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With the latest release of QEMU (0.5.4), it now boots Win2k perfectly.  I’ve fixed a small bug in the code preventing the Bochs VBE display driver from working and the full-color support looks awesome.  All but the first screenshot are running 1024x768x16bpp visuals.

Note that XP should boot full-color fine without the patch since, AFAIK, it has full VESA 2.0 support built-in.  You should be able to get 8-32 bpp visuals from the default Standard VGA driver.

Also, notice that QEMU runs Firefox flawlessly.  It’s a good test for full-color screens.

Are you a .NET coder?  Using continuous integration, or want to?  If so, check out Draco.NET.

Draco.NET now has a client-side GUI.  It can monitor your check-in builds and trigger a forced or normal build.  It sits in your system tray and hides itself when not needed.

You’ll need to build Draco from CVS to get this particular feature.  With any luck, there will be a 1.5 release soon and 1.6 betas soon after!

I’m a sucker for i386 on i386 emulation.  Check out QEMU booting Win2k in Linux:

I think the screenshot window clipped the first shot by accident as it was coming up.  Oh well.  Still very, very cool.

Seems to take a while to enumerate devices after install (still happening right now).  I’ll post more shots later if it works.

Okay, I’ll admit it.  My mind is racing with extension ideas right now.  May as well dump one here for future reference.

So, here’s my cool extension idea: take all of the bookmarks in the browser and sync them with a central server via a webservice.  Allow deep custom categorization of bookmarks and keep the folder structure on the server.  For extra credit, archive a current copy of the page for future reference if the page goes away.  If you have extra time, write an IE plugin (or external program) that does the same thing.

Now, where to host such a webservice?

Wow.  You can run this script to automatically install IE6 in Linux. 

It took me a while to figure something out that works, but I’ve figured out a way to organize my filters in Thunderbird.  Since I have something like 40 rules, editing and understanding them was started to become difficult. 

My solution?  I started adding fake filters as separator lines between the groups of filters.  They now look like this:

--- People Filters ---
Person A
Person B
--- Mailing Lists ---
List A
List B
--- Miscellaneous ---
Spam
Viruses

Vivendi Universal is releasing, for free (gratis), two of my favorite games ever: Tribes 1 & 2.  This release is geared at getting games’ juices fired up in anticipation of Tribes 3. 

I’m glad to see that people realize that freeing abandonware can be useful.

After installing Mozilla Thunderbird yesterday, all I can say is “wow!”  Not only is the look ultra-slick and refreshing, but it’s so fast that it really does deserve to be alongside an amazing browser like Firefox.  They’ve done such a great job that people nearby just start using it without even saying anything.

Before Thunderbird I wasn’t willing to push the Mozilla mail client on anyone.  I was using it before and, while it was fast, it looked like a relic of the Netscape 4.0 days.  As well, you needed to match it with the Mozilla browser.  Also fast, but not an end-user polished package.

rml posted some use cases for Project Utopia.  If they can solve these issues smoothly (which I’m pretty sure they’ll pull off), Linux will take a big jump in terms of general plug’n’play usability.

Unfortunately, the use cases miss out on one of my favorite new features - multi-session X.  You can easily start two X servers on two different virtual consoles right now, but the new gdm stuff will support suspending and resuming X sessions, as well as nested X servers.  This will help Linux catch up to the cool multi-user login features of Windows XP.