HowTo: Fix Virtualbox not allowing you to attach USB devices to your virtual machines.
Virtualbox is a great desktop virtualisation tool, but one of its annoying installation niggles is that when you setup and run a virtual machine you can’t attach any USB devices to it at all because all your USB options in Virtualbox are greyed out.
There are a raft of different solutions to this problem out there ranging from adding an extra line to the /etc/fstab file to modifying your udev rules, but the real cause of this problem is simply that your login name does not have permission to access Virtualbox’s USB driver which interfaces itself between the VM’s virtual USB hardware and your real USB stack.
HowTo: Fix being unable to click in Flash applications in Ubuntu 64-bit
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has a curious bug on the 64-bit Intel/AMD version whereby on some systems you can play Flash perfectly, but the Flash application does not recognise any mouse clicks in it. This means in sites such as YouTube, you can’t click the mouse to play and pause, or seek in a video – you’re forced to use the keyboard.
This is a known bug with the flashplugin-installer package and is currently being worked on by Canonical. In the meantime, if you wish to fix the problem yourself now rather than wait for the official fix, just follow these instructions…
HowTo: Remotely collaborate with another user in a terminal
You do remote tech support for clients. One client calls you up needing assistance. You SSH into their machine as usual to check out the problem. You probably also have them on the phone so you can walk them through what you are doing or ask them questions, but making long support phone calls can be expensive if you’re doing it via a mobile phone or internationally and it’s tiresome to switch to an IM client window all the time to write comments, especially if the client is not running a graphical session and only has a text server console to look at.
Sometimes actions speak much louder than words, and it would be great for the client to be able to see what you are doing without cumbersome and bandwidth-hogging remote screen tools like VNC. Is there an easy way to collaborate in a terminal?
There certainly is…
