Browsing the web securely (without getting viruses etc) using Windows 7 (VirtualBox, Fedora 17)

Linux

This guide is particularly for Fedora 17, if you just want to get going and browse as fast as you can you can try Mint or Ubuntu instead of Fedora, using the same settings otherwise. I use Fedora because I think it is the best distribution, the hazzles I have had with other ones just makes me go back to it.

1. Go to https://www.virtualbox.org/
At the time of writing, download and install this:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.0/VirtualBox-4.2.0-80737-Win.exe

2. Open Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager and press the "New"-button.

3. Choose these settings and Click Next:

4.Leave the memory on 768 MB or increase it if you know what you are doing, press next.

5.Create a virtual hard drive now and press next, choose VDI in the Hard drive file type and go to next.

6. Dynamically allocated works fine, go next.

7. Since it is dynamically allocated, you can go as high in GB as you want, if you feel you want to use this VM for other things that require space.

8. Press create, then press the Green-arrowed Start Button. It then tells you that the right control is a good button. This is necessary to use if you want to get out of the VM. You can seamlessly integrate the windows by pressing ctrl + L later on. Click ok and move on.
9. Now you need an ISO file. Get it from here (press Download Now):
http://fedoraproject.org/sv/
10. When the download has finished, select the iso file and press Start.

11. When I do this, I get the following popup:
So then I need to go into the bios and enable it, start up the Virtual Machine again, and continue the installation.

It is possible to do this either by just browsing "live" or by installing. Live will not give you any history from previous browsing if you wanted to check back on what you were browsing another day. And saving passwords will also not be possible. Installing addons that make it possible to show videos etc will not work either.

12. Now press through the installation with default settings on most things, it should go very quick.
If you need Flash in Fedora 17: http://nosnahoj.blogspot.se/2012/10/flash-in-firefox-4-fedora-17-works-for.html
Could not get it to install properly but will update this tomorrow if I get it running.

Also something about running Chromium/Chrome in Fedora.

To be able to copy and paste links etc to the virtual machine, install the Guest Additions from the Devices menu. This does not work for me. There is probably a solution on how to make the installation of Guest Additions work properly, but I need to sleep right now...

Installing Virtualbox 4 in Fedora 17

Go to the VirtualBox section for more information.

Apparently the version 4 is in the repository.

It is more convenient to use that one than to install a lonely package from www.virtualbox.org in my opinion, so I just go to Add/Remove applications and install it from there.

If need more on this, search my blog, there are posts on how to enable for example usb 2.0 support, don't know if it still applies though.

Spotify on Fedora 17

Sound and Video, Linux

In the Add/Remove Software applicaton under Applications, search for wine and select "A Windows 16/32/64 bit emulator" and press Apply to install it.
Now you are able to run windows-applications.

Now all you need to do is go to www.spotify.com and install it like you would do on windows.

If you need/want/feel like using the native version without wine just google that, fedora 17 native spotify etc. If I do it myself I will make another post. It has to do with rebuilding the .deb package, or (if you dare) use someones rebuilt package for Fedora.

Video codecs/Play videos in Fedora 17

Sound and Video, Linux

1. To use this player, FIRST install rpmfusion repositories:
http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

2. THEN, you need to have a video file. Open it, and the video player will search for the codecs needed to play it.

From my previous experience there is really no other way to do this if you want to use the gnome standard video player. And you need to do it in that order. Since it is time-consuming to verify that starting the player without rpmfusion in the repositories will make the video codec search unable to work, I have not done that.

It should be possible to extract a list of all the packages that were installed when the player is searching for the codecs, but this way is a way that will be maintained by developers, hopefully, so I deem it better not to do that because it would serve no purpose and would be an unnecessary task to do when it is possible to do like this.

"Windows fonts" in Fedora 17 How to install Microsoft TrueType core fonts in Fedora 17:

"Windows fonts" in Fedora 17 How to install Microsoft TrueType core fonts in Fedora 17:

Open a terminal and do:
yum localinstall http://fedora.missingbox.co.nz/core-fonts.rpm --nogpgcheck

Restart your browser!

Just discovered that the link is broken, look here:
http://nosnahoi.blogspot.com/2013/01/windows-fonts-in-linux-fedora-red-hat.htm

Flash in Firefox 4 Fedora 17 (works for both 32- and 64-bit)

Browsing help for Fedora in general.

In order for it to work properly with sound you need the 32-bit flash plugin even in the 64-bit. You can of course try the 64-bit plugin if you want, search my blog for info on that, you will find a post for Fedora 15 which should work.

1)Go to:
http://get.adobe.com/se/flashplayer/
Select YUM for Linux.

2) Open a terminal (Activities -> Applications -> Terminal)

Enter this command (64bit ONLY):

$ yum install nspluginwrapper.{x86_64,i686} alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 --disablerepo=adobe-linux-i386

Both architectures:

$ yum install flash-plugin

Restart your browser and it should work!

Skype Fedora 17

Browsing help for Fedora in general.

This time I'm going to do it properly.

Go to www.skype.com, choose the dynamic package. Absolutely NOT the one named Fedora 16, that will just be a useless gui with bugs that occasionally lets you chat for more than 15 minutes.

Also do this:
yum install qt.i686 qt-x11.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686

After that command it started properly for me.

Windows VS Linux

Linux

So now I am back on Windows again, after a 8 year period of using Linux on my desktop. Actually Windows 7 is quite good. The reason for the switch was partly due to university studies, or more accurate, the reason for keeping Linux on my computer. In a computer related science it was good to use Linux when for example making complex calculations on the red hat cluster machines.
Also I felt that Linux memory usage was better and it was faster for what I was doing.

But now it seems that Windows has catch'd up on these things.

Though I also use an SSD disc so it is not really an issue anymore.

I can't see any downsides to using Windows now that I feel I have a bit of knowledge in the Linux area.

Sure there are probably something a Linux distribution can do better, like running a web server  Maybe it can be a little more secure.

Browsing the net is the most major drawback where I don't really feel I can go in to any page Google presents me with, but for only that, I guess it is possible to live with a virtual machine to browse the web. For example Virtual Box and the seamless window integration.
I used Virtual Box the other way around in Linux, to run Windows-applications. However I could not really get everything critical to run like I wanted to. One thing is the e-ID which here in Sweden requires an extra application to be installed. It used to work in Ubuntu before, therefore also in Fedora (since it is the same system). This was like 3-6 years ago. Nowadays I only ran into trouble trying to get it to work. There are just too many versions of executable maybe. At least I had enough trouble to go to my Windows 7 laptop for those things that I needed the e-ID, maybe it would have been possible to get it running if I really wanted to. But I don't want to spend my life chasing after workarounds for hours either. In Windows you can do anything, and you're the true administrator account (at least I feel like it since the feeling stuck from the XP and earlier times).

...And what I really wanted to say is that I couldn't get the e-ID to work in Virtual Box under  Linux, running a bought Windows 7 installation. Is there anyone else that had this issue? That really feels bad, since it would mean Microsoft is blocking this kind of thing. Not meaning to be paranoid here, but I don't think it is "unthinkable" that they do this, from what I know it is possible to detect if the OS is being run as a VM.

Maybe I lost the "I want to be different"-gene somewhere...

Linux