Just hit CTRL-C and it will fail this method and then connect through your proxy to download the file. But do you really want to do that a hundred times? It will take quite a long time to install even if you sat there sending breaks each time. If you’re getting this far, you’ve got curl installed already, probably through the libcurl rpm that came with your Linux distribution. But there’s no /etc/conf file to set a proxy in, and it’s not honoring the environment variable.

Download eric ide tarball from sourceforge, unpack and install using python. Everything should go smoothly, but if not, create shell scripts in your path somewhere to launch eric with any command line options.

But instead, you find it needs an additional piece, the dropboxd daemon that isn’t included in the package. You see this popup and you click ok, but for whatever reason it just hangs there. Nothing is happening. Now what…?

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”.

The only problem i’ve had with LXDE and Mint is that running as a guest in VirtualBox, the guest additions will not install properly. I tried mounting the additions from the host and installing them, no dice. I tried installing from the software repositories using the aptitude update manager, no dice. So it didn’t work out of the box for me, but a quick recompile did the trick. No moving around files or manipulating configurations are necessary, just recompile for the running kernel and you’re in business.

You don’t need to install an RPM package just to get to the files. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for the default configuration files or docs from a package. You may have the package already installed and don’t want to reinstall it. It’s not pretty, and I wish rpm and yum provided a prettier method of extracting a file, but it works.

Utilizing macros can make life easier when you’re dealing with building on, and for, multiple platforms. Why bother with hard-coding full paths to system utilities when you can simply refer to them by their macro name? These can also be useful for avoiding things like rpm check-files errors, installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found, and debuginfo related stuff.