Archive - Aug 5, 2008

For those who have a problem with Virtualbox host networking and WIFI.

Scope of this HowTo
While being connected to your router (thus the Internet) via your laptop WIFI card, enable host networking on a different subnet by bridging your ethernet card.
Your ethernet card does not have to be plugged for this to work.

Your Virtualbox machines will be connected to the Internet as well.
Tested with Virtualbox 1.5.6, 1.6.0, 1.6.2 and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Pre-requisites
One computer with:
WIFI controller eth0
ethernet controller eth1
Virtualbox
Internet connection thru eth0 (WIFI)

All the bridge creation and host interface creation knowledge comes from Virtualbox help contents. (see chapter Host Interface Networking and bridging on Linux hosts)

I'm going to append to this as I had a few issues and headaches before finding a solution that worked for me.

Get Putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s.../download.html and
Xming http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/x...p.exe?download

Note, both of these applications are "portable" and can be copied to a thumbdrive and run on any machine you may have access to.

Launch Xming and select the style you wish to display the X server output. Hint: Select Multiple Windows and your X applications will look like they were launched from Windows. Leave Display number set to 0
Click Next. Select Start No Client and click Next.

Reduce Swappiness
If your computer has 1GB+ RAM, you would be hardly needing your swap space in most cases. It is evident that the RAM is much faster than your hard drive (A good 677MHz DDR2 can give 3000+ MiB/s while a standard hard drive can give around 50MiB/s). So it's better to let the RAM handle most of the processes. The tendency to use swap is called swappiness.Swap space is a cached area on the HDD that the OS utilizes as a memory overflow/dump area. To reduce swappiness, at a terminal, type in:

Source: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

When I wrote the first version of this article six years ago, I called it “Why Free Software usability tends to suck”. The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed.

Source: http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/64039.html

The next version of the Firefox Web browser will likely include support for the open source Ogg Theora video format. Mozilla is working to incorporate the Theora codec into the browser so that no plug-in is required to view Web video.

Mozilla is making a move toward open Web standards with its upcoming Firefox 3.1 release. The software -- now available in test builds -- will support the Ogg Theora video codec, the company revealed at its summit in British Columbia last week.

Source: http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Kernel-Log-New-Nvidia-drivers-are-sti...

Nvidia has released new proprietary GeForce drivers; Version 173.14.12 of the drivers for x86-32 and x96-64 now support the GeForce 8600 GS while fixing bugs in OpenGL, SDL support and the configuration tool.

2D performance problems with the newer GeForce graphics cards, discussed in many forums and blogs are not addressed with this update. Some applications which use Cairo or newer QT versions can feel like they are running on a several year old PC, even when it is actually on a quick system. This is especially apparent when rendering complex web pages with Firefox 3 or using Compiz and KDE 4.