Ubuntu

There are oodles of guides to netbooting the ubuntu install. This is the story of what worked for me. You could start with any of the nearly-identical guides – I began with FRIS's "Install Ubuntu Gutsy over network or from a hard-disk" on Linux Mini. Now that we've gotten credit out of the way, here are the basic steps in broad strokes:

My Compaq nw9440 laptop has a Conexant HSF soft modem. To make a long story short, the only way to get it to work on Linux (that I know of, anyway) is to use the commercial Linuxant drivers. Conexant paid them to sell drivers, and they're twenty bucks. It's not a bad deal compared to 3com, which does not and may never have Linux support for Winmodems (especially older ones.)

I bought both Freespace and Freespace 2 not long after they came out, and recently while looking for games to play on Linux I decided to try to run FS2 under Wine. This didn't work, but then someplace in the back of my mind I dimly remembered that Volition had long ago open-sourced Freespace 2. Back then, I didn't have a Linux system worth playing games on, and I was dual-booting Windows anyway, so it didn't matter. But today, I run only Linux (aside from virtual machines - which aside from VMware Workstation, don't support 3d graphics yet) and so the Linux port had become relevant.

If you want to use the mapping functionality of ntop to give you [typically incorrect but better than nothing] geolocation maps on host-information pages (for IP hosts) then you need to install the mapper.pl script on a webhost someplace. Each lookup seems to take around 30-40kB but that's just a guess. I suppose I could use ntop to find out... Regardless, this is how I got mapper.pl to work.

As discussed in a previous article, KVM is a kernel-accelerated virtualization package for Linux that utilizes AMD or Intel VT to reduce the cost of virtualization. It is based in part on qemu, a long-lived processor emulation package which also has a non-VT virtualizing engine, kqemu. One of the benefits of using qemu as a codebase is that qemu already has emulation for various pieces of hardware, including network cards. qemu can use a variety of methods for providing networking, including slirp, tunneling, and various others.

To me, the most interesting type of networking is VDE, or "virtual distributed ethernet". This is most similar to the type of networking performed by VMware. vde provides virtual switches (or hubs) and lets you connect them together at will. This document will not explain how to configure a complicated setup; it explains only how to set up a single TUN/TAP interface and utilize it. I will also briefly cover IP Masquerading, which is necessary for your system to access the outside world if it doesn't have a real, routable IP address.

KVM is a kernel-level virtualization technology/application that provides a complete PC virtual machine under Linux when you have a processor supporting VT. AMD and Intel both have processors which provide hardware support for virtualization to decrease the cost of translating all privileged instructions. In a recent study, vmware showed performance losses of 46% when functioning as a webserver. This is not out of line with expectations; the primary purpose of vmware is to consolidate little-used servers into a single machine.

This is a fairly niche application, but at my place of employment I have an Epson Perfection 3170 Photo Scanner. I'm not even using the photo (negative/slide) scanning capabilities, I'm just using it as an ordinary scanner. It is however very fast and unprecedentedly quiet. I wanted to use this scanner under Linux (Epson provides Windows 95+ drivers and MacOS 9+ drivers, but no Linux drivers) sometimes, and on the Mac sometimes.