Generally I like to keep Linux servers text-only, to save on disk-space and memory, however it is sometimes useful to be able to administer a server remotely using a GUI, e.g. if you need to run a web browser. Therefore I came up with this procedure for a minimal graphical desktop using openbox and various lightweight utilites, accessed remotely using NoMachine’s FreeNX server.

This guide has been tested on Ubuntu Server 7.10 and 8.04.

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I’ve not posted anything for a long time now, so I have many bits of news, some important, some not.

Alexander

The most important news is this little man (previously referred to as Project Thor). Alexander Perrie Atkins was born on 11th February 2008, and has spent most of the time since eating, crying, gurgling and making much mess. He is also absolutely fantastic.

Blog

I grew tired of the shared web hosting at Dreamhost, especially after the incident when they accidentally billed their customers a total of several billion dollars due to a typo, then treated the whole thing as a joke. As a result, this blog is now running on a Virtual Private Server hosted by the lovely people at BitFolk. Because this is my server it allows me more freedom in the config, so if it blows up it’s also all my fault.

The blog has also been migrated to Wordpress 2.5, which means nothing to anyone except me, as it now has a nicer admin interface.

I’m going to try and post a bit more often from now on, which is great news for my regular reader, if he or she exists. One thing I want to do is a few technical posts on how to do various things under Linux. Once I’ve worked something out I need to make a note of how I’ve done it, and if I do that here then it may be useful for someone else, but if not then at least I know where to find my notes.

I think that’s about everything for now. Keep ‘em peeled…