Category: Compgeeky

Here’s the thing. Dual booting sucks dead bunnies through a straw. For one thing, I like to leave my email app (Thunderbird) open all the time. Dual booting–notsomuch with the always open email client. No, it’s either check all my email accounts in webmail (which is another level of suckage altogether) on one “side” of a dual boot or keep transferring emails from one “side” to the other–even worse suckage.

Enter Thunderbird Portable. Slap the thing on a lil ole 4GB flash drive, set it up to handle ALL my email accounts, transfer emails from my inbox, etc., to it and bob’s your uncle. I can carry my email around with me and not have to put up with the Suckage Maxitudinous that is webmail. I still don’t like the limited dual booting I still do, but with more and more reliance on VMs, even that is down to a minimum (although I did frag two Windows VMs in VMWare Server over on the Ubuntu drive by updating the hardware config file in VMWare Server. Oh. Well. Easy-peasy to reinstall ’em).

Yeh, it does mean I probably will need to archive old mail/clean out the dead wood more often, since I use that flash drive for a few other portable apps (Opera Portable, Clamwin Portable, Filezilla Portable, etc.), but that shouldn’t be too big a burden. I ought to do more of that anyway.

This is sooooo much less stressful to think about/deal with that what the criminals, liars and buffoons (Oh! My!) in Congress are doing to this nation (with the willing compliance of the enstupiated sheeple that keep putting them in office).

(said in my best Don Adams/Get Smart voice)… 15 minutes to set up an OS? Less, actually.

New VM: Ubuntu 9.04 alpha. Yeh, not even beta. Alpha. The finished product is due out in April, but I had to get a foretaste, so…

Ubuntu 8.10 host.

VMWare Server 2.

Ubuntu 9.04 client (VM).

After designating the hardware setup for the new client OS, less than 15 minutes to a working desktop. About what it took me for my last physical install of PCBSD.

Nice.

Of course, it might have taken a tad longer had it had to actually sniff out my real hardware configs, but still.

Unfortunately, even though I chose the “alternate” (text) install process, the promised ext4 file system wasn’t an option, and it won’t appear as a default choice until 9.10 (in October 09).

Oh, well. Ext3 is still not bad at all, at all.

…

Later…

Well, so far, I don’t see a lot of difference from 8.10, but I suppose the differences will become apparent… or I’ll look up the changelog later. 😉

Works fine. Had 350+ “updates” waiting when desktop first booted but would not install all of them unless I first performed an “upgrade” using a subset of the waiting updates. No biggie. Just went on with other things in the host system. We’ll just have to see how things go.

More betaware from Microsoft, and I guess this is kind of cool, but something I simply cannot foresee as having any use for me. Photography buffs may see it differently.

HDView

HD View is a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images.

View some panoramas. There’s even a link to stitch some of your own together (stitching is visible, more or less). Funny thing: the MS website complained about my browser (Opera) and stated categorically that the HDView plugin would NOT work with it, that it was only compatible with some less-advanced browsers like Internet Exploder and Firefox. *heh*

Wrong. Stupid browser sniffer. I just told Opera to mask itself as Firefox in the “site preferences” tab and–bingo! The plugin downloaded, installed and all was well.

Stupid browser sniffer.

OK, dual booting just sucks swamp water. After just a few months of using VMs instead of dual booting, I had forgotten just how sucky dual booting really is.

Not for me, thank you.

Tried installing Ubuntu 8.10 with Wubi, but no joy. Installed just fine, apparently (or so it reported) but canNOT get it to show in the boot menu. Weird. Tried editing it manually and… no boot.

Well, Wubi installs Ubuntu in a different kind of dual/multi-boot, but it’s still, “Shut down current OS and reboot into different one” so not really all that useful.

Installing VMWare Server is easier in Win7 than in Ubuntu, but configuring VMWare Server and installing guest OSes is not. *sigh* But at least it works and doesn’t require stopping one OS to fire up another.

Now, installing VMWare Tools in the Ubuntu guest? Lots and LOTS of command line foo-foo. Oh. Well. At least it’s relatively easy command line foo-foo, just lotsa typing and retyping (cos my typing “skills”–such as they are… not–leads to lotsa typos and re-typing… and loads of pressing “Enter” to just go ahead and accept default configurations *heh*).

Oops. VMWare Tools doesn’t like the Ubuntu guest’s default location for the C headers, won’t accept it (even though version.h et al are all there). Oh. Well. Installing Open VM Tools instead. Automagic installation w/no command line foo-foo. Better for my typo-laden “Biblical typing method” (“seek and ye shall find” *heh*). VMWare needs to look into the Open VM Tools implementation.

Not bad, now. Ubuntu runs nicely, even screen configs, etc., w/o adding special, e.g. made-for-my-vidcard, drivers. With access to the external drive where my data from the Ubuntu drive is backed up, I’m pretty well set. Unfortunately, since the VM is bridging my hardware, it’s not an entirely fair comparison (no “update Ubuntu, reconfigure sound/video” issues, for example), but general usability should be pretty easy to compare. I’ll say this much just so far: when I switched to Ubuntu it was much easier finding ways to do quite a bit of the customizing I like to do with my machines than it has been with my toe-dipping in Vista machines or now in this Win7 Beta. I guess it’s a philosophy of “Hide things from users so they can’t easily break them,” but that annoys the s(p)it out of me. *heh*