There are utilities like rdate that allow you to set the timezone, and you can use other approaches that require a bunch of steps to get the timezone changed or complicated ones, but here’s what I use. This is the easiest method that I know works on both Redhat and Debian based systems.

Here’s a short step-by-step how to unpack files to any custom location you wish. If you used this for some automated purpose, you could easily create and destroy the temporary structures on the fly by looking at the tarball contents first.

virsh won’t let me query information, but I do know the vm names I wish to start and I have a simple ssh shell on the host machine. So lets give it a shot.

When you try to connect to a remote virtual machine host server and get the Virtual Machine Manager Connection Failure window shown below, the problem should be one of only two things. Either libvirtd really isn’t running and you need to start it, or you don’t have openssh-askpass installed.

After you get through the initial basic system configuration, here’s a quick how to get VirtualBox up and running in minutes on Debian Squeeze. The only package group i’m going to assume you installed was “SSH Server”.

Bonding multiple interfaces together is kind of a pain. After trial and error, I got trunking working between Debian Squeeze and a switch with LACP support.

Choice is one of many reasons why I really like this distribution over the other popular flavours right now. I share the same dissatisfaction for Unity and Gnome 3 with most of the community. While this is the main reason for jumping ship and crashing the Mint party, there are some really simple things I like, like Dropbox.