Linux distro sampling pt2 - Debian 7 on ASUS P550CA

Recently I got a new ASUS P550C laptop from work. As with most my machines nowadays I try to run some form of Linux on them to accomplish some of the tasks in which Windows is handicapped at performing. Well I will begin this post first talking about my experience with the actual computer first.

Laptop Review: ASUS P550C (also called ASUS P550CA on the website)

First of all, this laptop is fairly impressive at first glance. It has a nice 15" screen, it has a relatively nice keyboard that features a keypad which I'm very thankful for (no backlight though... I'm spoiled, I know!). It has a nice finish and it is very light in my opinion, which may be a bad opinion since I'm used to my alienware (performance and weight are often mutually exclusive). Right from the get-go I notice some issues with my wi-fi adapter. It would disconnect under windows every 5-10 minutes. I started using a cable because of it. The wifi is also completely not supported by ubuntu so I also had to use a cable under my dual boot Ubuntu 14.04 install I started with. Eventually the wifi completely gave up which I alerted to the it people. After they contacted the Tiger Direct they mentioned that this particular adapter has been giving users some headache. For those curious I'm speaking about Mediatek MT7630E 802.11bgn. Long story short, I just received a new machine.

The other major complaint I have regard the UEFI/booting rubbish that made it extremely difficult to dual boot Ubuntu on my first machine. My new machine so far has been even worst. Every time I try to install Ubuntu 14.04 it basically tells me I can only overwrite Windows. It does not display the "install alongside" option which is a bit scary. For this reason I don't want to do the partitions on my own since I don't want to have to fix the windows booting garbage that is now standard in so many machines.

In summary, I had a great first impression of my ASUS P550C laptop which soon turned into frustration. This ASUS laptop is very Linux unfriendly as far as I'm concerned, so I must give some thumbs down to ASUS for manufacturing a laptop in the year 2014 that simply can't play nice with other operational systems.

Debian 7 (VM)

Anyway, done with my rant on ASUS. Now that I've been scared enough I decided to just install VirtualBox and use linux through a VM on my work machine which is what I was doing before anyway. I decided that before I settle on one distro I wanted to sample a few to see what is the most practical and useful to me for the types of needs I will have at work.

Well the first thing I have to say is that trying to use Debian was the first time I realized how Ubuntu centric my Linux experience has been up to this point. There are so many choices and small differences working with Debian coming from Ubuntu based distros. The most striking for me was the fact that I didn't know how to work under root. As a lot of you know, in Ubuntu you can simply use sudo on everything, apparently Debian requires you to log in as root in order to perform a lot of different admin tasks. Anyway, there it is, I'm a linux noobie outside of ubuntu.


Unfortunately for me there is a pretty good learning curve to migrate to this version of Debian. I can definitely see the appeal of this distro as it seems very stable and full of great admin tools right from the clean install. Unfortunately, it is a tad too new for me at this point. I will certainly consider it when I have a bit more free time to learn how to get the most out of it. The other reason I am hesitant of using this distro on my laptop is the desktop environment, I do not like Gnome very much. For this reason I decided to see if Debian Xfce is a bit more friendly to someone like me... (continued on pt.3)

Change the resolution of your VirtualBox Ubuntu VM using Win7 host

I've been using VirtualBox to have easy access to linux on my Windows 7 machine for a while, however, one thing that has always kept me from using it more consistently is the fact that my VMs usually come with a small native resolution making it difficult to work on my VM primarily. Well I decided recently I should change that, so that perhaps I will start using my VM more for a lot of my day to day needs.

It turns out changing this resolution is a bit more laborous that I would have thought. I started by giving my VM more video memory and more power in general, as well as updating drivers and that wasn't the problem. This is a VirtualBox setting that I need to change. In order to make those changes, follow the instructions below:

First click on the VirtualBox menu option "Devices" and look for "Install Guest Additions" (figure1). From there you will get a pop up asking if you trust this source and then you will be asked about downloading a CD image from the web, just proceed and wait for it to download and install whatever it needs to install. Once this is complete, the next step will vary slightly from distro to distro, but you basically want to mount whatever it downloaded. On Ubuntu 13.10, you should see an iso image appear on the bottom of your unity menu bar, click on that.


When you open the image you should see several options of files which you will have to chose the one appropriate to your need. Since my host is a Windows 7 64-bit, I will copy the file of the appropriate exe file to your desktop.

From here open you distro's terminal and go to desktop. For me it was just a matter of typing cd Desktop/

From here type

$ chmod +x xfilenamex

xfilenamex is the name of the file that you copied of course which in my case was

$ chmod +xVBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64.exe

This will give you priviledge to run this particular file. Next execute the file via

$ sudo ./VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64.exe

again change the filename to whatever file pertains to your OS.This will ask you for your root credentials and install the guest additions. Now you can close your terminal and shutdown your VM

$ sudo shutdown -h now

From there go to your Windows 7 and open the windows terminal. If you don't know how, just type "cmd" on after pressing the windows button. From there look for the folder where your VM is installed on Windows. in my case it was under Program Files, but not the x86 one for some reason. There you should see Oracle\VirtualBox.

From there type

VBoxManage setextradata "xOSnamex" "CustomVideoMode1" "xresolutionx"

in my case

VBoxManage setextradata "u1310" "CustomVideoMode1" "1680x1050x32"

This didn't actually seem to do the trick, so I went ahead and also ran the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution 1680,1050

Now load your VM up as you normally would and this did the trick for me. I'm not sure if you need the first VBoxManage command so if you want to try just using the global command go ahead and try it out. If it works post a comment to let me know. Again I'm using a Windows 7 host OS, trying to run a Ubuntu 13.10 VM on it.