Sun xVM Virtualbox…

I’m a big-time user of VMware and has been for several years. I’ve been using all flavours of this product, and still is doing so at work. Since Ubuntu 7.10 I haven’t been able to run it successfully though and therefore I’ve been exploring alternatives.

I NEED to run Windows for three reasons a) MS Outlook since there is no substitute that seems to work well b) (ironically) Vmware infrastructure client is a Windows only product and c) MS Visio.

I’ve been experimenting with Virtualbox for a while ago, but with version 2 I find that the program is very, very nice, and seems to work well. There is only a version for Hardy available yet but it seems to work fine (with only one day of testing) on Intrepid as well. Find it here: http://dlc.sun.com/virtualbox/vboxdownload.html

One annoying fact, now tested on two brand new installations, is that Virtualbox doesn’t show up in the menus until the computer is restarted.

Restoring all the settings in Pidgin…

Pidgin is also hard to loose. I use pidgin for chatting on MSN, ICQ and IRC as well as Facebook. Finding the login information wouldn’t be to hard but getting all the chatlogs back is important to me.
My first idea was to find the .pidgin folder and just move that. Didn’t work. No folder as such existed. I then remembered that Pidgin used to be GAIM and found a .gaim folder that I did move.
Worked just beautifully, sortof.. I ended up with only one account, which seemed odd. After some googling I found out that the folders name is .purple. Purple as in Pidgin maybe? I dunno, but with that folder moved to /home/user everything worked flawlessly.

Getting Firefox to work as it did…

Today I find that one of the most annoying things when I change computers is that I loose all my Firefox settings. Since I still have access to the old disk that I used before my previous installation attempt I decided to move the settings. This was really dead-simple.
in /home/user/.mozilla/firefox
there should be a folder called “xxxxxxx.default” and a file called profiles.ini.
The “xxxxxxx.default” is the folder containing all the settings and this is the one to move to the same location on the new computer.
The file profiles.ini contains a pointer to the folder (its possible to have several folders since Firefox handles different profiles) I just moved this file as well and it worked out fine. Afterwards I deleted the folder Firefox had generated. The profiles.ini could also be manually:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=vkuuxfit.default

Quite simple to understand.

Partitioning..

Partitioning was done manually and based on unclear thoughts as well as unconfirmed facts gathered on the net. This is how I chose to do it:

/boot 100 MB ext2
/tmp 5 GB ext2
(someone, somewhere once wrote that it was a good idea to keep boot and tmp separate in ext2 since for some reason journalling would be bad. Don’t know really, please enlighten me if you can).
/ 60 GB JFS
/home 200 GB JFS
(someone, somewhere once wrote that JFS was faster than Reiser which I have been using previously. Feels kinda awkward to use Reiser these days anyways, look for Hans Reiser in Wikipedia if you don’t know about it..)

I also kept around 50 GB that I might end up using as a raw disk for Windows in Virtualbox.

My computer

Just had to try the wordpress app for iphone

Welcome…

This is a blog about the adventures I encounter when installing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my Dell Latitude 820. I haven’t decided yet if it should be in English or Swedish, so I start out with English (or it might be Swenglish).

I have been using several versions av Ubuntu on this laptop for the past years, and it was time to start over again, which I did just a couple of days ago. I bought a new 320GB harddrive and spent the weekend installing and configuring, keeping notes in a file on the desktop.

Yesterday morning the harddisk made a click-sound and wouldn’t work again. When booting it said that sda5 had problems with logical blocks 8,9,10,11 and STATUS DRDY ERR, ERROR UNC … Didn’t give me much, and I wasn’t able to access the drive externally when booting from other media. So out with the old one and in with a new. This time I’m going to keep my notes here.