Fix loading Xilinx licenses in Windows 8

The Xilinx ISE WebPack tools are apparently not officially supported in Windows 8 (whether the problems affect both the 32-bit versions and 64-bit versions or not, I do not know), and any attempts at opening file dialogues in the 'Manage Xilinx Licenses' or 'Project Navigator' results in the program closing. There is a workaround for these problems, available below and in videoformat here.

For everyone trying to use Xilinx ISE 14.5 in Windows 8 x64. Rename libPortability.dll to libPortability.dll.orig, and copy libPortabilityNOSH.dll to libPortability.dll.

Do this in:
C:\Xilinx\14.5\ISE_DS\ISE\lib\nt64
C:\Xilinx\14.5\ISE_DS\common\lib\nt64 (copy dll from first location)

This turns off SmartHeap.

This will fix ISE and iMPACT crashes on file dialogs.

I found the solution here and tested it against the Xilinx ISE 14.6 in Windows 8 64-bit with successful results.

Fix "Cannot find maple engine library “maple.dll”"

After installing the newest version of Maple (version 17) and starting it, I ran into a problem where Maple would not compute anything, or allow me to interact with its menus. Maple also gave an error message when it started, informing me that it "could not find maple engine library, "maple.dll"." The solution I found to work can be found in this support FAQ.

Changing Chrome New Tab back

I found the new "New tab" in Chrome to be a downgrade and wanted to change it back. To go back to the previous look, go to chrome://flags, find the "Instant Extended API" setting and disable it.

Fixing GRUB

Installing Ubuntu on various computers has not been a problematic experience for me in the past, so when I re-installed an old Asus eee900 which had been collecting dust for a while, I was suprised when it would not boot after the installation had completed. Figuring something had gone awry, I thought I'd boot it with the USB stick and see if that got me any further. Selecting the USB stick as primary boot option, I was surprised when the boot menu of the USB stick did not show up and the computer booted instead. Unplugging the USB stick and rebooting got me into the same issues, which led me to believe that GRUB was having some issues.

After some Googling, I found the Boot Repair tool, and after running that, booting worked as it should, without the USB stick.

Changing network interface name

I recently found myself interested in installing MatLab on my laptop, as my university has acquired licences for students to use. It turns out that to activate MatLab on Linux, there has to be a network interface named eth0 on the machine. Unfortunately, my Ubuntu installation had given the wired network interface the name of p3p1, and this made activating my MatLab licence a hassle, as explained by KB1-661QJD.
As the KB article explains, editing /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and renaming the name of the wired ethernet interface should solve the problem, but in my case, there was only a single interface in the file; wlan0.

The solution, I found, was to add a new entry to the file for the wired ethernet interface. I did so by copying the existing wlan0 entry and changing ATTR{address}, KERNEL and NAME values to appropriate values for the wired ethernet interface. The ATTR{address} is of course the hardware address of the interface, and may be found by running ifconfig | grep HW.

Installing Oracle JDK 7 in Ubuntu

Despite the latest security issues with Java, I still use Java as a development platform. The easiest way to install Java in Ubuntu I have found is by adding a custom repository, and webupd8's repository has served me well.

The step-by-step guide for adding Java JDK7 to Ubuntu is as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

Multiple workspaces in Windows

The ability to use multiple workspaces in Linux is one of the features I most appreciate, and has been a feature I have missed when I have used my Windows laptop, which is rarely used in conjunction with a secondary monitor. No longer will I be limited to access to one workspace, as the Sysinternals tool Desktops v2.0 provides easy configuration of more workspaces on Windows computers.