Tag Archives: ubuntu

Creating a bridge for VirtualBox / wireless bridging on Ubuntu

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

What you can do is add those various commands to a little script file in /etc/network/if-up.d/ which will set up the ‘bridge’ upon starting networking.

Woohoo!

VirtualBox 1.5x

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’ve not tried it out yet, but as far as I can tell you can have windows application windows displayed properly and running at full steam with all the rest of your windows – very much like running some kind of cool (sort of) hybrid OS!!! I thought it was exciting anyway.

To explain what I mean further, I found this rather strange video on youtube:

Once I get that new pc, I’ll give it a go!


Update:
It works, but it goes very strange if you have ‘desktop effects’/compiz turned on. Which is annoying! Nevermind!!! I’m sure it’ll be sorted out fairly soon.

Skype – Why it's the thing to use.

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. And now that the linux beta version supports video calling, I think it’s the best there is.

However, Skype (the company) shouldn’t be praised too much for their new linux beta – why didn’t we get it when the Windows version was released? Why should open source community suffer? Did Skype not realise it’s another potential market for SkypeIn/Out? So frustrating, but that’s how it is in the world of linux I guess!

This morning we called my sister in the UK. The call quality was great as was the full screen video quality. You always know something is good when it’s shocking! My only little gripe was that we couldn’t view my sisters webcam when ours was on. I guess that’s just a bug in the beta (2.0.17 I think) and could well have been something to do with my webcam itself.

Get the latest release of the Beta here.