Retrieve Lost Windows Product Key

mattw — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:03:34 +0000

I was in the middle of installing Windows XP in VMware Server when it hit me that I had no idea where the product key was. I decided to mount the install ISO and browse around and sure enough I found the file unattend.txt in one of the sub folders. This file is used by a program called Sysprep to automate the Windows install process. To find the file, use the following command:

awk -F= '/^ProductKey/{ print $2 }' `find /mnt/iso -name 'unattend.txt'` | tr -d " \""

This assumes your install media is mounted at /mnt/iso. If the install media is mounted somewhere else (such as /media/cdrom0 for an install DVD), simply change the path for the find command. Hope this helps!

JRE 6 and Firefox 3.5 beta 4

mattw — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:53:19 +0000

I ran into a little trouble getting JRE 6 plugin installed for Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 and thought I’d let you fine people know what I did in case you ran into the same issue.

First make sure to download the packages you need:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

To let Firefox know it is installed a link must be created in the mozilla plugins directory to the libjavaplugin library. This file can be found under the /usr/lib/jvm tree. The link can be created with the following command: (Note the location of the library may differ slightly)

ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.13/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/

Now verify your java version to ensure everything is working. You may need to restart Firefox for changes to take place./

Matt White

Retrieve Lost Windows Product Key

JRE 6 and Firefox 3.5 beta 4