SwitchBuntu

I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off since I’ve been rather busy with finals and financial planning for the new year. There’s a bug with Ubuntu that sometimes leads the wifi to be rather unreliable and causes me to not be able to reconnect if I sleep/hibernate or if I get kicked off accidentally. Of course, it is not something that is really reliably reproducible (now THAT’s alliteration!) so I’ve decided to do my work for school exclusively on Vista since the wifi rarely gets into a wonky state. Also I’ve abandoned SimCity Societies. It’s got a lot of niceness about it, but it’s just not fun. The game is really way too easy and gets boring fast. I’ve since picked up SimCity 4 Deluxe and have been enjoying the oldish-skool way SimCity goodness–unfortunately this requires being over in Vista-land.

I did some experimentation with a tip Luke left on my post regarding VMWare booting my Vista partition but ran into the same crashing issue upon boot with VMWare Workstation that I did with the hack-ish method of getting Vista to bootup with VMWare Player. Oh well, I suppose I’ll setup a WinXP SP3 and/or Vista virtual disk that I can use with some manner of virtualization tool on Ubuntu. If I find it fits my needs performance and stability wise, then Vista will walk the proverbial plank on my M1330.

The good news is that I’ve completely kicked the Microsoft Office habit and have moved over to Google Docs and Open Office completely. I found the OpenOffice2GoogleDocs plugin but have been unable to get it to function with my GDocs account since the plugin will only display files that I have hidden in my GDocs…funky. Nevertheless, my financial tracking spreadsheet that I’ve been carrying around for many years will be retired at the end of the year and will be replaced with a new set of Google Spreadsheets that I will (hopefully) be able to seemlessly use with OpenOffice since I’ve hit upon performance issues with GS when it comes to having large sheets open. I’m sure the big G knows about these issues and is working on a fix…I only wish they would put an intern on helping out the OO2GD guy and get that all locked up. Of course, my time is rather limited as I do way too much driving back an forth between Berkeley and Mountain View.

Anyway, I was bumming around del.icio.us and found a great set of tips for the n00b like myself. Unfortunately, most of the tips are for those who are able to run compiz fusion (I am not able to do this)….sigh. Oh well, they’re nice to know about for when I finally get an updated graphics driver for my laptop:

Eight features you didn’t know about in Ubuntu « Richard’s linux, web design and e-learning collection

I’m in the midst of trying to get VMWare Player installed and pointing at the Vista side of things so I never have to boot into Vista natively again…I can (hopefully) just run it in VMWare’s Player from now on. The problem is that it is taking forever to get things installed. Here’s one crucial step that I needed…took me forever that I had to use sudo to get the installer to work:

My Ubuntu Installation
9. Installing VMware Player

VMware Player is a free software which enables you to run Windows on your Linux PC. This needs an existing virtual machine which can be created with the non-free VMware Workstation, with the free QEMU and with the free VM Builder.

Note: VMware Workstation installs also the VMware Player so these steps are only needed if you don’t have a VMware Workstation installed.

VMware Player 2.x is not yet available for Ubuntu as a .deb package so you need to install it manually. Start by fetching the required .tar.gz file from the VMware Player download page.

# tar xzf VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp
# cd /tmp/vmware-player-distrib
# sudo ./vmware-install.pl

UPDATE: Abort! Abort! Abort! I tried all manner of drivers on the Vista side, but I could never get VMWare or VirtualBox to boot my Vista partition as a virtual hard drive. I did, however, succeed in borking my Vista partition twice such that it would blue screen upon start up and then retry. Luckily, I was able to get into the Vista partition via Ubuntu and get things back to normal again.

Anyway, if you want to see what I tried, go here. If you’re running Vista, you’ll need this too. Well, maybe not, as it didn’t really work for me.

Man, I feel downtrodden…no AWN curvy dock and now no raw disk action on the Vista partition. Sigh…maybe one day I’ll have my dock and my partition virtualization goodness.