I have been waiting a long time for a mature, stable build of CyanogenMod for the ViewSonic gTablet, and I have to say that I am quite pleased with the effort that the CyanogenMod team has put into the version 7.0.3 build. In fact, the only complaint I have is about the lack of built-in CIFS support on the gtab build. This is a guide on how to mount CIFS/SMB shares on your gTablet running CM7.

The reason the gTablet build of CM7 doesn’t allow mounting CIFS/SMB shares is because the cfis.ko kernel module was left out of the ROM. Fortunately, this is a fairly easy fix. On the official CM 7.0.3 gTablet build, the running kernel is Linux 2.6.32.39, and the correct module can be found on DroidBasement in the following lib package:

http://droidbasement.com/gtab/kernels/2632/37/lib-2632.39_gb.tar.gz

If you are running a different version of CM7 (or perhaps another ROM that is likewise lacking cfis support), you will want to run “uname -a” from a terminal emulator or adb to determine the correct kernel lib package to get from DroidBasement, and make sure you get the correct package for your device.

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.32.39-cyanogenmod #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Apr 24 22:06:49 EDT 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

Anyway, there’s only one file in that archive that you should be concerned with at the moment:

lib-2632.39_gb.tar\lib\modules\2.6.32.39-cyanogenmod\kernel\fs\cifs\cifs.ko

Once you have located this file, extract it and copy it to the internal storage of your ViewSonic gTablet using a micro-USB cable or the microSD card. Once you have it loaded onto your tablet, open the Market on your device and install CifsManager. Load the CifsManager app, click Add New Share…, enter the server IP and share name as instructed, enter the mount point, username and password (if applicable), then click on Save Share. Be sure your mount point exists in a location that is writable so that CifsManager can create it.

Before you mount the share, you have to tell CifsManager how to load the cifs.ko kernel module. Click on Menu, Settings, then check Load cifs module, and Load via insmod. Finally, enter the full path to the location of cifs.ko, then hit back and attempt to mount the share. If all goes well, you will see a message that reads, “The share has been mounted successfully.”

Unfortunately the version of CifsManager I had installed failed to set the permissions correctly when it created my mount point. Particularly, it left out the execute bit for everyone except the owner. In order to fix this, open up your terminal emulator, ssh client or adb, and type:

$ su
# chmod a+rwx /mnt/cifs/mountpoint

Replace /mnt/cifs/mountpoint with the actual name of the mountpoint you are using for your share.

And that’s it! You can now access files on your smb share directly from your gTablet within any Android app. I use it to access my music library as well as pictures and video files.

We recently started working on an old Unisys Aquanta EN (which is a rebranded Acer AcerNote Pro 950cx) for the lulz. However, since the thing won’t boot off any external disks and we have no internal floppy or CD-ROM module for it, it turned out that getting an operating system onto it wasn’t so easy. After several hours of fiddling with USB sleds and other possible solutions, we gave up on doing it directly to the hardware.

Enter virtual machines. We first tried VirtualBox, but it turns out that there’s not any easy way to install an operating system directly to a physical hard drive attached to the host OS. We decided to try VMWare Workstation.

Trying to install was a little disconcerting – we could get it booted and going, and the Windows 98 SE installer saw our 4GB IDE hard drive attached to my computer over USB, but as soon as the installer tried to format the hard drive or write files to it, it choked and VMWare gave us a “could not write to the disk” error.

It turns out that, unsurprisingly, UAC in newer versions of Windows prevents software like VMWare from directly accessing a hard drive and writing to it – even though VMWare presented a UAC prompt requesting elevated privileges to access the physical disk. After a little swearing and a bit more Googling, it turns out that you need to manually unmount the hard drive and set it as writable. This isn’t all that hard, but it does require a few minutes of command line work.

Open up a command prompt, type diskpart, and hit enter. Once diskpart launches, type list disk and hit enter to view a list of attached physical drives. You’ll now need to identify which of the drives listed is yours. Once you’re certain you’ve got the right disk, type select disk $n (where $n is the number of your disk). To take the disk offline (unmount), just type offline disk. Once you’re sure the disk is unmounted (you can double-check by looking in Explorer), type attribute disk clear readonly to make the disk writeable. Type rescan to wrap up, and you can now exit diskpart.

Open up VMWare, start your virtual machine, and now you can format your disk normally.

VMWare is a great way to get an operating system on to a disk when you’re unable to do so from the real host computer. VirtualBox is a good free alternative, although it’s a little rough around the edges in a few places. If you have problems or need a more advanced configuration, you can find an in-depth article on this issue on VMWare’s website here.

Happy geeking!