Debian 9.8 Post-Installation Steps on VirtualBox (GNOME)

Enable auto-login

• Settings > Users > Unlock
• Automatic Login ON

Disable screen lock

• Settings > Privacy > Screen Lock
• Automatic Screen Lock OFF

Install guest additions

• (VirtualBox) Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image…

•  su
   apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc make perl
   mkdir GuestAdditions
   cp -rf /mnt/cdrom/* GuestAdditions/
   cd GuestAdditions
   ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
  

Set up sudo

su
apt install sudo
usermod -aG sudo username

Add user to the VirtualBox share folders group

sudo usermod -aG vboxsf

GPU Issue + Hardware Reserved Memory

Two issues I had:

1. After installing a sound card Windows 7 was failing to boot. It was getting stuck on the "Starting Windows" screen. Long story short, it worked after (among other things) moving the graphics card to a new slot. No idea why it happened at the exact same time as installing the sound card. I guess I might have bumped it while messing around in the case.
2. After all the troubleshooting I did for the above problem, I noticed that only 8 GB of my 12 GB of memory were showing up as "usable" on the window that comes up when you right click "Computer" on the start menu and go to "properties". I reinstalled the memory sticks one at a time and  eventually all 12 GB were usable. I assume I didn't install a stick all the way after re-adding them before.

Ubuntu amd64 12.10 Video Issues

After installing Ubuntu 12.10 for amd64 I noticed that text was sometimes being displayed garbled and completely unreadable. I tried to switch to the proprietary nvidia driver (I have a GTX 560), but it totally messed up my video. I'd log in and only get a low-res blank desktop on a single monitor. The other monitor was blank. It turns out there's a missing dependency in the nvidia package, it needs the kernel headers package to compile a kernel module.

SELinux + Apache

Found out the hard way that you need to change some things if you're trying to run apache with SELinux. I needed to run the following commands to get it to not show a 403 forbidden page:

setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs 1
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/mike/pageDirectory

the first command allows httpd to serve pages that are in /home directories, the second sets the selinux context so that selinux allows those pages to be served

SELinux + Dropbox

If SELinux complains about execstack and dropobox:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=26808&replies=19#post-167370

All Text Messages Deleted

I was growing fond of the ability to keep all my messages without ever having to delete them for space. After all, I have several GB and text messages are small, so it's not like I'm going to run out. However, there is apparently a bug, experienced by many Android users, where it will randomly delete all of them for no apparent reason after a month or so. I think this is the only time that its happened to me. I have never had the auto-delete feature checked, so it does appear to be a bug. Different forums have shown I'm not the only one with the issue. Ugh.

Relevant link: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

More Droid Complaints

Not huge ones, but here they are:

1. There are three facebook friends that simply will not be added to my contacts list. I have no idea why these three particular people, but it's annoying
2. For some reason there are many contacts that do not show up in my people list unless I tell it to view google contacts. However, none of these people are google contacts, nor are many of them linked to google accounts.

Update: Deleting all of my google contacts seemed to solve #2...