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.

Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/) by Stephan Geyer

Use-case: I just been trying to get Ubuntu Make to install Eclipse IDE and the local AARNET download mirror is just refusing to cooperate (https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/issues/90). A quick forward to a remote VPS fixed the issue without headaches

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

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

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 -
echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list
sudo apt-get update
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.

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.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/) by Thomas HawkAfter years of trialing on various Windows platforms I have found [Notepad++](http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ “Notepad++”) to be the most useful of them all (closely followed by EMEditor which I used for years before Notepad++). Since I have now switched to Ubuntu completely it was necessary to find a permanent alternative on that platform since Notepad++ is only available on Windows.