Shift + Number Keys Not Giving Expected Symbols

The Problem

It can surely be annoying when you are about to send a tweet and started typing the hash tags by using "Shift" and "Number 3" key on the keyboard and you don't see "#" symbol. While it is supposed to make a "#" symbol, all you see is a "." or "&". It may happen that all other combinations of "Shift" and Number Keys are messed up.

But, before you think something is wrong with your keyboard and decide to change it, have a look at the simple solution to the problem below.

The Solution

The problem does not lie in your keyboard but the problem arose while you were typing. It may happen that by mistake and unknowingly you pressed left "Alt" and "Shift" key and you changed the input language of the keyboard. This can happen when your system has more than one input language set. Follow the steps below to solve the problem.

1. Go to the Control Panel and locate "Clock, Language and Region" options
   

   

   Control Panel

2. Click on "Change keyboards or other input methods" and Click "Keyboards and Languages" tab
   
   

   

   Change Input Languages

3. Click on "Change keyboards" tab and Select "English" as your default input language.
   
   

   

   Add English as Default Input Language

4. You may want to remove all other input languages except English. To do this, click on the input language and click "Remove" button to the right. Do this for all unwanted input languages.

And that's it! Your problem is solved! Always remember the shortcut to change the input languages, which is left "Alt" and "Shift" key!

[Solved] LXC: not authorized to change the password

The Problem

This problem occurs especially when LXC Containers are run on a host machine with CentOS distribution. When we want to create an user inside the container, we get an error which says "..... is not authorized to change the password of <user_name>. A snippet of the error is shown below:

~]# passwd testuser

passwd: unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 is not authorized to change the password of testuser

Containers Abstract Image

The Solution 

The culprit behind this problem usually is SELinux. When set to "Enforcing" or "Permissive", the SELinux would deny the user to change user parameters inside the containers like passwords as we encountered in the problem. Though, it is not safe to disable SELinux; we can solve above problem temporarily by checking the status of SELinux and disabling it. To get the "passwd" command work inside the container, follow the steps below:

1. Check SELinux settings on CentOS Host Machine

~]$ sestatus
SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /selinux
Current mode:                   enforcing
Mode from config file:          enforcing
Policy version:                 24
Policy from config file:        targeted

2. Check SELinux settings on Guest

~]$ sestatus
SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /selinux
Current mode:                   enforcing

3. Disable SELinux from Config file

1. Go to the config file located at /etc/selinux/config 
2. Change SELINUX option to disabled 
3. Save and close the file

4. Reboot the Host Machine
5. After reboot, check SELinux setting parameter using getenforce

~]$ getenforce
Disabled

Now, check again if the problem still persists in the guest virtual machine. This temporary fix should solve the problem.

*Note: This is only a temporary fix to the problem. If you want to have more insight on the problem and patches to fix the internal problems in LXC (if any), please post your queries to "lxc-users" mailing list here.

Upgrade Sony Xperia S to Android 5.0 Lollipop: A Step-by-Step Guide

Every phone has a finite life when it comes to firmware updates. Sony Xperia S, Sony's once flagship Android smartphone was launched in February 2012 with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and offered an upgrade to Android 4.1 Jellybean. In February 2014, Sony confirmed that a number of its smartphones will "not receive any further software upgrade support". The phones which are no longer supported for software upgrade are between 18 months and two years old which also included Xperia S and its twin smartphone Xperia SL. Many Xperia S users would want to keep their smartphone up-to-date with the latest OS and firmware by rooting their devices. In this post, we will discuss step-by-step process to upgrade your Xperia S to the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop with the help of custom ROM firmware.

Android 5.0 Lollipop Sample Screens

Key Features of Android 5.0 Lollipop

• 4x performance improvements
• Faster and more powerful computing
• Supported on ARM, x86 and MIPS architectures
• Full 64-bit compatibility
• Improved A/V Sync
• More intelligent notification system
• Support for OpenGL ES 3.1 with Android Extension Pack (AEP)
• New types of Sensors: Tilt Sensors and Heart Rate Sensors
• Improved battery saver feature for better and efficient power management

Before we start with our procedure to update the system to Android 5.0 Lollipop, please go through some important pre-requisites given below:

Pre-requisites 

• Backup all the data in your Xperia S including SMS, Call Log, Contacts, All multimedia files and other important local files. Failure to backup it would result in loss of important data in your cellphone.
• Make sure your smartphone battery is charged up to at least 80%
• Enable USB Debugging Mode from Settings option.
• Make sure that your smartphone is rooted.

Updating Xperia S to Android 5.0 Lollipop

1. Install ROM Manager App on your Xperia S. You can get this app from Google Play Store here.
2. Install clockwork mod recovery.
3. Download the Android 5.0 ROM from the link below:
1. Part 1: http://goo.gl/7pyL97
2. Part 2: http://goo.gl/ffHU2x
3. Part 3: http://goo.gl/l1zKh5
4. Combine 3 parts of custom ROM into 1 file using WINRAR.
5. Connect your Xperia S to PC via original USB Cable. Copy downloaded consolidated ROM file to SD card.
6. Using ROM Manager, restart your cellphone in the recovery mode. Once your cellphone gets into Recovery Mode, select Backup/Restore option in the ROM Manager to backup your information.
7. Perform a total data erase, including Delvik Cache from the Recovery Menu. Once completed, in the Recovery Menu, click on Flash ROM from SD Card. 
8. Navigate to the location of downloaded ROM file and follow the instructions to install Android 5.0 Lollipop on your smartphone.
9. Once the installation is completed, reboot your Xperia S. 

Updated System Information

Congratulations! You've just upgraded your Xperia S to Android 5.0 Lollipop.

Note: If your smartphone gets stuck while booting during the installation, perform the wipe cache partition and dalvik cache before rebooting the smartphone.

Courtesy: Upgrade/Update Sony Xperia S to 5.0 Lollipop

Libvirt: In a Nutshell

In one of the previous posts, we discussed about lightweight virtualization solutions and more specifically, Linux Containers aka. LXC. Although, LXC has its own management tools that are shipped with the package, there are other APIs and virtual machine managers which can be used to manage various hypervisors and container systems. In this post, we discuss about Libvirt, a widely popular open source virtual machine management API.

What is Libvirt?

Libvrit is an open source API, daemon and virtual machine manager for managing platform virtualization. Libvirt can be used to manage various virtualization solutions like LXC, KVM, OpenVZ, Xen and VMware ESX. Libvirt is a C Library, but it offers bindings in other languages some of which are Python,Perl, Ruby and Java.  

Some of Hypervisors Supported by Libvirt

Supported Hypervisors

Libvirt Supports a multitude of hypervisors and virtualization solutions. Some of widely known hypervisors supported by Libvirt are:

1. LXC- Linux Containers
2. OpenVZ
3. QEMU/KVM
4. Xen Hypervisor
5. VirtualBox
6. VMware ESX and GSX Hypervisors
7. Microsoft's Hyper-V Hypervisor
8. IBM's PowerVM for AIX

Command Line Tools

Libvirt comes with a plethora of tools for management purposes. These tools range from virtual machine management to file system management, from memory management to provision of virtual machines over the network. Some of important command line tools that are used are:

• virsh: An interactive shell and a virtual machine management tool which comes shipped with core distribution of Libvirt. It is one of the most important tool when it comes to managing various tasks on domains like virtual machines, containers or storage managed by Libvirt. 
• virsh-top: Another interactive command line utility to keep track of CPU, memory, disk and network utilization of all the virtual machines running on a host machine. This utility is essentially similar to "top" command which provides an ongoing look at processor activity of host machine.
• virt-what: A shell script essentially used for detecting if the program is running on the virtual machine.
• virt-df: Another commond line utility which is similar in working with that of Linux file system command, "df". This utility offers the file system information of all virtual machine running on the host machine. This utility gives the information about how much disk space is used in each of guest disk.
• virt-clone: This tool allows disk image(s) and configurations to be cloned from one virtual machine to another. This tool comes in handy especially while creating a new virtual machine from existing virtual machine keeping disk configurations intact. It automates copying of data across to new disk images, and updates the UUID, MAC address, and name in the configuration.

Get Libvirt

Libvirt is an open source software and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (see the file COPYING.LIB in the distribution package for the precise wording). You can get Libvirt from the latest upstream tarballs from here. You can also get it using git clone from git clone git://libvirt.org/libvirt.git.