Here’s a short step-by-step how to unpack files to any custom location you wish. If you used this for some automated purpose, you could easily create and destroy the temporary structures on the fly by looking at the tarball contents first.

virsh won’t let me query information, but I do know the vm names I wish to start and I have a simple ssh shell on the host machine. So lets give it a shot.

When you try to connect to a remote virtual machine host server and get the Virtual Machine Manager Connection Failure window shown below, the problem should be one of only two things. Either libvirtd really isn’t running and you need to start it, or you don’t have openssh-askpass installed.

After you get through the initial basic system configuration, here’s a quick how to get VirtualBox up and running in minutes on Debian Squeeze. The only package group i’m going to assume you installed was “SSH Server”.

Bonding multiple interfaces together is kind of a pain. After trial and error, I got trunking working between Debian Squeeze and a switch with LACP support.

Choice is one of many reasons why I really like this distribution over the other popular flavours right now. I share the same dissatisfaction for Unity and Gnome 3 with most of the community. While this is the main reason for jumping ship and crashing the Mint party, there are some really simple things I like, like Dropbox.

The only problem i’ve had with LXDE and Mint is that running as a guest in VirtualBox, the guest additions will not install properly. I tried mounting the additions from the host and installing them, no dice. I tried installing from the software repositories using the aptitude update manager, no dice. So it didn’t work out of the box for me, but a quick recompile did the trick. No moving around files or manipulating configurations are necessary, just recompile for the running kernel and you’re in business.

Install multiple avant window navigator dock panels on more than one display by editing gconf or change the source code for the more complete, but harder way. There may be a newer version of Avant Window Navigator (AWN) out that supports multiple docks across completely different displays, but I wanted to get this working in version 0.4.0 which relies upon a set of older libraries that I already have.

You don’t need to install an RPM package just to get to the files. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for the default configuration files or docs from a package. You may have the package already installed and don’t want to reinstall it. It’s not pretty, and I wish rpm and yum provided a prettier method of extracting a file, but it works.

Persistent naming of devices is important for instances such as booting where a particular hardware device needs to get mapped to the same name each time. To get the UUID of a block device, use scsi_id. To get the UUID of a file system for something like grub.conf, try blkid.