After having a chat with an old friend about RISC OS, I decided to hunt out my old ROMs and disk images and try out the RPCemu Linux port. Actually its pretty good, certainly no VirtualRPC, but not bad, it runs RISC OS 4.02 just fine, I couldn’t get networking to work but did get HostFS to work (allows you to store RISC OS files on your plain Linux partition instead of using disk images).

I got JunOS Olive 9.0 installed under VirtualBox today. Basically followed the VMWare instructions here, which are essentially: Do a minimal install of FreeBSD 4.11, with the majority of disk space allocated to /var (4Gb disk, 256Mb RAM) Setup a serial pipe and connect via “socat unix-client:/tmp/vbox.pipe -” Setup a network interface via the CLI, reboot: cli configure set interfaces em0 unit 0 family inet address 192.168.0.115/24 commit and-quit scp the files across and “pkg_add jinstall-7.

I just figured out how to get my EpsonRX425 multifunction printer to work under Fedora10, over the network via CUPS to the CentOS 5.2 server its connected to. rpm -Uvh pips-sprx420_425_430s-cups-2.6.2-3.i386.rpm uncomment the application/octet-stream line in the server’s /etc/cups/mime.convs file, to allow raw printing (fix found here) on the local (F10) machine, add a printer with uri ipp://centos52box/printers/EpsonRX425 In fact the Avasys (Epkowa/Epson Japan) website now lists Fedora 10 as a supported platform, and even provides 64-Bit iScan RPM’s!

I’ve just discovered a GKrellm replacement, kind of like gDesklets called Conky. Its pretty nice as it draws itself on the X11 root window (known as the desktop/wallpaper to mere mortals). Its very customisable, you can gather the information from commands such as lmsensors and ifconfig. Here’s my .conkyrc, I still need to figure out how to remove spaces before the %age sign. own_window yes own_window_colour brown own_window_transparent yes own_window_type override own_window_transparent yes own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager double_buffer yes use_spacer right use_xft yes alignment bottom_right gap_x 10 gap_y 10 update_interval 2.

VirtualBox 2.1.0 has been released. New features include complete revamping of host interface networking – no more IP forwarding or bridging/tap interfaces required, vastly simplifying network setup, its even better than VMWare now, as it doesn’t even create a new interface on the host. Unfortunately they seem to have completely broken Linux display support, with the X11 screen stuck at the framebuffer resolution of 640×480. Fullscreen and seemless mode don’t work either.