Why not attend the best scientific lectures online?

If you are curious about sciences or simply want to improve your knowledge in computer science for instance, I invite to check out the following website : Academic Earth

A large scope of subjects are covered through lectures given by lecturers from the best US universities.  If you do not know where to start, you should have a look at the playlists section : Academic Earth playlists  

For sure, you will appreciate how organised the website is and how easy it is to find a lecture.

It is worth a visit ! Enjoy !

VirtualBox 4.0.8 released on 2011-05-16

Oracle released a new version of VirtualBox a few days ago.

Please find below all the fixes applied and all new features added :

• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with recent Mac OS X versions in 64-bit mode (bug #8474)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with hosts with more than 16 cores (bug #8389)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed painting corruptions on a second monitor in 64-bit mode (bug … (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7606″>#7606)
• GUI: restored functionality to set an empty host key to disallow any host key combination (4.0.6 regression; bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8793″>#8793)
• VBoxManage: added controlvm screenshotpng subcommand for saving the screenshot of a running VM in PNG format
• VBoxHeadless: fixed potential crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• NAT: built-in services use the correct Ethernet addresses in Ethernet header and in ARP requests
• Host-only networking: fixed adapter reference counting
• E1000: fixed rare guest crashes with Linux SMP guests (bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8755″>#8755)
• SATA: fixed guest disk corruption under rare circumstances (only relevant for guests with more than 2GB RAM; bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8826″>#8826)
• Storage: fixed data corruption after a snapshot was taken with asynchronous I/O enabled (bug #8498)
• Floppy: several improvement
• HPET: another fix for time jumps (bug Fixed … (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8707″>#8707)
• USB: removed assumption that string descriptors are null-terminated (Windows hosts only)
• 3D support: fixed a potential crash when resizing the guest window
• 3D support: fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15
• Snapshots: fixed another bug which could lose entries in the media registry when restoring a snapshot (bug #8363)
• Shared Folders: don’t stop mounting the other valid folders if one host folder is inaccessible (4.0.6 regression)
• Linux Additions: check whether gcc and make are installed before building kernel modules (bug #8795)
• Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.10
• Guest Additions: fixed inappropriate Guest Additions update notification when using vendor-specific version suffixes (bug #8844)

For more information for installing it :

Download VirtualBox 4.0.8

Debian 5.0.8 released

Debian project released the eight update of the Debian GNU/Linux stable version on the 22th of January 2011.

Here are the bugfixes released for the version :

Package         Reason
awstats Fix directory traversal via crafted LoadPlugin directory
base-files Update debian_version for the point release
boxbackup Reduce root CA expiration date to avoid overflow in 2038
git-core Fix cross-site scripting vulnerability
gquilt Insecure setting of PYTHONPATH
hamlib Use system libltdl rather than an internal copy vulnerable to CVE-2009-3736
ia32-libs Refresh with new packages from lenny and lenny-security
ia32-libs-gtk Refresh with new packages from lenny and lenny-security
ldap-account-manager Fix upgrades from lenny by dropping master password debconf question
libcgi-pm-perl Fix header-parsing related security issues
libcgi-simple-perl Fix header-parsing related security issues
libgadu Fix memory corruption when removing dcc7 sessions
man-db Suppress locale warnings when being run from a dpkg maintainer script
mediawiki Deny framing on most pages to minimise risk of clickjacking
movabletype-opensource Fix various XSS and SQL security issues
mumble Don’t make configuration file world-readable; delete /var/lib/mumble-server on purge
opensc Protect against buffer overflow from rogue cards
perl Fix header-parsing related security bugs; update to Safe-2.25
postgresql-8.3 New upstream bugfix release
spamassassin Update list of ARIN netblock delegations to avoid false positives in RelayEval
splashy Modify lsb-base-logging.sh to avoid issues if splashy is removed but not purged
surfraw Update Debian security-tracker URL
user-mode-linux Rebuild against linux-source-2.6.26 (2.6.26-26lenny1)
xdigger Fix buffer overflow errors

To upgrade your system to this version :

root@localhost:~# aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade

More information about the release : Debian 5.0.8

VirtualBox 4.0 available since the 22th of December

The software development of VirtualBox is growing fast and new releases are available more often than in the past. It is about to be the most used virtualization solution at the desktop level. As a reminder for those who are still running VirtualBox with an older version (3.x), VirtualBox 4.0 is available since the 22th Of December 2010. It is a major release.

Here are the new features added :

• Reorganization of VirtualBox into a base package and Extension Packs; see chapter 1.5, Installing VirtualBox and extension packs, see the manual for more information
• New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see chapter 10.1, Where VirtualBox stores its files, see the manual for more information
• Major rework of the GUI (now called “VirtualBox Manager”):
  • Redesigned user interface with guest window preview (also for screenshots)
  • New “scale” display mode with scaled guest display; see chapter 1.8.5, Resizing the machine’s window, see the manual for more information
  • Support for creating and starting .vbox desktop shortcuts (bug #1889)
  • The VM list is now sortable
  • Machines can now be deleted easily without a trace including snapshots and saved states, and optionally including attached disk images (bug #5511; also, VBoxManage unregistervm –delete can do the same now)
  • Built-in creation of desktop file shortcuts to start VMs on double click (bug #2322)
• VMM: support more than 1.5/2 GB guest RAM on 32-bit hosts
• New virtual hardware:
  • Intel ICH9 chipset with three PCI buses, PCI Express and Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI); see chapter 3.4.1, “Motherboard” tab, see the manual for more information
  • Intel HD Audio, for better support of modern guest operating systems (e.g. 64-bit Windows; bug #2785)
• Improvements to OVF support (see chapter 1.12, Importing and exporting virtual machines, see the manual for more information):
  • Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) support
  • Significant performance improvements during export and import
  • Creation of the manifest file on export is optional now
  • Imported disks can have formats other than VMDK
• Resource control: added support for limiting a VM’s CPU time and IO bandwidth; see chapter 5.8, Limiting bandwidth for disk images, see the manual for more information
• Storage: support asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images
• Storage: support for resizing VDI and VHD images; see chapter 8.21, VBoxManage modifyhd, see the manual for more information.
• Guest Additions: support for multiple virtual screens in Linux and Solaris guests using X.Org server 1.3 and later
• Language bindings: uniform Java bindings for both local (COM/XPCOM) and remote (SOAP) invocation APIs

Please find the complete changelog for this version : Changelog for version 4.0

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.12 available within the Oracle official repository

Oracle issued the latest stable version of Virtualbox 3.2.12 on the 30th of November.
To install it :

root@localhost:~# apt-get install virtualbox-3.2
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
virtualbox-3.2
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 49.2MB of archives.
After this operation, 97.3MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://download.virtualbox.org lenny/non-free virtualbox-3.2 3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny [49.2MB]
Fetched 49.2MB in 7min8s (115kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages …
Selecting previously deselected package virtualbox-3.2.
(Reading database … 174756 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking virtualbox-3.2 (from …/virtualbox-3.2_3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny_i386.deb) …
Setting up virtualbox-3.2 (3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny) …
addgroup: The group `vboxusers’ already exists as a system group. Exiting.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules:done..
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules:done..
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS:done..
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules:done..

More details about this new release :
Changelog for Virtualbox 3.2.12

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.10 available within the Oracle official repository

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.10 is available from the Oracle official repository. If the previous version is already installed (3.2.8), run the following commands before upgrading :

root@localhost:~#dpkg -l|grep virtualbox-3.2
ii  virtualbox-3.2                          3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny       Oracle VM VirtualBox

root@localhost:~# apt-cache policy virtualbox-3.2
virtualbox-3.2:
Installed: 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny
Candidate: 3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny
Version table:
3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny 0
500 http://download.virtualbox.org lenny/non-free Packages
*** 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny 0
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

To install the latest version of Virtualbox :

root@localhost:~# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

You should the lines below during the upgrade process :

Preparing to replace virtualbox-3.2 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny (using …/virtualbox-3.2_3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny_i386.deb) …
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module:done..
Unpacking replacement virtualbox-3.2 …
Setting up virtualbox-3.2 (3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny) …
Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/vboxdrv …
addgroup: The group `vboxusers’ already exists as a system group. Exiting.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules:done..
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules:done..
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS:done..
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules:done..

For more information about the new features and fixes added :

Official Virtualbox changelog

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.8 available within the Oracle official repository

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.8 is available from the Oracle official repository. There are two ways to install it.

First method : download the appropriate package according to your Linux distribution. For Debian lenny (i386) : Download here Virtualbox OSE 3.2.8

Then, install it as root :

root@localhost:~# dpkg -virtualbox-3.2_3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny_i386.deb

Beforehand, make sure that any previous Virtualbox OSE installation has been properly removed.

Second method : download and install the package with the apt-get tool.

Please follow the steps below to perform a successful installation :

root@localhost:~# echo “deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lenny non-free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list

root@localhost:~# wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

root@localhost:~# apt-get update && apt-get install virtualbox-3.2

DKMS is used in the installation methods described above to compile the needed modules to make Virtualbox run out of the box. Make sure it is installed on your system.

For a more detailed installation, please visit the official Virtualbox installation website :
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.4 available in Debian backports

If you are running Debian Lenny, the best way to install Virtualbox OSE is to use the version available in the Debian backports. For those who have installed the previous release (3.0.12), please check the availability before updating :

root@localhost:~# apt-cache policy virtualbox-ose

3.2.4-dfsg-1~bpo50+1 0
1 http://www.backports.org lenny-backports/main Packages
*** 3.0.12-dfsg-1~bpo50+1 0
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1.6.6-dfsg-3 0
500 http://ftp.fr.debian.org lenny/main Packages

To update :

root@localhost:~# apt-get -t lenny-backports install virtualbox-ose

The dependencies will be upgraded : virtualbox-ose-qt, virtualbox-ose-dkms

More information :

http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/virtualbox-ose