To allow raw host disk access by guest machine on VirtualBox the user must have read-write permission to all partitions which are to be accessed. You can do this by something like
but executing it every time you need to boot virtual machine is annoying. You may want to set the permissions at boot time.
In modern kernels (since 2.6) you can use the udev rules for setting default...

Unfortunatelly my favourite mail client (Kmail) cannot leave messages on the POP3 server while retrieving them and delete them later, eg. when they are moved to 'Trash" folder (like Thunderbird). The same applies to Evolution. Of course I know there are IMAP servers, but that's not the solution I like most. I also did not want to periodically erase all messages left on POP3 server. I did not find any reasonable solution, so...

I spent some time wondering why cvs diff does not show the local files which differ from the most recent revision. It turned out that this is simply the default behavior, as described in man page:
To see differences with other revision, you must use -D or -r option.
For example to compare with newest revisions:
...

While testing many things often I have to mount/unmount resources, and I became tired of using 'su' and supplying password.

The easy but not very secure solution is to allow some (or all) users to execute mount/unmount as root without being prompted for password by adding them to /etc/sudoers file like this:
'users' is a group name.
Now I can use...

After initial OS installation (WindowsXP) on a HP laptop I created a set of recovery DVDs. The user installed more and more unnecessary programs and remnants after applications removal started to build up, so I decided to revert it to the fresh state after the first run. The important thing is, that after creating the backup DVDs I resized the first (system) partition, created another for user files, and removed the HP Recovery partition, because I decided to keep my backups elsewhere. <!--break-->...