ninth level down

I’m a big fan of virtual machines and especially VMware running Ubuntu Linux. Open source and virtualisation just go so well together – as many machines as you need with no restrictions. I use them more and more – build servers for different architectures, test beds, web servers, etc.

Anyway, here’s a quick tip that I discovered while setting up a VM server on amd64. I installed VMware from Ubuntu’s feisty-commercial repository (as easy as ever) but none of the virtual machines I ran on the box would connect to the network. It turned out that by default VMware only “bridges” the main interface of the host machine, in this case eth0. However, the only active interface on this machine is a wireless card on ath0. To fix this issue, I just needed to configure ath0 as a bridged interface by running:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config-network.pl

…and followed the prompts to select “Add a bridged interface on /dev/vmnet2 from ath0″.

After that was done, I just needed to change the settings in the server console for each VM to use the /dev/vmnet2 device and the networking on the VMs sprang into life; they could get IP addresses using DHCP from my router.

Hope this tip helps someone out there because the problem had me foxed for a while!

I’ve finally got round to updating my MythTV guide:

• http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

This is the most major change yet, with a complete new look for the site. I’m going to release site’s graphics as an Ubuntu desktop and usplash theme, so if you like it then watch this space!

As far as the guide goes, it’s had a thorough overhaul to make it more relevant to the new Feisty packages and it now focuses on the EIT TV listings rather than the Internet based XMLTV stuff, mainly because this is so much easier to get working and now has some advantages such as listings for digital radio.

April saw the second major release of my satirical side project, Ubuntu Satanic Edition. Although the response was never going to match the impact of the first release, I’ve had nothing but great feedback regarding the artwork. In fact, one user was impressed enough to cite it in a thread called “List the best software for Linux” …and it wasn’t me, honest! The whole thing has been done using open source tools and I’ll be posting details of what I used on this blog very soon.

I’m going to focus on my MythTV site for a while, but there are still some irons in the inferno regrading the Satanic Edition… plus I’ve got loads of great artwork ideas for the next release. If only I had the time for it all.

A good few years ago when I was at college and forced to program in Turbo Pascal (urgh!), we used the word “google” for those strange characters which used to appear on your computer screen when you’d made a really bad mistake in your code – you know, smiley faces, stippled blocks and the like. “Bugger, I’ve got a screen of googley characters!”.

Nowadays, of course, Google is spelt with an uppercase ‘G’ and means something entirely different.

Actually, Google the company now play a big part in how I use computers. As a big company, they’ve learnt a lot from Microsoft – and done the opposite. I love the way they follow open standards and use open APIs and give it all away for free, such as 3GB of email space all paid for with a bunch of very subtle targeted ads.

The thing I like most about Google are that their applications are mostly online. This has allowed me to change the way I do stuff quite dramatically. Instead of having one big PC running Windows, the price of hardware has allowed me to have a few PCs all running Linux… desktops in the study and at work, a MythTV box in the lounge, a laptop for lugging around and a PDA for everywhere else (not running Linux… yet). All these boxes can be used to access the same information – bookmarks and news feeds through my Google homepage, photos through Picasaweb, email through Gmail, news through Google Alerts, adds through AdSense, webstats through Analytics… the list goes on.

Sure, some of their stuff isn’t particularly original – YouTube, Flickr and Hotmail were the innovators for some of the stuff, but a bit of healthy competition keeps them on their toes. I like the way all the Google products can be accessed neatly with one account from any PC and just how nice it all is to use. Plus, it all gets updated automatically without having to upgrade every PC I use.

Maybe they’ll turn evil one day, but, until then, I’ll continue to use them for much more than just searching.