Following several guides on setting up a bridge on my laptop between the wireless network interface and VirtualBox for direct networking was simply not working for me. Today after lots of head scratching I finally discovered why.
Turns out that the standard bridge utils are no good for most wireless cards, but there is a workaround.
Check out this guide, and read under the wireless section: Bridged Networking with VirtualBox on Linux Hosts
Unfortunately, you can’t!!! Well, not as far as I can tell, I’ve asked around and scoured the web but it seems there’s no use, there simply isn’t a way to do it on linux. The next best thing is to use DVDFab for windows via Wine (it kind of semi-officially works with Wine).
As I found nothing really solid on google, I thought I’d write this post as it’s annoying when you can’t find anything.
While pondering why my backup scripts weren’t working in /etc/cron.daily, I remembered that run-parts (the thing that runs stuff in that directory) doesn’t like running scripts with a .sh, or indeed probably any extension on them.
Handy to remember that one!
Looks like the guys over at Innotek have been busy, probably old news to most but I just realised they’ve released version 1.5 of Virtualbox last year.
Among a whole bunch of bug fixes and other improvements it seems they’ve added one cool feature that will make working with those windows only programs much easier - seamless window integration with your host OS (I think that’s linux only, but I might be wrong).
I recently got the ClearSilver PHP module working on my Ubuntu laptop as we use it on a number of our web sites and I needed to develop a site with it locally. Then this morning I stupidly upgraded PHP and of course the module had un-resolved symbols. Dohh!
So I decided this time I’d write a better document on how to get it working, one which might actually help me and could perhaps help others.
Recently I’ve been using Skype a lot to speak to friends and family in the UK and Australia. It’s pretty good for the following reasons:
There’s no need to configure your firewall Everyone else seems to have Skype already It’s pretty good quality wise. The webcam function is really good, especially in full screen Yes, it’s not ideal - it’s a proprietary network and the software is closed source, but on the other hand it just works.
Google recently announced it’s new open source Android platform for mobile devices. As a programmer and designer, it sounds fairly cool, and as an end user it sounds fairly cool too!! I think I’ll be getting one of these Android devices as soon as they’re released as it seems like mobile computing has finally landed!
There’s a few interesting videos on the aforementioned site too.
A relatively unknown bit of virtualisation software called ‘virtualbox’ from InnoTek has recently become open source’d. I’m actually quite surprised it hasn’t received more publicity. After hearing people rave about virtualbox in #hantslug on the blitzed irc network, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Setup was far easier and much more sane than vmware player/server, all configured via nice gui rather than weird perl script.
The best bit was yet to follow…the performance.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu (Edgy and previous versions of Ubuntu) doesn’t seem to have a handy little script called mount.fuse which should come with the fuse-utils package.
This basically means it’s impossible to get Ubuntu to mount sshfs mounts upon startup (nicely), or using a nice and simple mount command like:
mount /my/sshfs/mount/point/
Anyway, personally, I find it really annoying. Yes, there are probably good reasons why they don’t include the script, but no I don’t care.