Another silly puzzle that’s remotely Ubuntu-related: Sound in WinXP under VMWare Server.
So, all’s mostly well in Ubuntu 8.04. Graphics stable and as I want them. Check.
Sound. Check. (some rare niggling, inconsistent midi issues but not bad)
Video/play DVDs/CDs. Check.
All USB drives, peripherals, SD cards, etc., fully accessible, no problems. Check.
Flash player in browsers. Half a check. Have sound but not video. Weird. I’ll track it down eventually, but meanwhile YouTube and other vids play fine when downloaded (using a small python script) as flv files. [Seems the fix was locating and installing the not-well-advertised (as in “not at all”) Flash 10 Beta2 for Linux. Works like a charm now.]
Apps installed and working. Semi-check. Everything’s fine except for sound in Windows XP Pro64-bit running under VMWare Server 1.06 and two niggling problems remaining with Encore 4.2.1 running in Ubuntu under WINE.
The no sound in WinXP I can live with, more or less, until I can find a fix. It’s just an annoyance. The problems in Encore may drive me to set up a Windows-only machine just for Encore use. *sigh* Midi keyboard input for score transcription is almost as bad as the bad old days with early Finale score input, you know: “Play score, wait for note to show up. Go make a pot of coffee and a coffee cake. Call up friends to come over and help drink the coffee and eat the cake. Build ark. Load animals two-by-two. Go back and wait for notes played to show on score… ”
OK, not even the early versions of Finale running on a 286 were quite that bad, but sometimes it sure seemed like it. *heh* Encore, OTOH, has always–even in its early years, seemed much more responsive and fast. I may try a midi-to-USB cable and see if that helps.
The second Encore issue is more troubling. Sometimes files do not save. At all. Sometimes Encore tells me the file didn’t save but it did. Sometimes the files thus saved work when reopened and sometimes not.
Just sometimes. Not all the time. Can’t seem to duplicate a failure at will.
Strange. Thought at first of checking file/folder permissions. Nope. No common issue there. Cogitating on this one for a while…
But WinXP Pro running on just one CPU under VMWare Server? Muuuuch more responsive than under VirtualBox or VMWare Player. Very nice, even for WinXP. Even with only 256MiB of memory allocated for its use–an ammount I’d never recommend for normal XP machines. Of course, full screen mode sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Corrupted my nVidia driver and forced a reinstall of the nVidia driver. That’ll teach me. Did. Now I run XP in a lil 800X600 box inside my normal 1024X768 resolution. Still large enough to do good work on this 19″ screen. In fact, it’s what I’m using to write this post.