I bought my son a new laptop so he could have a good computer to help him in college. I took his old HP dv9700, the one that he had spilled orange soda on the keyboard. I brought it to Staples and they tried to sell me a new laptop; then I had them look up the cost of a new keyboard+installation. Good thing I did - for $100 there's now one less laptop in the landfill.
This box has 4 gigs of memory. I added another hard drive and now I'm cooking with gas. My next move was how to get Linux on it. I thought about dual-booting but the thing is, if I did that, I'd be booting into Linux at least 10 times for every 1 time I'd use Vista. When you boot into a Windoze box that infrequently you spend so much time downloading OS patches and running virus scans you can't get any work done. So I decided to try Virtual Box. I read the documentation, then downloaded Virtual Box and the extensions. Everything installed smoothly. Then I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. I wanted to try this anyway since I'd heard the UI was changing, but not necessarily for the best. At first I couldn't get it installed. I downloaded the 64-bit version of Ocelot, since this box is running Vista 64-bit, however the installer tells me the chip is not a true 64-bit chip. I don't know how I'm running a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit chip but there are stranger things in life, so in the interest of moving on I then downloaded 32-bit Ocelot and I was good to go. Before the Ubuntu install I had to set some parameters in Virtual Box. I chose to allocate 1gig of the 4 gig of memory to the virtual image. Then, instead of having it create a variable file, I chose to have it create a fixed size file on the second hard disk. I chose to make that file 50gig, and it took about 40 minutes for it to create that large of a file. Finally I was able to start the Ocelot install. The good thing about Virtual Box is that you don't have to burn the .iso file to a CD first - it can read the .iso directly. That to me is one big reason to install Virtual Box on any box you are serious about - it just makes it *so* easy to try a new OS. Well, Oneiric Ocelot installed perfectly, and I'm sending this from Firefox running in the virtual image. Way cool! Now I have to figure out how to share folders between the host and guest OS, but so far I'm really happy with Virtual Box. As for Oneiric Ocelot - it looks a lot like the Ubuntu netbook edition I tried last year. I'm not crazy about it but I'm willing to give it a -- Frank L. "Cranky Frankie" Palmeri, Guilderland, NY, USA Risible Riding Raconteur & Writer Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things. _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Nov 2 - POV-Ray and The Relativity Train Dec 7 - An Intro to Chef Jan 4 - Recovering the Brownfield: Revitalizing Open Source Projects
