ways down) “Vista only” my ass. Remind me why Apple won’t let you install this on XP x64 again?

With that amazingly complex step out of the way, now you need to install QuickTime. For some reason the Quicktime.msi file won’t work right under x64 unless it’s part of a compiled installation package, so find the separate QuickTime installer you downloaded earlier and run it. (And agree to the license agreement, blah blah blah)

Now that QuickTime is installed there’s nothing preventing iTunes64.msi from installing successfully, except for the completely unnecessary Operating System restriction Apple decided to include in the installer. Fortunately this can be fixed quite easily. Right-click the file and go to “Edit with Orca”.

Once Orca opens the file scroll down the left pane until you get to “LaunchCondition”, then select it. From here you have two options:

  1. The right pane will show a few entries, the second of which should be “VersionNT64>=600″. Click it a few times and the entry should change to let you edit it; when it does, change “600″ to “501″. Click anywhere else on the window to confirm your changes, then select “Save” from the file menu and close Orca.
  2. Delete the “LaunchCondition” tab completely by right-clicking it and selecting “Drop Table”.  Next select “InstallUISequence” in the left pane, then find “LaunchConditions” in the right pane. (Click the “Action” tab at the top of the right pane to alphebetize the list) Delete it by right-clicking and selecting “Drop Row”.  Select “InstallExecuteSequence” from the left pane, then find and locate “LaunchConditions” in the right pane and delete that as well.  Save the file and close it.

Option (a) is the most simple, but some systems encounter an error (2229) which prevents the 8.0+ installer from running after it is modified.  In those instances option (b) should do the trick, though the modified installer might fail to notice certain other things the LaunchCondition table is set up to check. (e.g. driver install failure, iTunes still running, etc.)

Run the now much more cooperative iTunes64.msi and agree to all the licensing jazz, then sit back and let it do its thing. You may notice an error or two as it progresses; those are due to the aforementioned CD burning driver issue. If you want iTunes to support CD burning/ripping later, or just don’t want to see the annoying “iTunes wasn’t installed properly” screen every time you run the program, you should also install the optional GEAR drivers I linked to at the beginning.

Regardless of what you plan to do about CD burning, when iTunes finishes do not run it immediately. There’s still one more step you need to do to get the iPhone working before you run iTunes.

With all those (relatively) simple tasks you knew there had to be a catch somewhere. Well here it is, though most of us who have dealt with XP x64 driver issues are probably familiar with it by now For those who aren’t, I’ll present it in list form to make it easily readable. Plug in your iPhone, then do the following:

  • Open System Properties (in the Control Panel, or right-click “My Computer” and select “Properties”), then go to the Hardware tab and click the “Device Manager” button.
  • Scroll down the list until you reach “Universal Serial Bus controllers”. Double-click it to expand it, then look for “Apple iPhone” in the list. If it’s there you can skip the rest of this. If not, go to the next step in this list.
  • Next find the section “Imaging Devices”. Double-click it to expand it, then right-click the “Apple iPhone” entry and go to “Properties”.
  • Go to the Driver tab and click the “Update Driver” button
  • When the Hardware Update Wizard opens up, it may ask if you want to connect to Windows Update. select “No, not this time” and hit Next.
  • On the next screen, select “Install for a list or specific location” and click Next.
  • On the next screen, select “Don’t search…” (blah blah blah) and hit Next.
  • The next screen should show you two entries, “Digital Still Camera” and “Apple Mobile Device USB Driver”. (or similar) Select “Apple Mobile Device USB Driver” and click Next.
  • After a while you will be presented with that same “this driver might make your face melt off” warning screen from earlier. Click “Continue Anyway”. (Though if you do I can’t guarantee that your face won’t melt off)
  • When the install process finally completes hit Finish, then close out all the windows you’ve opened.

If everything went smoothly you can now run iTunes. If not… well I don’t know what to do, actually. Try again?

At last, it’s time to run iTunes! Find it in your start menu and run it; you should get the standard License Agreement screen after a while. If it takes too long to start, however, you may need to check the Task Manager to see what the hell is going on. Before that, though, try using Alt+Tab to scroll through your running programs and see if the iTunes window has been hidden behind something else. (For some reason iTunes 7.6 doesn’t always grab focus when it runs) If the window isn’t there or won’t come up, load up Task Manager by hitting CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. (Or right-click the taskbar and run it from there) Go to the Processes tab and scroll down until you find “iTunes.exe * 32″. If it’s just sitting there using no CPU resources select it and hit “End Process”. Otherwise you should wait until it isn’t using any resources, since it may still come up.

If you do wind up using “End Process” to stop iTunes from running, simply run it again. It should come up this time.

Once it’s running you can proceed as normal. The only weird issue is that iTunes will tell you that CD burning support isn’t enabled every time you run it, which while annoying isn’t a real problem.  If you do want to get rid of that annoying little screen though, here’s a quick, image-less walk-through of how to do it:

  • If you haven’t already installed the 64-bit GEAR CD Drivers I linked to at the beginning, do so now.
  • Go to your Windows directory (should be C:\Windows, unless you’re dual-booting or something) and create a folder called “Sysnative”, then another one inside that folder called “drivers”.
  • Go to system32\drivers and find the file “GEARAspiWDM.sys”.  Copy (do not move) the file to the “drivers” folder you created above. (Should be C:\Windows\Sysnative\drivers)

That’s it.  That’s all it takes to get rid of the odd error message, which (I think) is caused by the iTunes setup looking in the default Vista path for drivers and nowhere else.

Anyway…

Transferring files (music at least) to the iPhone does work, as shown in this screenshot. (Yeah, only 14 files, I know. It was my first test) I can’t speak as to other features like syncing with the Windows or Outlook Address Book yet, but the music part of Syncing is really the important part, and it works.

Enjoy your iPhone the way it was meant to be used. (No thanks to the idiots who restricted the iTunes 7.6 installer)

Configure Tomcat 6, Java 6 on CentOS 5.2 (With apache on port 8080)

Posted in HowTo - Linux on February 19, 2009 by aristomagnus

From: http://www.satollo.com/english/programming/tomcat-5-java-6-on-centos-52

Changed: Was configured for Tomcat 5, work well on Tomcat 6

I’m not very smart on installing packages on Linux, but today I need to configure a Tomcat on a CentOS 5.2. The CentOS 5.2 has Tomcat 6 available as yum package, with gcc-java. But Java gurus tell me to use the original Sun JDK to run Tomcat without problems.

I know that Tomcat can run with a JRE which is a lot smaller, so I started with download the Java JRE 6 Update 11 from here.

I choosed Linux/Multilanguage and accepted the Sun Terms. I downloaded the jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin file wich is an autoinstaller for Linux.

After uploading the file in the /root dir, I did a chmod to make the file executable:

chmod u+x jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin

and then ran it

./jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin

I needed to accept the long legal stuff by Sun, inputing a “yes” at the end of the text (press spacebar many time to reach the end).

I got the jre folder that I have to move into /usr or something. Not really satisfying me. Why not to try with an rpm, always from the Sun download page?

The file is called jre-6u11-linux-i586-rpm.bin. Make it executable, run it (as the previous file), accept the legal stuff and you have an rpm which will be automatically installed.

The JRE will e installed in:

/usr/java/jre1.6.0_11/

Now it’s time form Tomcat 5. I used the version 5.5.26, not the latest 5.5.27: we have problem with some JSP containing XML fragments which wouldn’t compile.

Tomcat 5 can be download from the archives: pick the file apache-tomcat-5.5.26.tar.gz. Moved it on /root I gunzipped it:

gunzip apache-tomcat-5.5.26.tar.gz  // change to tomcat6

and then untared (I know Linux guru, all those thing can e done with a single compact command line, but it take more time to read the man pages compared to run two separate and clear commenads).

tar xvf apache-tomcat-5.5.26.tar // change to tomcat6

I got the apache-tomcat-5.5.26 folder which I moved to /usr/tomcat. I like the simple things and not the hyper parametric future minded configurations…

mv apache-tomcat-5.5.26 /usr/tomcat // change to tomcat6

Now I need some script to run Tomcat as a deman, to put in /etc/init.d. I found this page and modified the script to match my path.

Pay attention: I need Tomcat to run on port 80, so I made it to run as root. If you want to make it run as another user (like tomact) but still responding on port 80, either you need to put in front of it Apache or add some (for me) strange rules to iptables.

tomcat deamon linux bash script

The file needed to be copied in /etc/init.d, and then

chown root:root /etc/init.d/tomcat

chmod a+x /etc/init.d/tomcat

To install the script for various runlevels, I ran

/sbin/chkconfig –add tomcat

it will be marked as “on” for runlevel 3, 4, 5 (I’m interest in rulevel 5). To see the configuration of all services, you can run

/sbin/chkconfig –list

On my server Apache was installed and running and I need to stop it to free the port 80. So I marked it as “off” for every runlevel:

/sbin/chkconfig httpd off

and then I stopped it:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop

Now it’s time to configure and then try to run Tomcat. Firstly I changed the configuration

/usr/tomcat/server.xml

to make it listen to the port 80. Find the string port=”8080″ and change it to port=”80″. Easy.

To run Tomcat has to be configured with the Java path. Remember we are using a JRE so we need to set the environement variable JRE_HOME (not the JAVA_HOME). I did it creating the file “setenv.sh” in /usr/tocat/bin. This file is used by startup and shutdown scripts, without modify them or the catalina.sh script (this is a good practice for future Tomcat upgrade).

The file content will be:

export JRE_HOME=/usr/java/latest
export CATALINA_PID=/var/run/tomcat.pid

The CATALINA_PID variable force Tomcat to create the pid file of the process, useful to kill it. Note that a shutdown of Tomcat can be done in two way. With the call:

/usr/tomcat/bin/shutdown

the same call made from our deamon script, or

/usr/tomcat/bin/shutdown -force

which make the script to wait a little and if the process doesn’t terminate it will be killed (using the pid). You can modify the deamon script to shutdown with “force” (I do it everytime).

To start and stop Tomcat:

/etc/init.d/tomcat start

/etc/init.d/tomcat stop

You can also run apache server on another port, for example 8080. You need to change one line  on apache config

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Change:

Listen 80

to

Listen 8080

Then start apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd start

Ubuntu Pocket Guide (PDF download)

Posted in HowTo - Linux on February 6, 2009 by aristomagnus

http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/download.html

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