iTunes Migrating To VirtualBox Guest Windows

OK I got iTunes running in my Guest Windows( VirtualBox term for the OS running through VirtualBox). Next my challenge was to migrate my iTunes Library from to my Guest Windows, so that my iPod will work exactly the same as before without affecting the existing synchronisation between iPod and existing iTunes Collection.

I moved all my Music to an external Hard Disk and I need to make iTunes library to point to their new physical location. The iTunes folder which has all the library data and other configuration files is "My Documents/My Music/iTunes" . I copied this folder to the same location in my Guest Windows.

There is a file in iTunes folder called iTunes Music Library.xml. I edited it to change the file location. It was just search and replace. But the thing is iTunes won't read the file. It has a binary representation of the file. Now we need to corrupt that file so that iTunes will build the binary again with updated folder location. Just open the file "iTunes Library.itl" and delete everything and save.

Next time iTunes start it will give a warning saying that "iTunes Library.itl" has been corrupted and it is going to rebuild it. After that is done iTunes will work like a charm , the same way as in your old Windows. Just connect your iPod and see it syncing what ever you have configured.

If you have configured to syn your photos, you will have to configure that again . Copy your photos folder to your Guest Windows and configure iPod to sync with that directory.

What I did for iTunes in Linux

I have an iPod dilemma was which application to use to manage it. There are great application in linux like Amarok,SongBird which are good but only to an extend( certainly only for iPod) . They don't support album art which I love to have. Songbird even corrupts existing ones u transferred from iTunes.
So I was determined to have only use my iPod with iTunes. So I decided to install windows using VirtualBox. The installation went smoothly and soon I logged into Windows XP. Networking was working fine. Ir just worked out of the box I was able to browse Internet. ( Of course I did allocate a good 512 MB RAM for my virtual windows and 5 GB of disk space).
But one and may be only one thing I wanted was not working - USB devices. There was a work around like this
sudo mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb/ -o devgid=130,devmode=666
Fortunately after I installed all windows updates even without this hack it worked out of the box :). Don't ask me what changed.
Then everythig got perfect the Windows worked perfectly fine inside VirtualBox.

KDE 4.2 on kubuntu

Hi all. I installed kde 4.2 on my kubuntu box from kubuntu kde experimental repository.
You can install it following instructions from following link.

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.2
I find it much better than beta releases and in one word awesome. But it still uses some kde 3 apps like knetwork manager, conversation .. which are replaced completely in jaunty. KDE guys have developed a nice network manager plasma applet which integrates controlling of your wired and wireless network to plasma ( the desktop shell for kde 4 series) itself. Quassel is the new irc client for kubuntu which is written in qt4. I installed it but haven't tried.

But sometimes I find my system very slow. Don't know what could be the reason. I am planning to install jaunty alpha and format my system to ext4 file system, heard it has better performance that ext3.

I am planning to start some development work for kde 4, if God blesses me with enough time and enthusiasm. But I seriously want to contribute back to the community.

Long absence

Hi everyone. It been a long time since I last posted something. Part of it can be blamed on my hectic work. ( I work for Yahoo). I am almost done with my part.
To describe the utilities I use for work , I am a fan of Eclipse.
http://www.eclipse.org/
We use cvs for our version control and merging and branching is an easy task in eclipse which is otherwise a pain using non GUI cvs command ( though cannot completely avoid ).
Then I started using vim heavily, though it does not have the heavy feature sets of eclipse. I know it can be extended a lot with plugins. But didn't get time for digging deep.

Now that I am finding more free time I will be posting more frequently.