How to Enable Sound Card of Debian 7 (Wheezy) in VirtualBox

I installed Debian 7 (Wheezy) as a guest operating system in VirtualBox on a Windows 8.1 host operating system. Here is how I enabled the sound card.

$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
$ pacmd
>>> set-sink-mute 0 false
>>> set-sink-volume 0 65537

I installed Debian with predefined collection “Standard System Tools” only and didn’t install the GUI system. I also installed VirtualBox additions using “./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run –nox11” (referred this discussion) before enabling the sound card. However, I am not sure whether installing VirtualBox additions is required or not (If someone tried please comment below).

Efficient Software for Linux

awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license. It is primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs graphical environment.

i3 is a tiling window manager, completely written from scratch. The target platforms are GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems, our code is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) under the BSD license. i3 is primarily targeted at advanced users and developers.

Vimperator is a Firefox browser extension with strong inspiration from the Vim text editor, with a mind towards faster and more efficient browsing. It has similar key bindings and you could call it a modal web browser, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in. For example, it has a special Hint mode, where you can follow links easily with the keyboard only. Also most functionality is available as commands, typing :back will go back within the current page history, just like hitting the back button in the toolbar.

apvlv is a PDF/DJVU/UMD/TXT Viewer Under Linux/WIN32 and its behaviour like Vim.

zathura is a highly customizable and functional document viewer. It provides a minimalistic and space saving interface as well as an easy usage that mainly focuses on keyboard interaction.

sxiv is an alternative to feh and qiv. Its only dependencies besides xlib are imlib2, libexif and giflib. The primary goal for writing sxiv is to create an image viewer, which only has the most basic features required for fast image viewing (the ones I want). It has vi key bindings and works nicely with tiling window managers. Its code base should be kept small and clean to make it easy for you to dig into it and customize it for your needs.

fbi is a image viewer for the linux framebuffer console.

xfe is an MS-Explorer or Commander like file manager for X. It is based on the popular, but discontinued, X Win Commander, originally developed by Maxim Baranov. Xfe is developed since 2002 by Roland Baudin, a french Linux enthusiast.

ranger is a file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. The secondary task of ranger is to psychically guess which program you want to use for opening particular files.

Deluge is a lightweight, Free Software, cross-platform BitTorrent client.

Set Terminus as Default Font for Linux Virtual Console

Edit /etc/default/console-setup

Add following lines:

FONTFACE=”Terminus”
FONTSIZE=”20×10″

Set Solarized Dark as Default Color Scheme for Linux Virtual Console

Put following lines in your ~/.bashrc file:

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
echo -en "\e]P0073642" #black
echo -en "\e]P8002b36" #brblack
echo -en "\e]P1dc322f" #red
echo -en "\e]P9cb4b16" #brred
echo -en "\e]P2859900" #green
echo -en "\e]PA586e75" #brgreen
echo -en "\e]P3b58900" #yellow
echo -en "\e]PB657b83" #bryellow
echo -en "\e]P4268bd2" #blue
echo -en "\e]PC839496" #brblue
echo -en "\e]P5d33682" #magenta
echo -en "\e]PD6c71c4" #brmagenta
echo -en "\e]P62aa198" #cyan
echo -en "\e]PE93a1a1" #brcyan
echo -en "\e]P7eee8d5" #white
echo -en "\e]PFfdf6e3" #brwhite
clear #for background artifacting
fi

Set Linux Console Resolution in VirtualBox without X

VirtualBox is a nice software to test/learn Linux. However, if you only want to use the console user interface without installing Xorg server, you probably want to change console resolution to make it look prettier.

You could use framebuffer to do this.

First close all instances of VirtualBox.

Open a console window, go to where you installed VirtualBox (maybe “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox”), execute (change resolution to what you like):

VBoxManage setextradata “wheezy” “CustomVideoMode1” “1920x1080x24″

Now boot into your Linux, edit /etc/default/grub, if you find something like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”vga=791”

Delete it or comment it.

Add following lines in it:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1920×1080
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

Now use: “sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg” to generate new configuration file.

Raining after raining…

It’s raining outside, with thunder. Sounds like I am still at home in China. It seems that raining sounds similar all over the world. I like raining. I miss my family.