Ubuntu 8.10 Under VirtualBox

Ubuntu 8.10 works great under Sun’s Virtual Box. To get everything working perfectly, you need to install “Guest Additions”. This is done by selecting “Install Guest Additions” from the VirtualBox Menu, and then entering the following into a terminal: -

sudo /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

This installs better mouse & video drivers and enables things like automatic resolution changing, and better mouse control.

For some reason, my xorg.conf file wasn’t updated properly though – the following lines should be present in /etc/X11/xorg.conf : -

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “vboxmouse”
Option “CorePointer”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Driver “vboxvideo”
EndSection

rsync on the QNAP TS-101

rsync is a useful application which synchronizes files and folders between devices. The QNAP TS-101 supports this (with a bit of fiddling).

Setting up the QNAP

On the QNAP, go to the “Remote Replication” page, and turn on “Allow remote Rsync server to back up data to NAS”. (“Enable backup from a remote server to the local host.” should already be set, and the port should be the default of 873)

Fixing rsyncd.conf

Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem with the rsync configuration file – the master user is set as “admin” which doesn’t exist (the root user on the QNAP is “administrator”).

To fix this, edit /etc/rsyncd.conf and change: -

uid = admin

to

uid = administrator

Listing Remote Folders

To check that rsync is allowing connections, go to your client and enter: -

rsync 192.168.0.2::

You should get something similar to the following: -

Qmultimedia
Qdownload
Qweb
Qusb
Public

Backing up a directory

To back up a directory, its a simple matter of issuing an rsync command. For example: -

rsync -vrltz –progress –password-file=password.txt –delete –exclude-from=excludes.txt “/cygdrive/C/users/windows_user/Documents/” “qnap_user@192.168.0.2::qnap_folder/“

where: -

password.txt is a file containing your qnap password
excludes.txt is a file containing files not to synchronize
C/users/windows_user/Documents is the folder to copy
qnap_user is a QNAP user that has access to the remote folder
192.168.0.2 is the IP address of the QNAP device
qnap_folder is the destination

Linux Media Centres

I’m toying with the idea of creating a Media Centre PC running Linux. Here are the main contendors for Linux Media Centres that I can find.

• Boxee
• MythTV
• Freevo
• Elisa
• Geexbox
• Linuxmce

Linksys WRT54GL Super Router

I’ve recently bought a Linksys WRT54GL Router. This is a great little unit that allows you to upload custom firmware.

After playing around with DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato, I finally settled on Tomato. The features are too many to list here so here’s a link to the Wiki.

There’s also a great article on Lifehacker here.

Multi-Platform Applications

CrossPlatformApplications.org is a great little website that gives a summary of software that runs on a combination of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Great for if you have different PC’s running different OS’s and want to use the same software.