Fix: make ownCloud installer display in English language

OwnCloud is an interesting solution for setting up a file sharing cloud for a group of people.

However,one issue I’ve found with its Windows desktop client’s current version (which looks clean of any viruses since I always check first) is that if your Windows 10 is configured with a preferred language that the desktop client’s installer doesn’t have localization support for, then it doesn’t show up in English as you’d expect, but in Czech or someother language that most of us don’t know how to read.

So I tried running it’s MSI installer (ownCloud-2.6.1.13407.13049.msi) with –? parameter from the command-line and the /g languageCode parameter mentioned there looked promising, but trying /g en for English didn’t work. I guessed it needed some specific language code number (and not double-letter language code like en for English), since the help text was mentioning to see Windows Installer SDK for more help.

After a quick search I found an article that suggested passing the parameter Productlanguage=1033 to an msi installer on the command-line for it to ALWAYS show in English. And indeed it worked.

To open a command window one can click the Search icon on the windows taskbar and type CMD then press ENTER.

Then they can drag-drop the .MSI file of ownCloud installer onto the black command-line window that opens up and type an extra space char and then Productlanguage=1033 before pressing ENTER to launch the ownCloud installer in English. After that they can close the command-line window at anytime.

Since many users may be uncomfortable with such instructions, one could provide an msiEnglish.bat file that just contains

%1 Productlanguage=1033

User could drag-drop the .msi they want onto that msiEnglish.bat file and it would run the msi installer being displayed in English language, irrespective of any preferred language settings at the Windows operating system.

Of course the best thing would be if ownCloud fixed their desktop client installer to fallback to the Engish language (set it as default) if it can’t find localization strings for the currently prefered language of the user. Have filed an issue at https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/7825

HowTo: open older Pi SD card via USB multi-reader on Raspberry Pi

After doing

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

on an older Raspbian installation (at a 4GB SD Card), some corruption occured (probably due to lack of space, since I see newer NOOBS asks for an 8GB SD Card), making it unbootable. Would only show the NOOBS splash screen, but couldn’t boot into Raspbian.

I just needed some audio files from the desktop of that older installation (it was an unattended looping audio player for an art installation).

So I prepared a new SD Card with the free SD Card Formatter utility and put the latest NOOBS files in it. Booted the Raspberry Pi 2 with it and installed the latest Raspbian OS (full) from the menus. This time doing again the above two commands from a terminal and rebooting didn’t cause any problem.

However, I was searching for the files and couldn’t find them. I had gotten a bit confused at first, since when plugging in the reader it would show a dialog asking whether I wanted to open a file explorer, but then it would keep that dialog again and repeat the action till I closed the dialog. Then I read

…in Linux when there are more slots in a card reader, only the one labelled LUN 0 is read unless other tools are installed to read the other luns. If your SD slot is not LUN 0, then the SD card will not be seen.There are a lot of pages on web about this, I will be installing a package called sg3-utils that is supposed to enable reading other card reader slots.

at this thread https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=11397 and just in case I did:

sudo apt-get install sg3-utils

from a terminal and then tried plugging in again the USB card reader with the older SD card.

This time I was patient and instead of closing the action dialog that was shown after executing the suggested action (open with file explorer), I repeated it for three times and respective file explorer windows came up, then the action dialog closed by itself. The three windows were showing different partitions that had been found in the SD card, and one of those windows was showing “/media/pi/” folder. I navigated from there to “root/home/pi/Desktop” subfolder, where I could see the old desktop contents and drag-drop the audio files I was looking for to the new desktop.

HowTo: Open page from Internet Explorer (Metro) app into desktop IE

The Windows 8/8.1 app version of Internet Explorer is also known as IE Metro because of the “Metro” codename (inspired by navigation signs in public transport] of the Modern UI design language promoted by Microsoft).

However that version isn’t the full Internet Explorer, in that it is unfortunately not supporting extensibility via plugins in the form of ActiveX controls as the classic (desktop version) of IE. It is only embedding the Flash player engine directly in its codebase, but not Microsoft’s own Rich Internet Application (RIA) rendering engine aka Silverlight, nor Unity or other VRML/X3D, QuickTime/QuickTimeVR etc. plugins.

Browser pages cannot detect the difference between running IE on the desktop or as an app, there is however a workarround for webpage authors or webadmins to force the app version of IE to show a prompt to the user that allows the opening of a page in the desktop version of Internet Explorer. There is also a way for System Administrators to set specific sites to open in the desktop version of IE without the user seeing such prompt.

At https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh968248.aspx, Microsoft mentions:

As a web developer, you can enable the requiresActiveX feature switch either by using this HTTP header:

X-UA-Compatible: requiresActiveX=true

Or by using this meta element on each affected webpage:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="requiresActiveX=true"/>

 

I just added the meta tag inside the <head>…</head> block of the Amnesia of Who web version that uses Silverlight and here is how it shows in the IE Metro version (note that Silverlight IS installed in that Windows 8.1 machine, it’s just that it’s not available in that browser, that’s why the Silverlight installation prompt is also shown):

When the user presses the default button “Open on the desktop”, the OS switches to classic desktop mode and shows an Internet Explorer window with the Silverlight application starting fine (or if Silverlight is not installed it will prompt and allow the user to install it – note that Silverlight ActiveX control’s installation doesn’t need administrator permissions since that installation doesn’t affect other users, nor requires any elevated rights in the system to work).

 

I hope that Microsoft, apart from keeping on supporting this workarround, will do a clever move this time and embed Silverlight too (apart from the Flash engine that was in IE Metro) in the Spartan browser that it prepares as the Windows 10 default touch browser. And why not, provide some extensibility method for it, since HTML5 cannot become a huge, impossible to implement beast, that covers every future conceived functionality for the web.