Writing a .iso to a USB drive in Linux

I've recently been attempting to test the lastest LTS release of Ubuntu: 12.04 Precise Pangolin on a touchscreen laptop recently retired from active service in my agency. I grabbed my .iso and tried first with UNetbootin, only to be dumped rather unceremoniously to a (initramfs) prompt with BusyBox.

After failing in my first attempt I decided to try some advice I found here: simply umount /dev/sdc1 (or whatever) then cat diskimage.iso > /dev/sdc1. While this did appear to create a good disk, I was unable to boot it at all.

Then after reading the bootable USB creation instructions on the Ubuntu page I decided to try the Mac methodology since I've used dd for this purpose before and I see no reason why this wouldn't work on Linux. Strangely though, it did not.

The eventual solution I found was to rename the .iso to .img and use usb-imagewriter from the ubuntu repositories. *shrugs*

CPU & RAM Info in Linux

I'm posting this because I've found myself having to look it up more than once. If you find yourself on an unfamiliar Linux system and need the CPU or RAM information you can simply cat /proc/meminfo for RAM, or cat /proc/cpuinfo for CPU. Easy as pi!

Backup a VirtualBox VM

I just installed FreeBSD 8.2 in VirtualBox 3.2.10_OSE under CrunchBang linux. After getting everything configured in terms of guest additions, and display setup I wanted to take a snapshot. Turns out there's a nifty one step command to facilitate this process that I found on here. Simply run

VBoxManage clonevdi ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/image.vdi ~/image_Backup.vdi

That's all there is to it! Easy as pi.

Convert .ova to .ovf in Linux

I just spent the better part of 20 minutes searching for a method to convert a .ova file downloaded from the web to the .ovf format required by my version of VirtualBox-ose. VMWare has a program called OVFTool that may do this conversion but requires registering to download and may only be available as a windows binary. After hitting several dead ends I found the simple answer. As it turns out the .ova file format is a tar image!

tar xvf SomeVMImage.ova

will dump the .ovf and related files. Easy as pi!

Install gmote on 64 bit linux

It appears that gmote and vlc may not play nicely together on 64 bit systems (specifically Ubuntu 11.10). Gmote consistently complained that it was unable to load libvlc.so even though vlc was correctly installed and working. I found this tip here to issue the following command to fix the problem:

sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev

One command, and 20 seconds of patience, and now gmote works like a charm.