This short guide shows how you can pass through USB devices (such as a USB flash drive) to VirtualBox guests on an Ubuntu 8.10 VirtualBox 2 host. USB support is available only in the VirtualBox PUEL (closed-source) edition, not in the OSE edition, so make sure you have the PUEL edition installed.
Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.
vmbuilder is a tool (introduced on Ubuntu 8.10) that allows you to build virtual machines (with Ubuntu as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server. You can afterwards copy the virtual machines to another system (a Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, or VMware Server host) and run them there.
Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.
In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare an Ubuntu 8.10 server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.
Please find the complete article here.
Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.3) on a CentOS 5.2 system (i386).
Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called “virtual machines” or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers’ web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it’s more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.
I will use CentOS 5.2 (i386) for both the host OS (dom0) and the guest OS (domU).
Please find the complete article here.
Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.
Yes its out now, Kubuntu 8.10 is released
After trying KDE4 on Kubuntu 8.04, I just can’t wait to get hold of formal Kubuntu release with KDE 4. Its not only about looks though it has lot of improvements from nevigation point of view as well.
I am already downloading it. So go and grab your copy now 
This is continuation of my previous post on the similar tool KDirStat for Linux user. It is highly recommended that you go through the post here before going further as I will not discuss the common stuff again.
WinDirStat is windows replacement for KDirStat, as the original concept was taken from KDirStat they are almost same and do the same job. Following picture show the main window for WinDirStat.
WinDirStat Main Window
WinDirStat Features:
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Someone has said that “A Picture is worth thousand words”. I completely agree with this statement when it come to determine hard disk usage. This requirement is even more prominent when you want to clean up your hard disk, if we know which directory occupies more space on hard disk we can concentrate on it for clean up. Similarly if we know which directory contains more number of files we might want to keep it defragmented to speed up the system.
There are many command line utilities that can provide this information du, dir, df etc. The problem with these commands is the results are not usable as it is either we need to sort them or combine them (to the level you want) and they don’t get the information is not relative to each other or total disk size.
What is KDirStat:
KDirStat is a visual disk usages statistic application for KDE users (Windows users please check out my post on WinDirStat here). This application scans the whole file system or given directory and displays the statistics both in numerical form as well as graphical form. See the picture below to understand what I am talking about:
KDirStat Main Window
Numerical view: As shown in above picture, top half of the image shows directory tree along with file size, percentage usage with respect to the total size in numerical as well as bar graph form, and last accessed date. The important part is if you go to the directory entry in this tree it will show the total usage of the directory including all sub-directories and files in them.
Graphical view: The bottom part is graphical view where each file is shown as a block, size of the block is relative to size of the file and space it occupies with respect to total size. Just like tree view all files in the given directory are grouped together.
Both the views are linked to each other, if you want to know space consumed by given directory, select it in tree view and corresponding block will be highlighted in Graphical view, If you see a huge block in graphical view click on it and tree view will point to the corresponding entry, this is very handy when you want to do system cleanup.
KDirStat Features:
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With so many video formats and video players around its not easy to find a tool which can convert any format to any other format. On top of that availability of so many converter softwares makes it even more difficult to find the correct match for your requirements.
ffmpeg is a free video processing library released under LGPL. ffmpeg is available for both Windows and Linux platforms. This is a very powerful library and is capable of encoding, decoding, muxing and demuxing almost all video formats in use today. In short with this single tool you can convert any video format to any other video format Such as:
However, with so many features it is equally difficult to use, also as it is a command line tool, you need to understand the properties of source format and destination format and based on that you need to supply different parameters to ffmpeg.
This is where Avanti comes to your rescue. Avanti is a free GUI frontend for ffmpeg for windows users. Avanti make it very easy for users to configure the properties of the output format and determines the required ffmpeg switches automatically. It also provides the templates for conversion between most common formats in different video schemes so that you don’t have to dig for all the details required to covert from one format to another format. You can also create your own templates so that you don’t have to remember those settings.
These two tools provides you unlimited capabilities in video conversion.
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I am pretty obsessed with Black and Orange color combination no wonder I own Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. Anyways that was the main reason behind choosing Sunburn as my first theme. I liked Sunburn for this color combination and excellent readability. However, as most my posts have long titles, the huge title font was not really suitable and it was quite difficult to find out different entries under Top Posts and Recent Posts widgets.
I was in no mood to give up the Black and Orange combination so my search ended on “Black Letterhead” by Ulysses Ronquillo. This theme solves both of my problems with previous theme and on top of that the individual posts don’t have side bars (See this in action) so you can concentrate more on what you are looking for rather than what I want to show you.
I am sure you will like it as it will makes your experience better on Tech Tool Tips.
