Well I thought I had better write about something. I decided today that I want to get my personal rants down on “paper”. So I figure what better way to save me from forgetting where a page was left than to leave it all online. I am not “going-green” or becoming “worried about the planet” or any of that other crap people are shoving these days. I am going to attempt to document my thoughts about specific money saving technologies and not the whole “green movement”. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a different type of article for me. I am writing this as a way to save money with windows not just using Linux.
I use Linux for just about everything, and the Windows OS that are running for the setups here are VMs on Linux (VirtualBox).
I am going to attempt to show step by step how to set up a windows XP desktop VM to be a terminal server for 5 or more clients.
I am going to attempt to make a simple explanation of how and what to install as far as updates. This is again only for my reference really, but the screen shots may help with some very common questions I have been gettting.
At this point I have screenshots for a current flash, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, and Automatic updates on XP. If your not using XP then this is useless. Windows has stopped progressing forward at Windows XP so I am going to document what I can while I can. I try to use screenshots of software updates to inform better than words. More words and more pictures is preferred but at least more pictures.
Well its official now. VMWare requires windows to be useful. Without windows you won’t be able to pay for all the goodies. The last hope they had was VMware server and it has not been updated in over a year. Its sad but its time to abandon those guys in favor of something both useful and usable without the windows requirement.
Enter the world of VirtualBox. Honestly I saw this project as well as several others headed to the junker after big brother bought them. Oracle has been very good to VirtualBox and I believe it is ready for primetime. There are some key issues but I am going to walk through step by step how to create a new “headless” Ubuntu VirtualBox server.
So like I was trying and trying to get things to work with openvpn on Ubuntu. On winblows this is not an issue. Dude you can use this big fat gui client on the server and the client if needs be on windows. For Linux this seems to be very not-so-easy.
So here I am to save my day again with simple and concise instructions. These are unique to Untangle’s OpenVPN and mostly only Untangle’s OpenVPN implementation. Use and adapt if you can, and please post comments if you get it to work with another method.
Why would anybody ever want to clean out this hidden directory? Simple, it gets full of junk that you don’t need or want any more.
Anytime an MS update fails to install or gets interrupted, regardless of the product, pieces get left in \windows\installer so that you loose disc space. This appears to be by design as MS has now removed the download for MsiZap.
I am not very formal about informing others how to do stuff. This howto is mostly a reference for me to remember how to do stuff when I really need it. Kinda like my own personal google 
In this howto I will give clear and concise lists of how to setup a crontab entry to run some program at a certain time.
If you have to retype the same sort of stuff over and over repetitively (call center anyone?) for various purposes, autohotkeys is the program for you. If you have tried other proprietary solutions that work well but have limits imposed without purchase of next version you need to try the open source goodness that is autohotkeys.
I am going to show off the easy config that I have been using for over 2 months now.
This is a simple procedure that I have stumbled upon to install VMware server on Ubuntu. The problem with the default installation is that it doesn’t support or compile for Ubuntu out of the box.
We will have to patch the source after installation, but before configuration. This procedure will also have to be completed each time there is a kernel update.
I use Centos for a lot of things so I am recording here the command(s) I use to make it work the way I need it to. Read the rest of this entry »
