VirtualBox and shared clipboard

Based on the number of results from a search, I feel grateful that I haven't had the shared clipboard between the Mac OS X 10.11 host of my work laptop and the Xubuntu 16.04 guest break sooner.

I read the documentation. I read many of the search results, including this older thread. Those commands gave me error messages! (This is useful, not terrible.)

/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: 31: /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: /usr/bin/VBoxClient: not found
/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: 32: /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: /usr/bin/VBoxClient: not found
/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: 33: /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: /usr/bin/VBoxClient: not found
/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: 34: /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: /usr/bin/VBoxClient: not found
/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: 35: /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all: /usr/bin/VBoxClient: not found

I did a directory listing to look at the available VBox scripts, and saw that those were symlinks. Based on that, if I had to guess, the VBoxClient script was renamed to VBoxClient-all without updating the script itself where it called itself. Doh! The simplest fix was not to edit the script giving the errors but to add a symlink for the "old" name. The symlink solution will also aid any other scripts that were also not updated to call the new name.

user@guest:~$ cd /usr/bin
user@guest:/usr/bin$ ls -l VBox*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxBalloonCtrl -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 62 Jan 18 10:06 VBoxClient-all -> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/VBoxGuestAdditions/98vboxadd-xclient
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Jan 18 10:06 VBoxControl -> /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-5.0.32/bin/VBoxControl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxHeadless -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxManage -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxSDL -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
user@guest:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/VBoxGuestAdditions/98vboxadd-xclient VBoxClient
user@guest:/usr/bin$ ls -l VBox*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxBalloonCtrl -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 62 Apr 12 11:04 VBoxClient -> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/VBoxGuestAdditions/98vboxadd-xclient
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 62 Jan 18 10:06 VBoxClient-all -> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/VBoxGuestAdditions/98vboxadd-xclient
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Jan 18 10:06 VBoxControl -> /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-5.0.32/bin/VBoxControl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxHeadless -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxManage -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jan 18 08:58 VBoxSDL -> ../share/virtualbox/VBox.sh

That might have been sufficient, but I thought this command also sounded promising.

user@guest:/usr/bin$ sudo rcvboxadd setup
Removing existing VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules ...done.
Removing existing VirtualBox non-DKMS kernel modules ...done.
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules ...done.
Doing non-kernel setup of the Guest Additions ...done.
You should restart your guest to make sure the new modules are actually used

And the report after a reboot is: OUCH! Lesson 1: do not try to install the HWE kernel (hardware enablement)! Virtual Box is not happy when you mess with the kernel. (Longer version: installing HWE conflicted with virtualbox-guest-x11 and that's necessary. I thought virtualbox-qt would be sufficient, but that didn't seem to be the case.) Without a skilled administrator, I don't think I would use that VM again! Lesson 2: make a snapshot before kernel upgrades! Or just any ol' time, because backups are good! I suspect the symlink helps too, but overall VBox feet were shot in the process of trying to restore the shared clipboard.

Xubuntu with blank screen

My Xubuntu media PC (that's been getting heavy use this week) blanks its screen to black even though I disabled the screen saver. Well, there's an appropriately simple solution: xset s noblank. Ahh, no more cries of "Mommy, please wiggle the mouse!"

Xubuntu 13.04 and Amazon Prime

I had not tried to watch Amazon Prime videos since upgrading my media PC to Xubuntu 13.04, but discovered I couldn't. Luckily, this fix also worked for me: run hal in verbose mode, create the directories that it wants to use, and restart hal.

install HandBrake

I ended up not needing HandBrake (by not needing to transcode the video), but I discovered how to install HandBrake in Xubuntu 13.04: sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk. Without the -gtk, I kept getting the message

E: Package 'handbrake' has no installation candidate

LooperNG: no go

I love the feature list for LooperNG:

• SNMP Trap forwarding, exploding and rewriting (enhancing).
• Event generation for demos, debugging, troubleshooting etc.
• Event Enrichment and Escalation.
• Intelligent routing, re-routing, and processing of events and alerts.
• Monitoring logfiles, syslog events, intrusion events, etc.
• Forwarding alert history to databases, logfiles, etc.
• Centralize alerts in a LooperDB database.

The bitter reality is that the simple configuration we tried at work didn't properly handle its own logfile, and we ended up getting alerts that we were running out filespace in /var (thank goodness logs were partitioned away from the kernel!). The only way to recover space in /var was to quit Looper NG. So as much as I loved the feature list, this is not the software for me to use at work on a production server(s). I'm not even sure how to phrase this as a bug report since I know Dustin Marquess is professional enough not to use software that slams /var. But I know when to move on, especially when I have trap forwarder and I only wanted to explore more powerful alternatives. Test over, not using this software.

MythDora ... Not Yet

Running anaconda 11.4.1.62, the MythDora system installer - please wait...

/usr/bin/python: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.5.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

install exited abnormally [1/1]

disabling swap...

unmounting filesystems...

        /mnt/runtime done

        disabling /dev/loop0 LOOP_CLR_FD failed: 6

        /proc done

        /dev/pts done

        /sys done

        /mnt/stage2 done

sending termination signals...done

sending kill signals...done

you may safely reboot your system

My current theory as to why I can't install MythDora from DVD or CD or LiveCD is that I have bad burns from OS X. Maybe it doesn't set all the right "bootable DVD" signals so that something (including libpython) isn't extracted or mounted at boot. I believe the error message because I can't find libpython when I mount the image in OS X.

The other possible theory is that the hardware I'm using is just that screwy. Linux is strongest on slightly older hardware (so that someone has written the drivers for it), so I asked for a cast-off. This cast-off, it was finally admitted to me, is unwanted because it was not stable as a Windows XP box. I've got another cast-off (same reason, but different-enough hardware to try again) to try.

Argh.

Picking an All-in-One Media Center

I happened across the Telematics Freedom Foundation PDF on FLOSS Media Centers, and the chart in the middle was great! For as little as we watch TV, the cable TV bill is gigantic! So we're considering ditching it (keeping the cable modem of course, but that portion of the bill doesn't feel as outrageous unless you compare it to most of the rest of the developed world where the US loses on bandwidth to households and price per bandwidth), but we like the DVR feature. So we need to replace it with something like TiVo. From the chart, I eliminated Neuros (don't want another set-top box, although it does look cool) and MediaPortal (I don't run servers on Windows). The next filter was that I want to watch and record TV, so that knocked out all but MythTV and Freevo. (Shame; XBMC and its derivatives Plex and Boxee look nice.) Those two have about the same feature sets, but I noticed that Feevo didn't have keyword search in media library; if I go to the trouble of adding keywords (and I do), I want to be able to search those. So it's MythTV.

The easy path is probably one of the bundled versions. Of those, Google search results seem to agree that if you can stand the longer up-front install time, MythDora is the easiest. I shouldn't have to install it too often, and I don't mind walking away from an installer either, so I think I should burn a copy of MythDora to try it out. Bonus is using RHEL at work might transfer to some comfort with RH's Fedora Core too (I hope). I'm keeping LinuxMCE in mind too, in case we want to add that home automation. Since LinuxMCE uses MythTV as well, I don't think it would be a painful transition for us after I install the same libraries and skins, but I suspect that starting there would be unnecessarily complicated.

Finding the right online reference comparing our choices has made all the difference so far. Yay for online!

Remote Control of VNC

Yesterday I needed to quit a graphical application running on my Linux laptop at work, and I couldn't find it in a process listing. Whoops! Time for remote control! Although I had turned on VNC ("Remote Desktop" in RHEL Linux), apparently I forgot the password. So I started with how to control the gnome vino-server from the command line and moved on to how to change the vino password from the command line. I used the online base64 encoder to put the known password in with gconftool. Pretty cool!