Hello. It was a project I had in mind for several years, but every time I started it, it never ended up the way I wanted: a home VPN through the services offered by Windows. The main problem was neither configuring a dynamic DNS (I had that for ages) nor the configuration of the VPN itself, but being able to reach it from outside (it works perfectly within the same network): in the countless guides I read about it, no one specified that the router must support VPN passthrough. ...

Hello. I recently got an Acer Aspire One 150 ZG5, a simple 9" netbook. Since the 8GB¹ SSD hard drive doesn’t work very well, I wanted to install everything on an SD card and boot from there. While browsing the web, I found mentions suggesting to update the BIOS to the latest version, 3309 ( Drivers & Utilities). As you might have noticed, after extracting the archive, you’re supposed to run a small program and perform the update while the system is running. ...

Need to navigate a remote folder via shell? Well, as you’ve noticed, it’s not possible to do this without mounting the folder somewhere. To do this, you need smbfs (which, from what I’ve found online, is a file system or, better, a “mountable” SMB). To install it, open a terminal and type: sudo apt-get install smbfs After that, you’ll need to create a folder where you’ll mount the remote folder; this can be in any location you prefer (I put it on the “Desktop”) and you can create it however you want (via GUI or with a simple “mkdir”). ...

I wanted to try Windows 7 on my “grandpa computer” (it’s six years old this month) equipped with an ATI Radeon 9200. Having already installed it elsewhere, I preferred to postpone the search for drivers until after installation; good decision because the only drivers it couldn’t find were those for the video card and the secondary sound card (well, I already knew this and in fact I had them already prepared). ...

Network Manager is an excellent wireless/wired/VPN/Dial-up network manager, but it doesn’t always work well. A worthy replacement is Wicd. To install it, you can follow the instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki, but on Lucid Lynx, when it tries to uninstall the Network Manager packages (“network-manager” and “network-manager-gnome”), it fails. You might say “Who cares? I’ll leave them there and start Wicd!”. Why? In my case, they conflicted with each other and Wicd couldn’t connect. ...