Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be.

From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes). Main reasons:

Every once in a while you find a gem. One of these for me is SShuttle – until now I have not known about this one.

[](https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3609/3525594169_2668b21170.jpg “Threads 140.365 by Stephan Geyer, on Flickr” https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephangeyer/3525594169/ http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/2.0/80x15.png “Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License” http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

This is a follow-up on an older blog using Ubuntu.

[](https://farm6.static.flickr.com/5290/5328014910_0b3bdd6718.jpg “r by rosmary, on Flickr” https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvoegtli/5328014910/ http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/2.0/80x15.png “Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License” http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License )](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by

Raspberry Pi Prerequisites

Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best).

With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available.

wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add -<br></br>echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Whilst I am by no means a photographer I do end up taking quite a few photos (these days pretty much exclusively on my phone) and the management of these photos can be a pain. So far I have never found an program worth the pain over plain old file management.

But having stumbled across Darktable (http://darktable.org/) I think I might have found a worthwile package.

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver.

On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.
sudo apt-get install unoconv
Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze.
#find all Word Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;<br></br>#find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;
To show all the possible conversion formats you can use:
unoconv --show
The following list of document formats are currently available:

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform.

The requirements list in order of priority: