Test IE virtual machines made easy

I just have to take a minute and thank @xdissent et al. for the amazing work done on ievms. I was able to install IE 6,7,8 and 9 virtual machines without hardly any work on my part.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04, and after uninstalling the virtualbox package found in the standard repository and installing the one found here, I simply ran the command in the readme, went to bed, and in the morning I was greeted with this in my VirtualBox window.

So far, each of them has worked without issue.

Why is udev renaming my network interfaces?

It was driving me nuts. I was setting up a few virtual servers and the network interfaces were not showing up. I looked in dmesg and there were some odd lines that looked like this.

udev: renamed network interface eth1 to eth2
udev: renamed network interface eth0_rename to eth1

It turns out that udev that takes care of matching up the network interfaces to the physical hardware so the same hardware will always get the same device ids. So, in order to save myself time, instead of installing the Ubuntu again on each VM, I just copied the HD from one machine to the next. The old VM had different MAC addresses for the interfaces saved in the udev config. So, with the help of this post, I deleted /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and it stopped doing the rename.

Asus Laptop Reclaimed

I’ve successfully installed Debian Linux on an old Asus Laptop.  My wife used it for a few years, but she was trying to use it for word processing, and a few of the keys stick every now and then.  It’s been a goal of mine to get it running a newer version of linux, but the CD drive is bad, so installing from a iso is out of the question.  I kept meaning to install from usb drive, but the only one we have that didn’t have files I cared about on it was only 128 MB.

Anyway, I got a 1 GB usb drive from my insurance agent.  Score!  Oh, they still have the road atlases, but the free stuff has gotten considerably cooler.  I followed the instructions here and it worked like a charm:  http://bit.ly/dAKhWJ