Further Forrays in Linux

I'm going back to part-time on my internship, and need to be able to work on my projects at home. I needed to use a Cisco VPN client to connect, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be one available for Vista 64 bit. Guess what I upgraded to at home...

To make a long (looong) story short, I decided to try connecting from a virtual linux machine on my Vista computer, through a third party Cisco VPN adaptation for linux, and then the very nice built-in remote desktop viewer in Ubuntu. After hours and hours of googling, patching, and sudo installing, it is finally working! In case you are looking for the same thing, here are some of the links I found helpful:

• start here!
• patches
• finally

Hope it helps you!

Strike My Last!

Upon replacing the motherboard, the CF card worked no problem. Same CF-IDE converter and everything. I guess it is because the new motherboard has two slots for those ribbon cables, where the old one only had one, and for some reason on the old one it automatically set the IDE to slave, which didn't work. Who knew!

Fun with Xubuntu on a CF Card/USB Stick

Update on my robot team's progress. Just spent a few late nights trying to install linux (Xubuntu Dapper) on a CF card and access it through a CF to IDE connected to a motherboard on our robot. It did not work. I guess there was some problem with the CF to IDE adaptor. We then tried to install Xubuntu on a 2GB USB stick. No matter what the online linux geeks say, it will not work. Xubuntu Dapper is too large for a 2GB USB stick. We switched to a 4GB USB stick, and now everything is working fine!

We found that the online Ubuntu forums are filled with posts about this very topic, but that they really try to make it a lot more complex than it really is. You don't need to do any partitioning, the install will do it for you (there are a lot of complicated instructions on how to do this - they will confuse you). Just go with slightly larger memory, and you won't need to go through all the hassle.