USB Bootable Linux + Dropbox FTW

At work, we have shiny new laptops. Yeah! …. except that they’re locked down and audited. Lame. Even if I carry my laptop with me and use it off-hours, all my surfing and installations are still restricted and subject to company policy and review. Bummer.

Using the instructions at pendrivelinux.com, I quickly set up a persistent Ubuntu installation. It lives on my 8gig pico drive and just uses the laptop resources to run without writing anything to the laptop harddrive. It found all the drivers and was online and usable immediately after booting. It even has built-in drivers for my new Wacom tablet that works perfectly with GIMP. The default LiveCD setup is not secure, so I disabled the default no-login user and created my own account and added remote login and a few other customizations like auto-mounting to my home file server via SSH. Now, I can just put this tiny USB drive into any PC and boot into my own interface.

I went a step further to protect my browsing security and set up Squid proxy using my home Ubuntu server so that all my web traffic will be directly between my machines as far as any local firewall can tell. Using that, I can access anything that my personal server can access and do so without being restricted by local network blacklisting.

My latest addition to this setup was to use the Dropbox service to give me direct, local access to all my recent or frequently used files AND give me a persistent Firefox profile across all my machines (PC, Mac, and Ubuntu). That part is pretty cool. This synchronizes my plugins, cookies, passwords and sessions. I close Firefox at home, then I open it to the same tabs at work, preserving session logins.

Aight, I should either be doing homework or doing something about my geek addiction.

I’m trying Windows 7

I installed the beta to an older AMD 64 desktop with several added devices, and it found all of the drivers without any help, and it connected wirelessly on the first boot with the correct native resolution, and …. I like it.

The new window management features are intuitive and VERY helpful. I would like to see them on my OSX 10.5.6 machine. (catch up, Apple!) It is definitely running faster than Vista at this point (on the same hardware), but I haven’t installed many apps yet. The newly simplified security management controls are much easier to understand and work through. More sections of the desktop have informative right-clickable menus and are more directly customizable than before.

I won’t say yet than I’m a fanboy, but it really does feel solid and looks pretty attractive. (giving Aqua a run) It’s obvious that they took some interface concepts from Apple while giving users more options to customize.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

mac screen sharing black hole

file under “cheap geek tricks”. 

use your ubuntu machine as an apple server that supports Time Machine

I don’t have a Mac server. 
I wanted to use Mac’s Time Machine to backup my laptop without buying Time Capsule or manually connecting an external drive every time. 
I have an extra PC that is running Ubuntu as my file server. 

… ::searches Google:: …

oh hai, this lets me do backups automatically.  woop! 

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

ubuntu 8 is really really good…

ubuntu 8 is really really good. get it through wubi if you run windows.