I refrained myself from posting anything, except the food challenge, last week. Basically so that the food challenge was nice and consecutive. Most of the stuff I thought: Gee I might post about that; is no longer something I feel like writing about.
But I can’t go past this one: I installed a Ubuntu 9.04 Virtual Machine (Under VirtualBox). After some updates the login screen changed to the following. Put simply: I like it. No frills, no fuss.
Everyday Life
linux, ubuntu
I just spent an hour trying to figure out why I could run firefox over ssh from two remote offices but not from a third. The DISPLAY variable was not set when I connected with:
ssh -X user@host
Turns out that xauth is not installed by default (on Ubuntu Server). I vaguely remember figuring that out before but never documenting it. So now I have.
Everyday Life
linux, ssh, X11
It is almost guaranteed that the upcoming Windows 7, which I’m beta testing tomorrow, the ongoing developments of OS X and the expanding percentage of X11 desktops will bring forth an abundance of articles, lists, and flame wars on how one or the other is a killer for the rest. Just like this piece.
While I strongly suspect that this is a flame-bait article; and some of the reply comments already have fallen for it, if it is; each desktop environment is salient. Given enough time all things change. But the current computer operating interface is a desktop environment. There are 3 at the moment and for the foreseeable future that is how it will stay. Buy why, oh why, do we keep getting this sort of article?
Because people only see what their bubble of life includes. There are 6.5 billion people on the planet; no-one can profess to knowing anywhere near 1% of that. Yet we all think because a majority of who / what we know does / thinks something that a planetary majority must also.
WRONG!
Everyday Life
linux, osx, windows
I’ve just uploaded a new tutorial to the Tutorials page on MultiWAN Routing with a Linux server (direct link).
Work
linux, multiwan, networking, router, tutorial
At work recently, to meet our growing on-the-go connection demands, we got hold of some of the Optus Wireless USB modems. The rebadged Huawei E220. In the spirit of my previous posts on Telstra NextG under Linux, I want to use these with Linux. They are natively supported in recent kernels which is great news. There were a few gotchas with Ubuntu 8.04 though. Read more…
Work
3G, linux, optus, wireless internet
Tonight at LOGIN the topic is Virtualisation. I’ve spent the last week playing with KVM to virtualise some of our servers at work. So the meeting topic will be interesting from the point of view of comparing technologies to that end. However, I have also been asked to briefly discus KVM. Read more…
Work
kvm, linux, login
As mentioned before in Next G over LAN my phone line has a high signal attenuation, too high for me to get ADSL. Essentially this means there is too much copper cable between the exchange and my house. I need some form of broadband at home so I turned to wireless. The 3G HSDPA networks provide the speed I need, and the UTMS 850Mhz network from Telstra (i.e. Next G) has coverage for where I live. So I’m using Next G for home internet.
Recently there have been several questions how I got this working. This post goes through the steps in more detail. In fact I reinstalled SmoothWall myself last night to upgrade to the official version 3.0 release so I wrote this as I went.
UPDATE JUNE 2009: See comments about using the “Option Driver” instead of Airprime – Airprime is, since 2.6.27, deprecated. The Option Driver does not require patching. Read more…
Everyday Life
bigpond, howto, linux, nat, NextG, smoothwall, telstra