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VirtualBox is a great, free, virtual machine engine. However, its multiple monitor capabilities are a little prickly. Launching the VM with one monitor when the settings are set for two monitors is sometimes troublesome. The problem is easy to fix: just change the VM settings to one or two monitors. But it's annoying to have to remember to do that. This post shows how to resolve this challenge with a couple of simple Ubuntu .desktop files.

An Ubuntu 17.04 VirtualBox VM, (running from an Ubuntu 16.04 host) suddenly stopped connecting to the Internet. The last time it was running all was well; then one day, at boot-up, it couldn't connect to the Internet. Other Ubuntu VMs internet connections worked just fine. This wasn't a problem with the host, it appeared to be isolated to the one VM.

It's late at night and you just need to do a little work with MariaDB (or MySQL) but you've completely forgotten the root password. With a little command line effort, this is an easy problem to solve.

When a project is in development you often need to copy a new instance of a MySQL refresh the server's database with the latest dev copy. This post provides a couple of Bash scripts to do that easily to and from the dev computer.

Installing an app manually on Ubuntu isn't hard, but it's fiddly. Especially for Ubuntu rookies. However, if you take your time and pay attention to the details it's quite doable. This example shows how to install Firefox Developer Edition manually, but the instructions work for other Ubuntu applications.

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Another post on this blog explains how to install an Ubuntu app manually. While it's good to know what's going on with all those steps, this post puts all of that that article discusses into a reusable Bash script. This makes it very easy to keep an app like Firefox Dev Edition refreshed.

Linux includes a ton of great utilities that make Bash scripts better. This post looks at how to use Curl, Grep, and Tail to fetch the latest release number of Firefox Developer Edition to automate its installation.

Install Ubuntu 17.10 on a VirtualBox virtual machine from scratch

Mounting a secondary drive on Ubuntu at startup

Ubuntu odds and ends

Copying SSH keys (both public and private) from one PC to another simplifies SSH key management on Digital Ocean droplets.

Source Code Pro is a great, free mono-spaced font. This article provides a Bash script for downloading and installing Source Code Pro on Ubuntu.

How to use Yank to copy command output to the clipboard.

Using Docker on Ubuntu sometimes imposes frustrations with directory default groups and permissions. Here's how to fix that.

Ubuntu's default terminal title display is a little verbose. It includes the current user and machine name and the current directory name (which is chopped off of the right end of the directory name). This default title text is never any help!

How to install and configure PHP's XDebug in an Ubuntu Docker container.