Possibly OT: networking under VirtualBox

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:30 PM, Mark <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, OK, but having a half-working system with weird glitches is not pleasant.
>>
> I wound up going the whole hog and creating a new VB VM for my XP.  So
> far I have upped it to SP3 and no major problems, but I also haven't
> pulled in any of the usual apps I had before.  That's next.
>
>> I advise wiping & reinstalling all computers periodically.
> Egad!  I try to avoid that as much as possible.

It's a fact of life and a regular necessity.

Q.v.
http://www.drdobbs.com/184405140

> There's a book around that I have somewhere in my storage boxes called
> "Degunking Linux" that addresses this exact problem.  Of course, it's
> pretty old, now, so possibly its ideas a a little crufty as well, but
> I'd rather clean up the gunk than reinstall.  It's not that hard to
> do.

It really is that hard to do, after a while. When \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 is
a morass of DLLs that you can't identify, when every time you plug in
a new device some ancient driver tries to claim it and fail, when you
have magic directories you can't remove, etc. etc.


> For Windoze, there's a nifty little program called CCLeaner (used to
> be called Crap Cleaner - go figure).  Maybe we need an industrious
> person to do something like that for Linux machines, except that it's
> so easy to just do it by hand or in a dinky shell script....

It exists. It's called "Computer Janitor": look in
System:Administration. It is a bit vicious, though - I've known it
uninstall programs I was using.

CCleaner is better than nothing, but it does not do a very thorough
job. It's far better to do it manually. I wrote an article on this a
few years back which went down quite well:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004689/how-to-give-a-tired-old-pc-a-spring-clean

Have a read. If you think CCleaner's doing a good job, yoiu'll be
surprised at how much crap it leaves behind.

>> However, the technology does not exist to spend more transistors on
>> making processors run code faster,

> Actually, Microsoft solved this problem with Vista by releasing an OS
> that consumes more CPU time as it becomes available....  :-)

Heh!

Mind you, Linux today is pretty damned bloaty. Even superlightweight
ones like Lubuntu are vast and flabby compared to mid-1990s Linuxes.

>> Wiping & reloading is a pain in the *cough* neck, but the pain is
>> rewarded. It is, as the kiddies say, like, totally worth it.
>>
> Cleaning one's room is too, and it takes less time and effort than
> rebuilding the house.

You still have to do it every now and again, whether you like it or
not. If you don't, you end up one of those mad old buggers who is
killed when the piles of junk collapse on them & the emergency
services have to excavate their home to get the body out.

> To each his/her own.

On this one, no, not really!

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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