VMplayer: How to bridge to a specific network port

Suppose you need to bridge another network interface under your VM to a specific physical network port. First, you need to create a vmnet port and bind with that specific port. Here are the commands:

vmnet-bridge -n 2 -i eth1  -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-2.pid -1vmnet2
mknod /dev/vmnet2 c 119 4
vmnet-netifup -d /var/run/vmnet-netifup-vmnet2.pid /dev/vmnet2 vmnet2
ifconfig vmnet2 up

(Mac) Taking screenshots with mouse pointer not supported by Grab

In Mac, both Preview and Grab can take screenshots but Grab can also capture the mouse pointer. If you want different mouse cursor look, then you have to select your desired pointer type in Grab -> Preferences.

FreeBSD /usr/ports build with all the default options

Something to remind myself

make -DBATCH install clean

Changes to make CutyCapt bypassing ssl certificate confirmation

I need to use CutyCapt to run with https url on server side. However, it doesn’t support https url. A patch for bypassing the SSL certificate confirmation has been submitted on this page (and other additional features). However that change has never been pulled to the main release. So I tried to apply the patch to the source, the patch process didn’t work and the build failed.

Configure Shellinabox as a url path on FreeBSD

I need to test my web application on a remote network. For policy reason, I am only allowed web access to my FreeBSD box (no ssh) which makes the debugging to the backend processes very difficult. Hence, I need to install a web based ssh client, shellinabox, a daemon program that opens a listening port service html pages with http requests and the backend is a ssh login process.

Emacs command line to indent Javascript code and convert tabs to spaces

Part of my project checkin script is to automatically apply coding style and converting tabs to spaces. Here is the command line:

emacs -batch file.js --eval "(custom-set-variables '(js-indent-level 2))"  -f mark-whole-buffer -f indent-region -f mark-whole-buffer -f untabify -f save-buffer -kill

Change the value of js-indent-level to any religion of white spaces.

Running CutyCapt + Qt on FreeBSD

I need to generate some screenshots from a Javascript graphing library, Highcharts, on the server side as in a background process. Luckily, this post in Highchart forum has the answer. As for running CutyCapt on FreeBSD, there is only minor difference. Here are the steps:

Install FreeBSD archive packages online via sysinstall

I wrote this just for reminding myself. Sometimes, when you try to install a package on a older release FreeBSD machine via sysinstall using the online method, you will find the release become obsolete and cannot be installed anymore.

Plymouth: Create your own splash screen with scrolling boot messages

I have been trying to create a simple splash screen and configure it with scrolling boot messages. However, there are very little online documentation and reference, brief introductions can be found at Plymouth themes: Fix, install, create in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and Software/Plymouth/Scripts. In here, I am documenting how to create the splash screen with scrolling messages.

Ubuntu 10.04 LiveCD customisation gotchas

Here are the gotchas that I came across so far via building Ubuntu 10.04 LiveCD from scratch.