Possibly OT: networking under VirtualBox

[Mark]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 6:42 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:30 PM, Mark <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
>
I'll be interested in seeing the Linux follow-up to this good but
completely Windows article....

> 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.
>
Maybe I've just never seen that much cruft yet.

> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004689/how-to-give-a-tired-old-pc-a-spring-clean
>
Also a good read, but still all Windows.

> Mind you, Linux today is pretty damned bloaty. Even superlightweight
> ones like Lubuntu are vast and flabby compared to mid-1990s Linuxes.
>
Of course - the more it does, the bigger it gets, and the more like
Windows it gets, that expands on a faster-than-linear scale.  Even so,
and with all the daemons running behind the scenes (WAY more than
Windows has), my Ubuntu, and my CentOS before that, runs circles
around comparably configured Win machines.

> 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.
>
Picturesque, but as I said, I've ever seen it that bad.

Of course, the longest I've ever run one system between re-installs
was about two years, and that would be my CentOS 5.  I did notice that
the caches tend to pile up unless checked - e.g., when I installed
Ubuntu and had to move the root account's files from the CentOS /root
to the new /root, I was amazed at how many .thumbnails had piled up
(they're now gone), and I haven't even looked at my own (uh-oh...).

>> To each his/her own.
>
> On this one, no, not really!
>
Even here.  Some curmudgeons like to be dug out of the mine....

:-)

Mark