ksymeon

It's been 2.5 years since I posted an installation guide of installing Ubuntu 12.10 on VMWare Workstation but the release of Linux Mint 17.1 has prompted me to write an updated guide. This is the third of my guides, acting mostly as a memo for a quick install of new distros on VMWare, my first one written in 2009 ( Linux on VMWare with later additions of other posts full of little hints and reminders (e.g. fonts, keymaps)). Ingredients Please note that these instructions work for most distros, although this post focuses on Mint 17.1 A downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro ( Mint , Mint LMDE , Ubuntu , Debian ) A newly created virtual machine with 2-8GB of RAM, a 40-60GB disk and a couple of CPU cores. Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM's optical drive and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). For accessing your VM via ssh from your host, it helps if your Lin...

Some of you may be familiar with the bitmap (raster) fonts that I have created a few years back or the Raster Font Editor software that I've written for MS Windows. I've been using Linux quite a lot recently so I decided at some point to convert them to BDF (Binary distribution format) files. Here's a quick guide on how to download them and install them: Download Fonts You can either download from here or type this from a terminal window: wget http://www.cylog.org/files/fonts/cylog_fonts_bdf.zip Unzip and Copy fonts In a terminal window type the following: unzip cylog_fonts_bdf.zip mkdir ~/.fonts mv *.bdf ~/.fonts cd ~/.fonts ls ...and ensure you can see the *.bdf files listed. Convert the BDF files to PCF To do the conversion we use the command line utility bdftocpf , and then we remove the BDF files: bdftopcf -o leros10.pcf leros10.bdf bdftopcf -o leros.pcf leros.bdf bdftopcf -o lini.pcf lini.bdf bdftopcf -o yamahana.pcf yamahana.bdf bdftopcf -o ya...

A while ago I posted a "how-to" doubling as a check list for installing Linux on VMWare and later I've added other posts full of little hints and reminders (e.g. fonts, keymaps). A few years later and that information is still valid, however my workflow has changed a bit, so here's a new post based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) trying to consolidate everything into one big list. Ingredients A downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro ( Ubuntu , Debian , Mint ) A newly created virtual machine with 1-1.5GB of RAM, a 20-40GB disk and a couple of CPU cores. Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). It helps if your Linux account has the same username as the one on your host OS - it helps when accessing your computer via ssh. Once the installation finishes and the VM boots up, log in with your newly created user account ...

I'm on a mission here to write personal reminders for linux installations... My latest collection of monospaced (and not only) fonts can be installed from the command line by typing the following: sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer (Note: do not attempt to run this through the software manager - it has to be executed from the command line as it displays a EULA that needs to be accepted) sudo apt-get install fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console sudo apt-get install fonts-inconsolata sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-font-family sudo apt-get install xfonts-terminus Tahoma Tahoma is not included with the mscorefonts. Here's how to add it. Tahoma: cd ~/Downloads wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB cabextract -F 'tahoma*ttf' IELPKTH.CAB sudo mv -f tahoma*ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahoma* sudo fc-cache -v rm -f IELPKTH.CAB ...

For years and years I have been using the US keyboard layout on UK keyboards. Don't ask me why, many reasons. Now, UK keyboards have a key between the left-shift and Z, which has the backslash ("\") and pipe/bar ("|") symbols on it. On Windows selecting the US layout leaves that key as is, so basically this key works as a backslash and pipe key, but on Ubuntu it doesn't - it works as a "<" ">" key :-/ I seem to remember that on one of my Ubuntu installations (or was it a debian) I managed to find a keyboard layout that was US but worked on UK keyboards as I expected it. On my last install I just couldn't find a solution, until of course Googled it and found this page  which has instructions on how to remap a key. Two minutes playing with xev and xmodmap  and voila, all I needed to do was:  xmodmap -e "keycode 94 = backslash bar" Gotta love a quick solution.

What a nice surprise, when my Linux Format arrived today with a copy of Debian 6! My favourite distro's latest incarnation. :-) No time to waste, I've got a VM running with a dual-core CPU and a gig of RAM, and the installation started. A couple of moments later (after following my own instructions to setup ssh etc.) and I have a perfectly functioning Debian install on my desktop. Now, on to my apt-get list of useful things to install: sudo apt-get install make sudo apt-get install gcc Install VMWare tools and then, fire up the Software Centre from System -> Administration -> Software Centre and choose to your heart's content. sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo apt-get install mercurial sudo apt-get install git sudo apt-get install curl sudo apt-get install zip Got Google Chromium browser (synchronised my bookmarks), even installed the Free-Pascal compiler and Lazarus (what a good job they've done). In general Debian 6 did not s...

To add swap space for Linux, you'll need to add either a swap partition or create a new (big) file and use it for swap: To add a new 1GB file I do this: root@debian> mkdir /swap dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap/swapfile_1gb bs=1024 count=1048576 mkswap /swap/swapfile_1gb swapon /swap/swapfile_1gb To enable the swap file for the next boot, edit /etc/fstab and add this: /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 To check that the swap file is used, type: swapon -s free That's it! bs: blocksize count: number of blocks 1 million blocks x 1K = 1G

This post is written for Debian but will work for other Debian based linux distros like Ubuntu. Debian is my personal favourite as it is stable, clean, fast and easy-to-use/configure. There is a wealth of information about Debian on the net, and the debian.org web-site is quite comprehensive and helpful. So you have installed a Debian 5 (Lenny) distro on a virtual machine in VMWare and cygwin on your windows desktop. This is a quick guide (doubles as a reference/reminder for myself) on how to install stuff and get you going. As stated above I assume this is where you are: You've downloaded an ISO image from your favourite distro web-site ( Ubuntu / Debian ). You have installed the distro on a VMWare instance and you gave it a name (e.g. 'debian5') You have a 'root' account and your own named account (e.g. 'username'), advisable to use the same username you use for Windows (helps when accessing your computer from cygwin) You have cygwin installed on your P...

Install Samba: apt-get install samba Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and change: workgroup = your windows workgroup name netbios name = xxx Add shares: [_downloads_user] path=/home/user/_downloads browsable=yes writeable=yes valid users = user admin users = user Restart Samba: /etc/init.d/samba restart

I'm getting tired setting up my linux prompts every time I need to setup a new Linux machine (more on this later), so here's my cheat-sheet of linux settings for your .bashrc or .profile: Production machine (red theme): export PS1="\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;31m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] " QA machine (purple theme): export PS1="\n\[\033[1;35m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;35m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] " Test machine (yellow theme): export PS1="\n\[\033[1;33m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;33m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] " Test machine (cyan theme): export PS1="\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;36m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] " Integration machine (blue theme): export PS1="\n\[\033[1;34m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;34m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] " Personal/Local Account  (green theme): export PS1="\n\[\...