Ubuntu over Windows XP!!

Installing linux on your machinge can be a difficult decision for most wanna-feel-like-geeks, especially when the laptop in question is owned not by them, but by their employer, and has elaborate encryption technologies in place at the BIOS level to prevent loss of information in case the laptop is lost. Yes, I'm not talking of a general dilemma, but of my predicament.

Enter Microsoft Virtual PC. This sounded interesting. So much so that I initially tried installing the latest releases of Fedora and Ubuntu on it, without much luck. There weren't many articles on how to do this either. All the help I got was either for Ubuntu 6.06 or Fedora 5. So after a while I gave up.

Yesterday I decided to lower my expectations and install the older version of Ubuntu Linux. It was a rather easy install, and most of my hardware worked like a dream. I had to manually install the soundcard, but the network and display were working fine anyway.

I can't wait for someone to hack Leopard enough so that I can go ahead and install that too.. That will surely be fun. But till then, take a look at these lovely screenshots. This blog post is being written inside Ubuntu by the way, but I will eventually have to add the windows screen shot from windows itself, because I still haven't figured out the host system access from within the virtual machine.

Next stop, VMWare.

AHA!! The advantage of having 2 machines is that I could save on the non host and use the "Windows Share" connection from Ubuntu to access the screenshot. This thing is a dream. I remember the first time I tried to use Samba on Mandrake, I almost wanted to kill myself!






So, entirely from within Ubuntu. My very first post :) And may I add, that I even saw a bit of Cheeni Kum on Ubuntu Today.. Funny things can bring excitement back in life!

Labels: Linux