Tag Archives: ubuntu

Administration

Ubuntu 11.04 Colour Scheme

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Once again the problem of an ugly colour scheme returned. Instead of a sleek looking theme, I got the root theme which looks like it came out of Windows 10 years ago.

A Google search with the keywords “virtualbox ubuntu 11.04 ugly theme” led me to a Ubuntu forums thread with a link to the Virtualbox forums.

Here’s the solution which worked.

Open a terminal window, go to your home folder (don't forget that) and type:

sudo gedit .gtkrc-2.0 (DO NOT forget the dot in the beginning of the filename)
Type your password and when gedit opens copy/paste the following two entries in that new file.

include "/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
gtk-icon-theme-name = "ubuntu-mono-dark"

The second line will fix the icons in Nautilus.
Save the file, close gedit and restart your VM and...
Administration

Expanding VirtualBox Partition

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Trying to update to Ubuntu 11.04 on my trusty virtual machine today, I got a message saying that the disk was full.

Since the VM is just a file on my windows hard drive on which I have plenty of space, I thought it would be fairly easy to just increase the size of the file and thus give me enough space. Turns out there are a few more steps than that.

The first thing to do is to increase the size of the VirtualBox file. This can be done with the VBoxManage command from the windows command line.

VBoxManage modifyhd d:\ubuntu.vdi --resize 12200

Replace the filename with your own vdi file and the number with the desired size in megabytes.

This only adds unallocated space to the virtual computer. The next problem is to add this to the root partition. This can only be done when the partition is not mounted and thus requires booting from a live CD. I don’t have live CDs around but I do have a USB thumbdrive with a copy of Ubuntu on it. However, it’s not that easy to boot to a USB drive from VirtualBox. It involves fooling the system into thinking that the USB drive is actually an IDE drive.

Follow the instructions at agnipulse.com to see how to accomplish this. When running the command line command and when adding the vmdk file, run the command line and VirtualBox in Administrator mode, or it’ll fail with funny errors. This was mentioned in some VirtualBox forum threads.

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename d:\usb.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1

Which PhysicalDrive number the USB drive is actually at should be checked from Disk Management.

After booting up to the USB image, run GParted. Delete the extended partition containing the swap partition. Extend the primary partition then add the swap partition back at the end of it.

That’s it! Enjoy the glorious extra space now available on the root partition.