Making a bootable pen drive in one command

 Well you can make one in a single command and it works like a charm.  Here's how :

1) plug in your pen drive
2) Run dmesg and check the drive letter (identifier) ( eg /dev/sdb)
3) Run the following command :

dd if=ubuntu.iso  of=/dev/sdb  bs=4M ; sync 

Note : if is your iso file .  DONOT append any trailing number to the pen drive

Thats it ...

VMware player 5.0.2 on linux ( ubuntu 12.04 LTS ) and mint 17 - Installation

Updated june 2017 . The following has been tested on mint 17 as well

Virtualisation is very useful if you want to experiment with network stacks , web servers , load balancers etc. Open source offerings like Xen are out there but the industry standard seems to be vmware. The following is about  how one can go about installing it on linux .

Observations:
1) The vmware site is a very typical "corporaty"  mess . not easy to use.
2) All thet you get via google is a vmware download page with rpm's.
3) Don't download from third party sources , the binary could be tainted!

Distro : Ubuntu 12.04 LTS   (  LTS 's are usually more stable )

Install the dependencies :

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)


Get the "bundle" :

 wget -c http://goo.gl/JXy7L -O VMware-Player-5.0.2-1031769.x86_64.bundle.tar

note : The shortened URL points to a vmware hosted download server

The above link no longer works !!!!
WORKING LINK : ( June 19 2017) :
 wget -c https://www.vmware.com/go/tryplayerpro-linux-64

 $chmod +x tryplayerpro-linux-64

Create a directory say VMware and move the bundle to that dir. The just run the "bundle".

./tryplayerpro-linux-64


Have fun :)