Martello

Australian online magazine PC Authority have published a list of the top 10 most disappointing technologies that never changed the world. The list (in brief below) has many that I’m familiar with but some that I am not and I’d go along with much of the reasoning behind it.

10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative search engines
8. Voice recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista

They even gave an honourable mention to Biometrics and Ubuntu, with the latter being somewhat contentious. That said, I have agree that while Ubuntu has come on a long, long way, it’s still not quite there in terms of mainstream desktop/laptop use.

Need to install an Ubuntu package on a system that is not directly connected to the Internet? Well, if you have a HTTP proxy nearby, you can do it as follows:

# cd /etc/apt/apt.conf.d
# vi proxy
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://x.x.x.x:80";

Just edit/create the file above and add the line shown (substituting the IP address or hostname of your proxy server) and use your apt-get command(s) as normal. No need to restart any processed.

We have a number of Ubuntu Linux systems and I regularly find myself wanting to find out which specific distribution I have installed on a given system. While the trusty uname -a command is useful most of the time, it is unfortunately too generic in this instance and only reports version information about the Linux kernel.

However, today I discovered the lsb_release -a command which does precisely what I want. The description of this command in the man page says:

The lsb_release command provides certain LSB (Linux Standard Base) and distribution-specific information.

Here is a sample of the type of output it provides on a recently installed Ubuntu Server 8.10 system:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 8.10
Release:        8.10
Codename:       intrepid

Ever wondered how to change the default editor on your Ubuntu system? Well, thank to this article, it is now very easy to do this. I had always used the EDITOR envrionment variable but that always seemed a less reliable way of doing the same thing.

Thanks to Michele Neylon’s post for finding this …

I have an Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine running on my Windows system (using VMware) and a colleague wanted to do the same. However, rather than create a new VM and install a fresh version of Ubuntu and go through the motions of installing and configuring all the same development and testing tools, we decided to copy an already configured VM and see if the copy could be used intead.

This turned out to be a very trivial task and I would highly recommend it. Here is how we did it

1. Copy C:\Virtual Machines\Ubuntu to C:\Virtual Machines\Ubuntu2
2. From VMware, select File, Open and click the Browse button to locate the .vmx for the new VM (this file stores critical configuration information for the VM including the MAC Address of the Ethernet Adapter)
3. To rename the new VM, click Edit Virtual Machine Settings, select the Options tab and change the Virtual Machine Name. Click OK.
4. To start the new VM, click Start Virtual Machine and when prompted, select Create to create a new Unique Identifier for the new VM. This is a critical step as it breaks the association between the new VM and the one it was copied from, producing a new, unique MAC Address for the new VM.

Once the new VM boots, you should be able to log in and reconfigure the network as required and that’s it!