Nicolas Richeton

Ok, be really careful with this since you can easily lose your data :
You can boot or use a real drive (not a vdi file) with virtualbox using a VMWare disk image (vmdk).

The VMware disk image format usually stores data within a file (similar to the vdi file format) but can also use a raw device like a real drive which is what we want here.

To create a vmdk image using a raw device, you can use VBoxManage :

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /Users/myusername/Library/VirtualBox/VDI/raw-disk.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0s3

A few things to know :

• This is dangerous for your data since you can easily boot your current system drive : this will probably kill your OS install
• You'll get access to the existing data of the disk (no format needed)
• MBR is stored in the vmdk file, you cannot create a bootable drive this way
• MBR is read from the vmdk file, you'll have to fix it once in virtualbox in order to boot an existing system from the disk
• On MacOSX, you can only use a drive with no OSX readable partitions on it (ext3 is ok). If one partition is mounted, you'll not be able to create or use the vmdk image

(You'll find all details in the VirtualBox user manual)

Quelques news du projet Eclipse Nebula en français dans le post du 27 avril 2009 du blog de Xebia :

http://blog.xebia.fr/2009/04/27/revue-de-presse-xebia-106/

My blog and my other sites have been offline for a week. I had to reinstall from scratch after my server got hacked by some spanish student using a vulnerability of Mantis Bug Tracker in order to install an IRC bot (more info coming soon).

Everything is slowly going back online one service after another. I took this as an opportunity to virtualize my servers (and thus limiting the impact of another bound-to-happen hack of these lovely php apps), so I’m now pushing my EPIA 5000 board to its limits with several debian instances running simultaneously

I’m still trying out some stuff, so a few outage can be expected during the next weeks.

Nebula is a rather active Eclipse project even if it is maintained mostly by individuals (see Nebula statistics on Ohloh). It can also be very silent . If you’re not following the cvs commit log, the dev mailing list or open bugs, it can be hard to notice what is going on.

Here are the latest news :

• Nebula is not only an incubator for SWT : the current Nebula mission statement can sound like the Nebula widgets are unstable, otherwise they would have moved to SWT :
  

  The Nebula project is a source for custom SWT widgets and other UI components. Nebula is also an incubator for SWT. Some Nebula widgets will graduate into SWT and therefore into the main Eclipse Platform.

  The reality is different :
  – several Nebula widget were developped for real world applications and were contributed once completed in order to share the code base with the Eclipse community.

  – Additionnal stable widgets are currently being contributed from other Eclipse projects.

  – The graduation is unlikely to happen, for several *good* reasons like toolkit size and dedication to native widgets even if it contains a few custom ones.

  Tom Schindl, Nebula co-lead with Chris Gross, pointed this problem out in a recent mail to the dev list and according to the number of “+1″ he got, the statement is likely to be changed very soon.

  On the stable/unstable topic, an idea (as discussed previously on the dev list) was to provide more visibility by grouping the widgets by status (stable/alpha/dormant) and to do releases of stable ones as soon as possible.

• Nightly builds : The binary downloads have been removed from the Nebula website for some time now. The reason was simple : the build process was down and all downloads were several months old. They were also not conforming to the incubation status so we simply removed them.

  Nightly builds are now back on the download page. The build process is using althena (cbi) on build.eclipse.org and can run unit tests. As a result, junit tests results are also available alongside of the binaries.

  

  Note : we haven’t finished setting up the build process for every widget yet, more downloads will be added soon. Progress can be monitored on bug 237588.

  Our next move is to build on hudson.

• Nebula Examples : The example project page has been restored.
  

  This project is also built nightly and can be downloaded as binary or simply installed from the update site.

  An official webstart version will be available as soon as I can host it on eclipse.org. (Eclipse webmaster please comment bug 270617 ). In the meantime, you can try this webstart (hosted here on my blog, don’t kill my bandwidth ! )

• Gallery widget stable version : I’ve published a stable (not nightly) version of the Gallery widget : 0.5.2_R_0_20090418.
  

  Even if the project itself is still in incubation, this version of the Gallery widget is stable enough to be used in RCP application or plugins. Be sure to read the release notes page which points out stable/unstable features and the explaination of the incubation phase (What is Incubation) on Eclipse.org.

  With that version, a javadoc is available.

  Don’t forget to report bugs if any !

That’s all for today, I hope to have more news to blog about soon .

This is a tip for all Eclipse users on Linux :

When using content assist (Ctrl-Space), you sometime have to get your hands on the mouse to use the scrollbars in order to read the full package name of a class or to scroll the content of the javadoc to the interesting part.

On both Windows or OSX, you can simply resize the content assist window and the new size will then be used the everytime you trigger content proposal.

But on Linux, you cannot resize this window. This is caused by bug 23980. While this bug is hard to solve, there is a simple workaround for this specific issue.

Edit
${workspace_location}/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.ui/dialog_settings.xml

…and change content assist size in the completion_proposal_size section


<section name="completion_proposal_size">
<item value="800" key="size.x"/>
<item value="300" key="size.y"/>
</section>


Restart Eclipse and enjoy content assist at full size.

(I helped Philippe to find the right file. He published a french version on this tip and I took care of the international one. )