Here is a well laid out explanation of how to do it:
http://blog.philippklaus.de/2011/11/install-nx-server-neatx-on-ubuntu-11-10/

I am a bit disappointed with the result though.

I don’t seem to be able to connect and disconnect cleanly. The neatx server leaves sessions behind and then tries to re-attach to them causing an error.

Recently I have got caught out by leaving a terminal running while remotely connected to a Linux server and the connection has failed leaving the remote process unfinished & terminated.

The Linux screen command allows you to run programs and disconnect. Rather than re-inventing the wheel I’m simply going to link to an article that made sense to me. Located here: http://www.rackaid.com/resources/linux-screen-tutorial-and-how-to/

Telstra provides a costly service. There isn’t enough competition to get the prices down especially in a regional area. They do have the best coverage on the mobile network though and it would be unfair not to mention our low population and enormous cabling distances to provide some sort of counter-point to the first sentence.

We have been paying circa 95$ a month for a fixed home line and an ADSL 2+ with a 50GB (I think) plan.

However we don’t use the homeline and the ADSL is $45 a month but you need to rent the copper to get the ADSL hence the nearly 40$ a month charge on top. Ouch!

For area’s where it’s Telstra only there is no such thing (as far as I’m aware) as Naked DSL.

So until the National Broadband Network arrives in my town. I’m going to leave the Phone/DSL dis-connected and when I see them laying the cable for the NBN in my regional city I’ll re-apply for a DSL/Fiber service… That’s if it ever eventuates.

http://tfischernet.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/searchable-pdfs-with-linux/

PDF Copy of blog post in case they stop blogging and leave the internet

I have found the problem/s:

The immediate problem: The version of Office 2003 didn’t have Service Pack 3 installed. Once I installed it the xlsx opened fine.

The underlying problem: I also didn’t have Microsoft Update installed and enabled. Windows Update doesn’t grab Office updates so despite the Windows 7 OS being up to date the version of Office was as installed. So another tip is to make sure you enable Microsoft Update as it will pick up old versions of Microsoft Software not just the O/S as Windows Update does.

Just got this error when running vmware convertor on Windows 7 to transfer an XP image to ESXi 4.

Looks like VMWare Convertor can’t find the files.

Opening the Virtual PC’s settings and you find that it is referencing a `Parent Disk’. Copy the this file to the same directory:

You should now be able to copy the VM up to your ESXI server.

Note: You need to have the Virtual PC in a Powered Down state in order for VMWare Convertor to work.

I want to schedule a defrag for every day at 5:30PM. This is on an old Windows XP Pro laptop.

I can never remember what the abbreviations used to denote the names of the weekdays are for the `at’ command so here is an example:

at 18:30 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su c:\windows\system32\defrag.exe c: -v

At work I have a range of admin tools that I install on every new workstation that I get and after 10 and more years of clicking next and watching progress bars I think I would like to reduce the number of times I have to install stuff.

It’s counter productive to spend 2 days on and off re-installing software that you only use once in a blue moon.

So heres one vote for creating an IT Tools Virtual Image. In it you stash your esoteric administration utilities. For example that PLC software or Phone System config utility that is critical but not in everyday usage.

The Virtual Machine sits there ready for when you need it, but it isn’t cluttering up your every-day workstation which can be dedicated to Twitter, Google+, Facebook (if you’re into that sort of thing).

You can then move the Virtual Machine from Workstation to (new) Workstation and the upgrade process becomes less tedious and takes less time.

You can use Windows Virtual PC or VMWare Player or if you’re into Linux any number of options (VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen, KVM etc) to create your virtual machine.

Saturday very early in the morning we had a electricity substation blow nearby. It caused a power outage not only at my home but 6kms away at work. The outage was for long enough that the UPS’s didn’t hold the servers up, and some of them didn’t come up again cleanly. So I went in to work Saturday morning and used my index finger to remedy the situation.

The problem with sudden and unexpected power outages is that they tend to make failing old equipment fail completely.

So I have a control system computer that has been ticking away for over 5yrs that has become borked.

In an environment where you have hot spares and mirror redundancy it can be as little as half an hour from fail to ohh yeah.

Unfortunately I’m spending my Sunday evening doing the following:

• Transfering a hard disk from a dead PC to a less dead one which has an identical spec
• Taking a Ghost Image of the hard disk to a external USB Hard drive
• Creating a similarly sized virtual machine using VMWare Player on a new Windows 7 machine
• Booting the VM from a Ghost CD and then attaching the external USB drive to the VM and restoring the ghost image into the new vm

All the above sounds relatively easy however I am suffering from really bad performance in the Western Digital MYBook 205 G USB hard drive.

I’m getting max of ~100MB per minute transfer from the USB drive to the VM image.

Admittedly I’m running through a virtualized setup so you expect it to be slower. Taking the Ghost image off the physical hardware took about 20mins but the restoration is probably going to be an hour and a half.

The reason for the blog post is to remind myself in future how long it can take to restore something and a solution.

I have also run into the VMWare Player boots to fast to allow you into the BIOS problem and have had to add the bios.bootDelay = 5000 parameter to the vmx file to allow me time to get into the BIOS.

SOLUTION: Restore from Extremely slow WD250 External USB Drive into VMWare Player VM Image
OK this is what I did to speed up the process:

1. Create a Second hard disk in the VM image to hold the Ghost(.gho) image file
2. Boot VMWare Guest using Ubuntu 9.04 iso (or any linux live distro) partition and format the 2nd hard disk with NTFS, once it’s finished formatting, mount it (e.g. mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt) and copy the Ghost image from the attached USB drive to the 2nd harddisk (This took about 15minutes at 4.5MB/sec) and shutdown
3. Reconfigure your VM to boot from a Ghost iso image again.
4. Use ghost to restore ghost image from 2nd harddisk (this is working at 800MB/min) (This took under 10minutes to restore a ~4.5GB fast compressed ghost image)
5. Once ghost is complete shutdown the VM and before you restart into the restored image remove the 2nd hard disk

At under 100$ AUD for a license it’s good value. And with modest CAD skills you can do useful stuff with it. For example my front fence:

front_fence

QCAD 3
I have been using the QCAD 3 release candidate.