My Portal Project

It is time for the perennial “try-out-linux” experience, and this year I decided to not waste the effort on a crappy machine, but to try it out in a virtual environment on my more up to date laptop.

So the first decision is what distribution to test. This time I found a Linux Distro Chooser test that pointed me to Ubuntu (GNOME desktop) or Kubuntu (KDE desktop). So I downloaded the standard Ubuntu ISO and made the fateful decision to try it out on Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007.

I decided that I would try this out without any googling and within 15 minutes realized that was a bad idea. The install kept crashing to a stack trace. So a quick search found this article that did the trick (you have to read all the comments too, since the author did not edit the original article but kept appending to the comment section). The solution was typical of every Linux install I have ever done; endless editing of config files with non-sensical obscure switch names.

So eventually it ran, if you can call it that. First was the mouse; its behavior reminded me of the days when my sound card was erroneously configured to the same COM port as my mouse. Jerky, inaccurate, bouncy, whatever description you want to apply to crap. Second was the sound, rather the complete lack of it. Third was the overall performance which was dismal. Everything took minutes to start, and alot of the configuration GUI screens caused a complete lockup.

Let’s call that experiment a failure.

Next came VMWare. The first thing that struck me was the install size difference between VMWare and VirtualPC; VMWare Workstation 6.5 was 500 MB, versus 32 MB for VPC. After installing VMWare, I had the Ubuntu install flowing within 10 minutes. I made myself lunch and when I came back, I was at the Ubuntu desktop.

Mouse - check
Sound - check
Performance - check

It was just that easy.

One piece of advice: I only allocated 3GB to my image and that quickly filled up. You can increase the size of your VMWare image through a simple command line that is detailed here.

My final point: I use VirtualPC at work for keeping specialized design environments separate from each other (running Sharepoint on the same machine we create web parts) and it works great, but I think it is pretty limited to only MS products.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Cool Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.