How to install liveusb-creator on Debian 5 Lenny (Failed)

I never got this to work properly so I used the following steps to uninstall:

locate liveusb

Manually delete the results

First install the following packages on Debian

sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-qt4-dbus python-urlgrabber syslinux


Download Fedora's liveusb-creator from the project site

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/

Extract then run as root

sudo python setup.py install

Now you can run Fedora's liveusb-creator on Debian 5 Lenny

sudo liveusb-creator

Getting distributed DNS in a LAN

If you are running a Debian-based distribution, just run the following command:

apt-get install avahi-dameon

Once you have it installed, you can ping machines on your LAN by their hostname and the .local suffix, for example:

ping hostname.local

Red-Hat based distributions usually have a firewall enabled, remember to allow port 5353 (mDNS). (system-config-firewall on Fedora)

You now have a distributed multicast-based DNS service on your local network based on Zero-Conf technology. You can find more information at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avahi_(software)
http://avahi.org/

Understand the computer through Bash

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing various bash scripts to automate the various tasks I have to perform to maintain a Planetlab slice and run tests for my experiments on Amazon EC2. As a novice in bash scripting, I have spent a good chunk of time reading the bash manual (easily available through 'man bash'). Through reading the manual, I began to understand how powerful the shell really is. As a child of the graphical UI era, where everything is done through mouse clicks, noone took the time to tell me how much more effective one can be by simply interacting with the shell. The shell gives you so much more control and understanding for process management, file access, and networking. Overall, the shell has helped me gain a much greater appreciation for the operating system and for the many tool available for decades such as grep, awk, sed, find, join, cat, lpr, screen, vim, cut, just to name a few. The sad part is that it took me this long to realize this, but as they say, it's better late than never.

TTYL, Internetland

The fastest way to create host-only network with VirtualBox

Hello Internetland,

This took me a while to figure out, so I decided to write this post to share it with the world.

Since VirtualBox gives you the ability to attach a virtual ethernet adapter on Host to one of the ethernet adapters on the guest machine, it means that these two interfaces have a direct connection to each other. In other words, it's like plugging a crossover ethernet cable between 2 computers. All you have to do is statically assign IP address to each machine and it will work.

In summary, in your guest settings, create a new adapter and attached it to "Host Interface", then select the host interface you want to attach to. If you do not have any, you can add one through the interface. So it should look like the image below



Then start the virtual machine, if running Linux use

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

for Windows use

netsh interface ip set address name="VirtualBox Host Interface 1" static 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0 

Once you have set static for both machines, you should be able to connect to your guest machine. Hope this helps.

How to turn your Windows PC lab into a Linux-based Condor Pool

How can you get the most use out of a Windows PC lab?

Most Windows PC labs around the country are severely underutilized. Despite the high cost of power consumption and management, average PC labs only uses about 10% of their total CPU utilization in a particular day. Meaning that 90% of the time, the CPU is just waiting and running some idle process that does nothing. Well, there is a solution at

http://www.grid-appliance.org

This Grid Appliance project you to turn a Windows PC lab into a Condor pool without interfering with normal lab use. Through the use of virtualization, this can be acheived without requiring any change to the infrastructure of the lab. And all this can be done effortlessly. Here is a list of projects/software that have made this possible.

• 
  
  VMware (www.vmware.com)
  
  


• 
  
  Condor (www.cs.wisc.edu/condor)
  
  


• 
  
  IP-over P2P (www.ipop-project.org)
  
  

If any of the links above are not clear enough on how this is possible, simple reply to this post and I will be glad to provide more details.

 Enjoy

OpenSuse 10.2 (64-bit) does not support ACPI on Gateway MT3418

I have been wrestling with OpenSuse 10.2 (64-bit) for the past few days on my Gateway MT3418. According to my experience, this distribution does not support ACPI properly, hence whenever I boot the OS, I have to make sure that I specify the "acpi=off" kernel boot option. If I do not do that, I just get a black screen and nothing ever boots. I have also been experimenting with Yast Software Management. As an Ubuntu user, I much prefer apt-get. It's quick and easy. Yast runs a bit slow in comparison, and it's not as easy to use as apt-get. Well that's all for now in my experiences with my Gateway MT3418. Feel free to leave any insight.

Gateway MT3418 supports AMD Virtualization

It took me a while to confirm this, but I was not sure if the single core AMD Turion 64 MK-36 has AMD-V (or AMD SVM) technology. This processor is part of the Richmod series of the Turion 64 processors. To confirm if you processor supports virtualization, run the following command:

For Intel processors (Intel-VT), type:

grep 'vmx' /proc/cpuinfo

For AMD processors (AMD-V), type:

grep 'svm' /proc/cpuinfo

If the command output a bunch of flags, then your processor has support for virtualization. If you get no output, then unfortunately, your processor probably does not support virtualization. (This only applies to Intel and AMD x86 processors).

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta

Should I just want one final release that comes out on April 2007 according to Ubuntu.com?

With much excitement, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 beta on my laptop (Gateway MT3418). Everything seemed ok, but one crucial thing was missing. Ubuntu could not detect my wireless card (Realtek 8085). I went to the Realtek website to download the linux driver but they said that it should be already in the kernel. I could not understand why it did not work because I previously had Ubuntu 6.10 installed on the laptop and my wireless card worked fine. So after hours wasted trying to install the driver, I gave up and reinstall 6.10. Maybe I'll give 7.04 another try later in life.