Amazon Instant Video on Fedora

These instructions will fix Adobe Flash Player DRM to allow use of Amazon Instant Video on Fedora 20+ or RHEL7.  This works with 32bit or 64bit flash-plugin-11.2+ from Adobe in Firefox.

Update September 9th, 2014:
fakehal-0.5.14-8 below should now automatically work on Fedora 20 or RHEL7 to allow Firefox to play Amazon Instant Video.

Step 1: Install FakeHAL

Adobe Flash Player for some reason uses HAL for its DRM to function, but HAL was removed from the operating system in Fedora 16.  The fakehal packages below contain a stripped down subset of hal necessary to allow this to work on newer versions of Fedora.  If your firefox and flash-plugin are x86_64, then you will want the corresponding x86_64 fakehal and fakehal-libs packages.

KVM with Spice USB Redirection on Fedora 16

After some initial trouble I managed to get Windows 7 32bit working in KVM on Fedora 16 on my Thinkpad T410s.  For the most part it works except for a strange issue where hardware virt works only *once*.  If I shutdown the guest, I need to reboot the laptop for hardware virt to work again.  I then struggled to use USB storage devices in the Windows guest as is often required in school.  It turns out that the USB passthrough in virt-manager is only capable of USB 1.0 and is ultimately unusable due to its fragility.  PCI passthrough for my sdio slot did not work either.

Windows 7 KVM guest with Spice USB Redirection on Fedora 16 host

Fortunately, Spice's USB network redirection seems to work great.  virt-manager is not capable of configuring or using it directly, but following these directions and using the spicy client, I managed to redirect USB 2.0 devices to my KVM guest.  It even has an option to automatically redirect newly plugged devices, and it does so intelligently to the host or guest depending which window has keyboard focus at that moment.

spicy client seems better than spicec or virt-manager, although Shift-F11 to escape full screen mode seems to be broken.  Until this bug is fixed, a temporary workaround is to CTRL-ALT-F2 and kill spicy in order to escape.  UPDATE: It seems Shift-F11 fails to both enter and exit full screen mode.  Full screen can only be entered from the View menu of spicy.  However Shift-F12 to ungrab the mouse does successfully escape from full screen spicy.

Windows 7 KVM Trouble on Fedora 16

For the past school year I have been forced to use Windows for various proprietary applications that we are required to use in MBA school. =(  I have been running Fedora within VMWare Player within Windows 7 on my Thinkpad T410s.  Today I wiped my laptop, installed Fedora 16, and I am attempting to install a KVM guest of Windows 7 x64 from an ISO image using these instructions.  Unfortunately, shortly after the ISO boots in KVM it fails with this BSOD.

 
A quick Google search reveals seemingly nothing related to KVM.  On a hunch, I ran the qemu-kvm command that libvirt launched, and it printed this error message: KVM not supported for this target

There were some Fedora 15 era bugs with this error, but nothing more recent.  BIOS has Virtualization enabled, and lsmod shows kvm and kvm_intel loaded.  After reloading kvm_intel, I see this kmsg:
kvm: VM_EXIT_LOAD_IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL does not work properly. Using workaround

Oddly enough, the previous KVM not supported for this target message no longer happens.  This however has no effect on the BSOD.

Has anyone successfully installed Windows 7 in Fedora 16 KVM?

UPDATE: Windows 7 x64 install worked in kvm on RHEL6 on a different machine.  For some reason, only Windows 7 x32 works on my Thinkpad T410s with Fedora 16 x86_64.  Makes no sense...

How to fix Android Chrome on CM9

Today Google pushed an update for Android Chrome Beta that broke its ability to run on many CM9 Android 4.0.3 devices.  It says "Chrome is not supported for your version of Android.  Version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is the minimal supported version."

The procedure to manually fix Chrome Beta on your CM9 device is beyond the break.

How to build Android on RHEL6 or Fedora

Google's instructions of how to build Android only detail how to setup your build environment on Ubuntu.  This post describes how to do the equivalent on RHEL6, CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6 or Fedora 16+.

CM9 Android 4.0.3 for Samsung Epic 4G

Our team released a mostly feature complete Android 4.0.3 build for the Samsung Epic 4G on the Sprint network.  See the Epic CM team blog for more details.

Tools: repoclone, reporeset, repohardlink

I wrote tools repoclone, reporeset and repohardlink to copy and use multiple Android repos in parallel.  By using hardlinks in a git-native manner it clones repos much faster and saves a lot of storage.  [Documentation] [Git]

Hawaii Android Automatic Time Zone Bug

This post describes the automatic timezone setting bug that affects Hawaii and many other locations around the globe.  Included below are temporary and permanent workarounds to avoid this issue for existing phones in Hawaii.  I also discuss the proposed location-aware automatic timezone selector that has the greatest chance of fixing this for good for all timezones.