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”.

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.

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.

Utilizing macros can make life easier when you’re dealing with building on, and for, multiple platforms. Why bother with hard-coding full paths to system utilities when you can simply refer to them by their macro name? These can also be useful for avoiding things like rpm check-files errors, installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found, and debuginfo related stuff.

You can go to http://www.nltk.org and download NLTK and all the extras - pyyaml, matplotlib, etc. However, these packages are now in the Fedora repositories which makes it a dead simple task to install.

Perform an Inception. Mount your iso, then mount the image found inside. Go inside the second image to see what is available during the pre install section of a kickstart. Use isomaster to rebuild the install.img and plop that inside the the outer iso, rebuilding that one too.

You can list the contents of an rpm without installing it first. If you’re not going to build your own from source, you should at least check an rpm before installing it to see what it’s going to install.

These packages are not available in the out-of-the-box configuration when you install Ubuntu 10.04. To get sun java packages such as sun-java6-jre or sun-java6-doc, you need to give yourself access to additional repositories… Now try searching for or installing one of those packages you were missing.

Think of all the software you install on your computer as windows on a battle tank. Every app is another window where armor used to be. The next time you get hit with a virus, the chance that it’s aimed at one of your windows just increased.

The default out-of-the-box installation should delete any additional anonymous users after installation and disallow remote logins completely, but it doesn’t. At least all you have to do is run the mysql_secure_installation script to do so.