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VirtualBox and raw host disk access

By Ringo on 21 Aug 2012 3 Comments

The VirtualBox forums lists numerous reports of people not being able to get VirtualBox to work with raw disk partitions. Initially I bumped into the same problems, but got it working in the end.

The setup used in this article is an Ubuntu 12.04 host system with VirtualBox 4.1.18 installed. From disk /dev/sda the partitions 3 and 4 will be made available to a virtual machine. All virtual machines are run as user virtualbox. All console samples show clearly the user that runs the command.
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Categories : Linux

Backporting Debian/Ubuntu packages the easy way.

By Ringo on 4 Jun 2012 No Comments

There is a lot of documentation on the use of Debian/Ubuntu packaging tools, but most of these pages just list the options of each of these tools. After fighting with these for some period, I jumped over to the #ubuntu-packaging IRC channel for help. After explaining my intent of backporting some packages unchanged, I was pointed to the backportpackage tool:

backportpackage fetches a package from one distribution release or from a specified .dsc path or URL and creates a no-change backport of that package to one or more Ubuntu releases release, optionally doing a test build of the package and/or uploading the resulting backport for testing.

This tool comes with the ubuntu-dev-tools package.