Micks Distractions

A rant about the state of play with Sun, and what I’d like to see Sun do to improve Solaris.
Read more…

I’ve been a user of Opera Mini for a long time. On my mobile it’s great. However, there’s times when I need to view the web in a bigger than 240×320 format. I spend a fair amount of time on the train, and I have a laptop with bluetooth, and a phone with GPRS and bluetooth…. but GPRS is slow and running firefox over it is a pain… even with images turned off.

So, this howto shows you how to run Opera Mini on Linux in glorious 1440×900…. and take advantage of the speed increase.
Read more…

This howto covers one way of running familiar Linux from your CF, SD, or MMC card.

OK, it doesn’t actually boot from SD, but uses a snazzy Linux trick called pivot_root. Which switches over one root with another. This, IMHO, is probably the best way of doing it apart from actually directly booting from SD. Although, I’ve only tried this on a 38xx based iPAQ it should work for all handhelds based on familiar. Heck, it should work for anything really.

Read more…

If you have an iPAQ installed with familiar Linux and want it to connect to the net using your Nokia mobile via GPRS; then this is how you do it.
Read more…

I had an issue with my home network. The server that supplies DNS, web proxy, IMAP proxy, VLAN tunneling, LDAP authentication is an HP B2000. This is a good server, however, my electricity bill is now $AU500/quarter. Ouch. So I decided to use it sparingly and to chuck all these services onto a green-friendly PC that can power up/down HDD and CPU on demand. But, then I thought. Heck let’s do it properly – I’ll virtualize it, then I can shift the virtual server around without having to go through the arduous re-setting up and copying of files for my specific configuration.
So, here’s a mini-HOWTO, (to complement the many on the web), on how to setup a vserver on Linux.
Read more…

My aging 1GHz PC was creaking under ths strain of running too many virtual PCs. So I decided to upgrade to a much better, faster PC. I eventually settled on an AMD64 based PC, (200G HD, 3G DDR2 RAM). Basically a nice cool, (literally as well), box. The only trouble is that I couldn't get my vmware to run. Aaaaaaaaaaargh. This is a short howto on what I had to do to get it to run.
Read more…