Tutorials

VirtualBox Shared Folders

silviogutierrez
02/08/2009
61 comments

If you're like me and still need Windows for a few tools (Photoshop), you're either dual-booting or using a virtual machine. In my case, I tried VMware Workstation, but had some kernel panics.

I decided to try the proprietary version of VirtualBox, which is free but closed-source. Vista worked well but I ended up installing XP. While it's very fast and almost everything works, I had problems browsing my shared folders. If you navigate to \\vboxsvr using the address bar you'll get an error.

Instead, open up the command line and type:

net use v: \\vboxsvr\YOUR_SHARE_NAME

Replace YOUR_SHARE_NAME with the share you'd like to use, in my case it was Home. This will map the share to a network drive. It will be mapped every time you start the machine, so there's no need to do it again.

Change MySQL User on Ubuntu

silviogutierrez
12/13/2008
70 comments
One thing that always bugged me is that everything on my development server is in my home directory except my databases. As I go on the road a lot and like to have my server on my laptop, "syncing" the server becomes annoying. I usually use rsync, but unless you enable the root account, you won't be able to synchronize the elusive /var/lib/mysql folder. And we all know what the community thinks of enabling the root account. This is just one of the countless reasons why I decided to move my databases to my home directory. It's also nice knowing that I need to backup only my home folder. Fortunately MySQL presents an easy way to change the user the process should run as.

Iconize Drupal

silviogutierrez
12/14/2007
4059 comments
I've gotten a lot of feedback on this site's design, and probably the most frequent compliment I get regards the icons on this site. I added them because it's a very small addition that makes a site a lot more exciting. As much as I love Drupal, I was surprised when I learned that there's no unique CSS ID for most menu items in the Drupal core. This tutorial will show you how to add these handlers to make adding icons trivial. Throughout this short tutorial I'll assume you have some knowledge of Drupal's theme system, but if you don't, head over to the handbook to learn more.