Jun 28
smachadoCivilization, Games
Civilization V new features likes policies, city-states and non-stacked units require new strategies to be developed.
Here is a list of strategies to succeed in the game:
- Stay ahead in science. Research Writing early and build a library and the National College wonder while you have only one city. To build the National College each city needs to have a library so it is better to build it early.
- Focus on Gold. Gold will increase research and will allow you to provide gold gifts to city-states.
- Be allied with city-states. They can provide you with units, culture, gold, resources and research. It can be expensive so the Patronage policies are a good idea. If you are playing a game with diplomatic victory enabled, city-states will help you succeed.
- Eliminate other players early. Specially if they are militaristic they’ll hunt you sooner or later. Use archers and warriors. Attack with all units at the same time on the same city. Don’t divide your army unless you have enough units.
- Increase your culture as much as possible.
- Increase the generation of great people as much as possible, for example building the Garden city improvement. Great scientist can provide you with free technology and Great engineers can speed up the construction of wonders.
Jun 28
smachadoUncategorized
If you had Windows and Linux running on your system and just formatted the Linux partition you probably can’t load Windows anymore because the boot loader can’t load its configuration.
To solve this problem boot your pc using a Linux installation cd-rom that uses grub as the boot loader (typically right after the system boots it will show the boot loader menu) – recent distributions have fancy boot loaders with graphical interfaces, avoid those for this.
Use Backtrack Linux for example.
On the grub meny type ‘c’ for a command line and then type the following commands:
grub> rootnoverify (hd0,0)
grub> chainloader+1
grub> boot
You should be booting into Windows XP.
Now to restore your Windows MBR download MbrFix from www.sysint.no and unzip it to a local folder.
Open the command prompt and enter the following command:
Mbrfix.exe /drive 0 fixmbr
Press Y and you should have your MBR fixed. You can reboot your system.
Jun 09
smachadoVirtualization
Using Virtual Box 4.0.8 for MAC OSX 10.6.7 I was unable to access data on my external USB disk on a Windows 7 guest machine.
No solution was found after searching the web although there are similar issues out there like:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7462
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1776
I was almost ready to give up when I found page 142 on the Virtual Box manual. Section 9.7.1 tells how to configure a physical disk to be accessed as if it was attached to the guest/virtual machine.
So the guest OS instead of accessing the disk using the USB bus it would access using the SATA or IDE bus.
There’s a warning on that page that I’m copying here:
Warning: Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. Incorrect use or use of an outdated configuration can lead to total loss of data on the physical disk. Most impor- tantly, do not attempt to boot the partition with the currently running host operating system in a guest. This will lead to severe data corruption.
Following the instructions on that section I could access my external USB drive successfully.
This is what I did, remember that I’m using OSX as host operation system.
Connected my usb drive. OSX automatically mounts it.
Opened a terminal and wrote mount to find which /dev device is the disk mapped to. It was /dev/disk1s1:
$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/BOOTCAMP (ntfs, local, read-only, noowners)
/dev/disk1s1 on /Volumes/SergioDrive (exfat, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
Now before using it on virtual box I unmounted it on OSX:
$ diskutil unmount /Volumes/SergioDrive
/Volume SergioDrive on disk1s1 unmounted
Now I created the virtual box image file that I’ll use to configure my virtual machine:
$ VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/VBAccessToSergioDrive.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk1s1
RAW host disk access VMDK file /Users/machados/VBAccessToSergioDrive.vmdk created successfully.
Now you can use the virtual box gui to add the image file as a disk to the virtual machine. This is done under the storage definitions. I added another disk under SATA controller.
This can also be done on the command line with this command:
$ VBoxManage storageattach "Windows 7" --storagectl "SATA Controller" --port 1 --device 0 --type hdd --medium ~/VBAccessToSergioDrive.vmdk
The command has no output. Of course “Windows 7″ is the name of my virtual machine.
This image file can only be used with the same physical external disk because it maps the UUID of the disk.
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