Geekdom updates

Roundup of bunch of things I've been upto in my spare time (and quite a bit of not so spare time). Almost none of this is original or ground breaking or anything like that, just a load of fun.

Chrooted Debian

For a long time now, I've yearned (like many others here at Amazon) for a linux distribution less older than dear old grandpa Redhat Enterprise Linux 3. So, ever since someone pointed me to a tutorial on setting up a chrooted installation of Debian Etch, I've been wanting it on my machine. So a couple of weeks ago, I went ahead and pulled Etch down with all of apt-get's greatness :)

Works great, a chrooted install sort of gives you the advantages of a virtual host(under any of xen/virtualbox/vmware) without the additional costs incurred in virtualization and running a whole os. So if you're okay with running on the same kernel (and instance) as the host os, a chrooted install is ultra neato.

However, one of my main motivations for finally doing this was to get firefox3 running. (it is impossible to run anything built on newer glibc2.4/kernel2.6 on the archaic rhel3)
However, debian etch is again an uncle among distros, but I have no other option since that's like the only one that still runs on kernel 2.4 and thus its binaries can thus run over rhel3, and the gtk+ version is about 2 minor versions less than what firefox3 needs :), and no ready backports available either :P. Back to square one. Anyway, I can live without firefox3 on my desktop for a while, as long as I have my winxp laptop for bootstrapping firefox :)

Anyway, the internal wiki link I used is not accessible from the internet. So here are the closest links I could find (and used too)

http://capricorn.woot.net/~jdrew/debian-chroot.html

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot

https://help.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/packagingguide/C/appendix-chroot.html

Webserving over a Dsl with help from Dyndns

Another something that I've wanted to do for a long time now is to get the dyndns/nat/webserver setup going over my dsl connection so I can put stuff up from my laptop/desktop. And I finally did that yesterday.

Installed Lighttpd from cygwin. Then went into my adsl router's settings and turned on the nat (my router has a very simple nat configuration where you can only specify one host where all traffic is routed to), and opened up the router's firewall to let port 80 through.
And i finally got myself an account on DynDNS and registered kashyapp.dyndns.org and am using their windows client right now to keep updating my dsl assigned ip on their server.

All set :) and I am serving out a small section of my photos.

Virtualbox

I tried installing virtualbox the other day on my laptop, but it would fail to install for some strange reason. Would go all the way to end and rollback silently. Poking around in the bios showed that 'intel virtualization support' was turned off and as soon as I enabled that, virtualbox installed itself. Yayy! Now, I want to try a minimal ubuntu on my virtualbox :D. And yeah, virtualbox is now The default virtualization solution on most linux distributions. Neat stuff.

More to write about:

• Extensions and tweaks that I have on my firefox


• The windows xp window manager can actually do focus follows mouse, no more struggling with braindead click-to-focus


• Opera mini is the web browser to use on your mobile phone. And if you have a poor gprs/edge connection, then it is the ONLY browser to use.