I like programs that put themselves in the tray when I’m not using them and, while extension exist for windows, unfortunately firefox and thunderbird don’t have native tray support. Enter alltray. Alltray is an excellent little program that allows you to minimize pretty much any program to the tray. Just run your program like so
alltray firefox
and marvel at the tray icon glory before you!
Just a quick notice that I posted my weight loss spreadsheet over in the projects section. It’s a google doc template, so feel free to grab, use, comment and abuse!
When you are working with VMs, the hierarchy of needs tends to be Memory, Storage, Network, CPU. You can never have too much RAM when you are talking about a VM server. Since you usually consume all of your memory first, it’s nice to have a little one liner that lets you know how much memory you have allocated to VMs, and using the VirtualBox command line, this does exactly that. You’ll note that this isn’t my best work, but it’s quick and I’m not worried about all of the forking because we’re only talking about a dozen or so lines at most. Feel free to add tweaks in the comments if you can pretty it up!
VBoxManage list -l runningvms |grep Memory | awk {‘print $3′} | awk -F”MB” {‘print $1′} | echo `sed ’s/$/+/’` | sed ’s/+$//g’ | bc
Or this one is a little fancier and takes the total memory installed in the system, subtracts the VM memory in use +512 for the host and gives you the total physical RAM left for VM usage
VM=`VBoxManage list -l runningvms |grep Memory | awk {‘print $3′} | awk -F”MB” {‘print $1′} | echo \`sed ’s/$/+/’\` | sed ’s/+$//g’ | bc`; MEM=`grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo | awk {‘print $2′} | sed ’s/$/ \/ 1024/g’|bc` >/dev/null; echo “$MEM – $VM – 512″ | bc -l
I have really enjoyed Beta3 of virtualbox and have stood up a server that runs headless in my basement and acts as my VM host. I have about 6 VMs running at any time but don’t have easy access to the VirtualBox GUI. Fortunatly, VBox has a really great command line that allows me to do pretty much everything I need right from the shell. Here is an example of creating a new VM called Zenoss with 1548MB of RAM, a bridged network connection using the hosts eth0 adapter, a 10G drive and running in headless RDP mode at boot. The iso image “test.iso” is mounted at boot time, so the VM will boot from the CD at first boot.
VBoxManage createvm -name “Zenoss” -register
VBoxManage modifyvm “Zenoss” -memory “1548″ -acpi on –bridgeadapter1 eth0 -nic1 bridged
VBoxManage createvdi -filename “Zenoss.vdi” -size 10000 -register
VBoxManage modifyvm “Zenoss” -hda “Zenoss.vdi”
VBoxManage registerimage dvd test.iso
VBoxManage modifyvm “Zenoss” -dvd test.iso
VBoxHeadless -startvm “Zenoss”
