Another few months go by...

Monday, April 09, 2007 8:59 pm By BigLig

Here we go with another fun-packed try at escaping the bonds of proprietary software! Woo hoo!

Slurp the data off to my shiny new USB hard disk, boot from the Ubuntu Edgy Eft CD, halve the windows partition with gparted, install, get the latest updates. So far so straightforward. Also System, Preferences, Mouse to speed up the Mouse Pointer - it's so slow out of the box. Or else I'm so fast. ;-) By the way, plugging the USB drive in works perfectly, despite one partition being NTFS. Lastly, the usual Firefox tweaks to get it how I like it before starting to configure the box.

Add the Universe and Multivers repositories, and install extra codecs for gstreamer so I can play audio and video - I want to avoid using a script like Auomatix or such to encourage me to learn and annotate. Hmm, looks like I'll probably need Xine since Totem is not a good DVD playback application.

HTTP://oopsilon.com/Running-a-Windows-Partition-in-VMware and HTTP://www.advicesource.org/ubuntu/Run_Existing_Windows_Instalation_On_Ubuntu_With_Vmware_player.html both describe how I can use VMWare player to run my Windows install in VMWare, which sounds like a useful way to get to my machine. After all, I have two cores in this machine, one each sounds fair.

Some sort of dpkg loop with the configuration seems to get stuck setting up all those damn stupid extra VMWare adapters... I end up crashing out of it and it looks like it doesn't finish the setup properly as I get a "device missing" error on starting the player.

Looks like it's not installed right, the looping was a symptom, and my crashing out not the cause. I'll uninstall and reinstall; that fixes it.

New error, cannot read the disk - I'll have to re-read the howtos.

Meanwhile, eye-candy! Luckily my blog contains notes on how I got Compiz to work last time, so I consult that. Switch to the proprietary Nvidia driver, add beryl to my sources.list; install the key; apt-get beryl and xserver-xgl and nvidia-xgl, CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart X.

It's not quite as simple as that makes it sound, since I cut out all my stupid moments (like turning off the window decoration in bsm and then wondering why I didn't have any window decorations)

There's more, I think, needed to make twinview work, but that can wait.

Getting a dock is harder work. There's one in gdesklets, so I'm using that, and it has the minimum I need. Most of the fancier docks seem to be KDE, which I guess fits into their way of thinking.

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