VMware, Ubuntu 6.10 & USB flash drives

Before Ubuntu 6.10, I had no problems to access USB flash drives from Windows running under VMware (guest system) with Ubuntu as a host system.

And then Ubuntu 6.10 came and the problems came, too. Sometimes, when I plugged the drive, Windows detected it and I could access the data on it (rarely) and sometimes Windows didn't detect it at all or did detect it but there was no access to the data (usually). And I could see no pattern in this behaviour.

After a few months I finally found this article 3862823 in the VMTN Knowledge Base - USB Devices Are Not Available on Some Linux hosts, the VM > Removable Devices > USB Devices Menu Is Empty.

Adding the following line:
  usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
to the /etc/fstab file solved the problem.

HOWTO: Edit properties of DataGrid columns (.NET 1.1)

It's probably obvious for everyone working with Visual Studio 2003, but it doesn't work this way in VS 2005 (which I usually use) and as a result it recently took me a while to find this option.

Installing Ubuntu on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook (part 3 - WPA)

I don't know why, but WPA doesn't work on Ubuntu out-of-the-box. WEP does and we were using it for some time, but recently we finally decided to switch to WPA.

First we found these instructions, but for some reason they didn't work for us. And even if they did, this method is way too complicated.

After some further searching, we found this post. Really simple and it works! Although, after having followed the steps 1, 2 and 3 listed there, we also had to reboot the machine and add ifup eth1 to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh file.

Reading data from a sorted view (Microsoft SQL Server)

If you read data from a sorted view (a view that contains an ORDER BY clause in its SELECT statement) into a DataTable (ADO.NET) or a ADODB.Recordset ('old' Visual Basic 6 ADO), it will not sorted in the DataTable/Recordset.

Installing Ubuntu on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook (part 2 - headphones)

If you hear no sound after connecting headphones or external speakers to the headphones jack, try installing alsa-driver-1.0.14rc1, alsa-lib-1.0.14rc1 and alsa-utils-1.0.14rc1 packages and remove the options snd-hda-intel model=uniwill-m31 line from the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file (if you added it before).

Thanks for the advice, mario_7!