Shared Folder in Ubuntu/RedHat/Oracle Linux VMs using Virtual Box

One of the first things after installing an Ubuntu VM is that you would want to share a folder across from your host operating system. This method is independent of the host operating system you might be using.

Note: If you are using the latest Ubuntu OS(currently I am on 13.10), I would recommend to have your VirtualBox(currently 4.3.x) updated to the latest version as well. There are few VBox and Shared Folder issues that happen due to incompatibility and I had to reinstall entire ubuntu because of that.

A lot of blog posts suggests creating a shared folder in /mnt and mounting them manually using the mount command. Though all those techniques work perfectly, I feel that it is unnecessary work just to be geeky. Lets try and keep it simple and use the features available to us for enabling this so that most of the audience is able to accomplish this without much hassles.

Pre-Requisites

VBox Guest Additions is required for the below steps to be successful.

Step - 1 - Enable Shared Folder from Host OS.

Step - 2 - Enabling the Share in Ubuntu OS

Once you start Ubuntu VM, you would notice the share name appearing as sf_sharename on path /media/sf_sharename

The major problem faced here is that only root user has access to this shared folder and if you login from other user you would not be able to open it. This problem happens because shared folder belongs to the group vboxsf.

The way to solve this and give access to shared folder to your user is to add to vboxsf group by running the following command

sudo usermod -G vboxsf -a <yourusername>

PS:- Please restart Ubuntu VM for this to take effect.

To test if your user has got added to the group open file /etc/group and search for your user which should now be a part of vboxsf group.

Step - 3 

There is no step - 3. Have fun and leave comments if it was useful :)

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2 Step Authentication in Evernote

One of the best product announcements that I have heard recently is Evernote giving 2 Step Account verification to all its users. Enable it here

Evernote brought in the concept of two factor authentication several months back alongside many big players including Dropbox. This is indeed a very useful and secure feature of cloud based applications. Until recently this was available only to premium users but our prayers got answered and Evernote opened it for everyone. However, two step authentication for free users is available only through Google Authenticator (Android | IOS). Evernote is a highly productive app that I have used in my daily routine. It helps to store financial statements, important documents, ToDos for work and personal agendas, travel notes, research notes and the list is never ending. One of the the best tools that I use in combination with Evernote is Skitch which is an extremely useful snapshot tool. You can take snapshot of any activity on your screen, annotate it with your comments and send it across. This becomes very useful in development scenarios, where you can take snapshots of the issues and share it across with team.

Try it today and it can become one of the best applications you have ever come across.

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Upgrading to OSX Mavericks from Mountain Lion

OS X Mavericks - Best just got Better !!! 

If you are still on Mountain Lion and have not upgraded to OS X Mavericks, its about time. The best part of upgrading to this entire new OS is that the upgrade is absolutely free of cost. Boy, don't we love free stuff and to our hearts content upgrade just makes it a lot better. One can visit the App Store and leave the upgrade to download and install.

The upgrade to Maverick is approximately 5 GB and it takes roughly 45 minutes to install. One of the best things about owning a Mac is that the upgrade happens without much hassles. Even though it is great to have auto upgrade, it is always a good idea to have a backup of your stuff incase you need to revert back. 

What's Different

There are no iconic changes that you will notice out of the box, but certainly there are little tweaks which are all set to make your life much better. After using the new OS for a week, here are the noticeable changes.

Under the Hood Performance

Feels much better without doubt. With apple throwing in terms such as Accelerated Scrolling, App Nap, Timer Coalescing and Compressed memory, performance and battery life is certainly a boost. I have an 8 GB Mac Pro machine on which I run a VM with 4 GB and it has performed much better after the update. You would notice that the applications that are in foreground are given higher priority in terms of CPU and Memory as compared to the applications that are minimized or in the background.

Finder Tabs and Tags

This has certainly turned out to be one of the most useful features. Tagging certain folders with user defined tags makes it useful to quickly access certain files/folders which are resident in different parts of your machine. 

In addition to this, introducing Tabs is a great thing since it allows you to run Finder in full view mode now and manipulate your requirements using tabs. This feature needs no explanation since browser tabs have already become part of our lives. 

Multiple Displays

Multiple displays came as a huge relief specially for developers. Mac machines are most helpful for designers, artists, photographers who cannot live without multiple displays. Running full screen apps on multiple displays taking away all nuisances from previous Mac versions is a huge plus.

More Good Things

There are more good things present which are worth a mention such as Notifications which is still in nascent stages, a new overhauled calendar app which in my view still lags behind Google calendar and under the hood safari innovations which is easier on memory. Few more things added are Maps(good only for US) which still is far behind Google Maps and iBooks which is useful if you are an avid reader.

What Breaks - Developers Perspective

SVN would definitely be broken once you upgrade to Mavericks. Thus, when you would try to run your usual SVN commands, the chances are that it wont work. The reason is that XCode has been moved from earlier /Developer/XCode to /Applications/XCode. 

There are many posts suggesting to do symbolic link of /Developer/XCode to /Applications/XCode etc. but none of them are a good solution. The best is if you follow the following steps even though, it might require a 2 GB download but is a very clean approach.

1. Go to App Store and Install XCode. This also includes Command Line Tools which is required for active development using terminal. If you are one of those people who like Eclipse plugins and do not use terminal, then you would not require to perform this activity.

2. Run the command - 'svn upgrade'. 

If you have problems running GIT-SVN, then you can follow Victor Quinn's blog.

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