Daniel Hardy » Ubuntu

ECS 6100SM-M and Ubuntu are friends

Yesterday my wife’s computer finally croaked. We decided that the best option was to build a desktop replacement form scratch. This can be a nerve racking experience as a Linux user because you never know how well every items will work with your distro of choice. I ended up with an ECS 6100SM-M, AMD BE2300 (45watt) processor, 2GB of OZC PC6400 RAM and a Pioneer DVD/R/RW. None of these components are amazing but they all work perfectly with Ubuntu 7.10 and the computer is surprisingly fast. My boot time out of the gate was a brisk 28 seconds and I haven’t even began to tweak the system to improve this time.

VirtualBox’s hidden gem!

Today I was doing some work in innotek’s VirtualBox and noticed something new. It now accepts the “vmdk” format. For those of you not in the know, this is the format used by the most popular virtualization software, VMware. After recognizing this I decided to give it a shot and see if it would work. The first system I tried to convert was an Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon server I haven’t used in a long time. I decided on this machine as I knew that Ubuntu is pretty forgiving about hardware and often it can reconfigure itself to run when drivers are missing or changed. To my suprise it booted the system with little to no problems (took a long time).

After such a great success I decided to try a Windows system that I had laying around (and had previously backed up). This time around I wasn’t so lucky. Unfortunately Windows thought that its hardware had been significantly changed and refused to boot. This is probably due to the VMware drivers I had previously installed on the machine. Either way I am sure with a little work the machines could easily be converted to what I now consider a superior virtualization solution. It is important to note that I went back and successfully ran Windows and the Ubuntu machines in VMware.

Screenshots [Updated]

I read some where you can tell a lot about a designer by the way their computer’s desktop looks. Interesting idea although something tells me it is not exactly accurate. Anyways I decided it could be a fun continuous post to show the various states of my desktop as they occur.It is also a nice way to demonstrate one of my favorite parts of being an Ubuntu user, I cancustomize it anyway I want.

[Update: 08/01/2007] This is a shot of my desktop looking like OSX. It isn’t perfect but pretty close. The window animations are similar to OSX as well thanks to Beryl.

Create terminal shortcuts in Ubuntu

Ever get tired of typing the same long terminal commands over and over again. This is a short article that does a great job of explaining how to make those nasty terminal commands nice and easy to handle. Every Linux user should check this out as it could save you a lot of time.

via Jon