I’m old school. I don’t have one of those fancy multimedia keyboards, but I do have one of those new fancy Windows-keyboards. That’s right – I’ve now got three extra keys I can’t really use for anything. I tried to map Win+F11 and Win+F12 to adjust my volume in Gnome, but no dice – it just displays Super R the moment I hit the Win-key. But there is a solution 
The solution is to redefine the Win-key behaviour. Open up System » Keyboard » Preferences, select the Layout tab, click Latyout Options… and change Alt/Win key behaviour from Default to Hyper is mapped to Win-keys.
I went straight back to Keyboard Shortcuts and tried Win+F11 again – this time I got Mod4+F11, proving that the Win-key now works as a modifier instead of a normal key:
Uncategorized
Gnome, Keyboard, WinKeys, X11, Xorg
I couldn’t find any updated information on this online, so this is my ultra short guide to converting VMWare disk images to VirtualBox. This is tested with VirtualBox 3.0.0 under Fedora 11.
Step one is to concatenate fragmented VMWare images. This might not me necessary in your case, but we’ll do it anyway. Let’s assume the image you want to convert is called leopard-fragmented.vmdk:
vdiskmanager -r leopard-fragmented.vmdk leopard.vmdk
Now you’re got a rather huge VMWare disk image file, and we’ll use qemu to convert it into a raw disk image:
qemu-img convert leopard.vmdk leopard.bin
This will take a while, and you’ll probably end up with a less-than-huge file since this is the raw file, without any fancy compression. Now you’ll want to convert this to the VirtualBox disk format, vdi:
VBoxManage convertfromraw leopard.bin leopard.vdi
The vdi ended up being around 7GB – more or less the exact size of the vmdk file. The temporary bin file was 32GB though. Be sure you’re got enough room on your disk for this job.
Uncategorized
Fedora, Fedora11, Linux, VirtualBox, VMWare
