Android X86

My Android phone has died on me last week. Suddenly I had an issue. Bunch of stuff I had on it was not available anywhere else. Not on Windows and especially not on crusty Nokia 6300 I used as a replacement. I had to get another Android. My choice fell onto running Android x86 in VirtualBox.

First step was creating virtual machine. Upon creation I selected Linux 2.6, increased memory to 1024, and got 8 GB disk ready. After machine was created, I disabled absolute pointing device (System) and changed network adapter type to PCnet-FAST III (Network).

I started machine with Android x86 live CD (android-x86-4.3-20130725) and went for installation. There I was met with slightly annoying partition creation (New, Primary, Bootable, Write, Quit) and disk format selection (ext3). I installed GRUB and went for writable system partition. One reboot later (don’t forget to remove DVD) and my new Android device is ready.

Before I could do anything I had to go to Machine menu and disable mouse pointer integration (; remember host key for exit) in order to click-through setup options. And then I noticed that my network wasn’t working and screen was a bit weird size-wise. So I rebooted and selected Debug mode upon next boot.

There I went on to edit /android/system/etc/init.sh (remember vi) and I added new line with netcfg eth0 dhcp near the end (just before return 0). For fixing up graphics, solution was in editing /mnt/grub/menu.lst (vi again) and appending vga=842 (34A) to kernel line. This gave me resolution of 1152x864x16 and that one worked perfectly for me.

Short reboot later (reboot -f) my new Android was ready.

BitLocker on Asus N56VJ

I am a big fan of full disk encryption. It is more of a political issue for me than security one. While I probably have no data that other would find worth stealing a laptop for, I value my privacy and I don’t want just anybody snooping around. And anyway, full disk encryption is always a good policy when having company’s data around. I don’t want to be one to leek company’s private info just because I read it on my personal laptop.

On my Asus N56VJ this proved slightly more difficult than expected. As soon as I would enable bit locker, Windows would go into Recovery and stayed there. Result was unusable system. After fiddling with Windows and BIOS options, I have found problem. Asus’ quick BIOS initialization left computer in an unhappy state that didn’t properly initialize USB drives.

Solution was just going to BIOS and changing Fast Boot to Disabled (together with already Enabled Legacy USB Support).

Visual Studio Express 2013

Visual Studio 2013 Express is available for download.

As always, most changes are reserved for higher tiers (e.g. Professional and Ultimate) but some did survive into Express edition.

Go and try it out. It is free.

XP-compatible Manifest

I got a report that one of my applications under Windows XP. It would just simply fail with “The application failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.”

A bit deeper investigation into the Event Viewer discovered slightly different error description there “Syntax error in manifest or policy file "\QText.exe" on line 24. The element trustInfo appears as a child of element urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1^assembly which is not supported by this version of Windows.”

Quick look into my manifest showed:

<trustInfo>
  <security>
    <requestedPrivileges>
      <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />
    </requestedPrivileges>
  </security>
</trustInfo>

PPS: You can find schema at Microsoft’s MSDN.

On first glance everything looked proper but next one brought obvious error. I was missing namespace declaration. Quick-fix was to just add it:

<trustInfo **xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2"**>
  <security>
    <requestedPrivileges>
      <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />
    </requestedPrivileges>
  </security>
</trustInfo>

It was that easy.

I introduced this error some time ago when I was fixing high-DPI support. Manifest processing on anything higher than XP (e.g. even XP with some patches), is much more forgiving so this issue hasn’t appeared much in the wild.

It simply goes to show that even most simple changes you do for one OS version might impact other. There is no substitute for actual testing.

PS: Just for reference, here is manifest I usually use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<assembly manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
    <dependency xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2">
        <dependentAssembly>
            <assemblyIdentity type="win32" name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls" version="6.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="*" publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df" language="*" />
        </dependentAssembly>
    </dependency>
    <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2">
        <security>
            <requestedPrivileges xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
                <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />
            </requestedPrivileges>
        </security>
    </trustInfo>
    <application xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
        <windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
            <dpiAware>true</dpiAware>
        </windowsSettings>
    </application>
    <compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1">
        <application>
            <supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}" />
            <supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}" />
            <supportedOS Id="{4a2f28e3-53b9-4441-ba9c-d69d4a4a6e38}" />
            <supportedOS Id="{1f676c76-80e1-4239-95bb-83d0f6d0da78}" />
            <supportedOS Id="{8e0f7a12-bfb3-4fe8-b9a5-48fd50a15a9a}" />
        </application>
    </compatibility>
</assembly>

[2018-08-16: Added Windows 10 GUID.]

Drive Letter Change

I am quite obsessive about which drive gets which letter. I have a certain expectations and it is not uncommon to see me fiddle with drive letters again and again. I mean, if I want that USB drive to be mapped as R:, I will get it mapped there.

Unfortunately this always includes trip to Disk Management and slowly selecting appropriate path. Well, no need for this any more.

Nitpickers of the world, rejoice. My latest program, logically named Change Letter can do this just by right-clicking on a drive. If you have VHD Attach installed, you will not even get UAC prompt.

You can download both setup and zipped files on BitBucket.