All that time spent trying to get WINE to work... The left hand monitor is showing a Linux desktop, the right hand, XP. Everything works. The mouse moves from one to the other withut locking. Office 2007 running a treat, no performance hit I can see.
I can even use the Beryl cube to spin away from XP onto something else.
This was done with VirtualBox, then Host+F then Host+G.
Two things - a realization that my D820 can run XP in virtualization without breaking sweat, and a weekend with nothing to do - lead me to dig out the backup drive and the latest Ubuntu live CD, and have another go at running Free software on my main production PC.
Now, previous attempts (documented in this blog) involved hours of getting Beryl to work, or the sound to work, or WINE to work, or to figure out a way to make sound work.
Now in 7.04 though, a menu option lets me turn on the proprietary Nvidia driver, and another one lets me turn Beryl on, and I click a button and it shows me my WiFi network (and my neighbours on both sides) and it all just works.
This feels rather wierd, like it's too easy. I'm going to put XP on via virtualization now, that should be painful enough to reassure me.
I couldn't stay away from Linux very long, and since I happenned to need a second XP running in a virtual machine on my laptop for a project, I thought I might as well make a virtual Feisty as well.
Four things don't work:
It's supposed to only support 16bit color, not the 24 bit colr that is the default, although by installing in safe graphics mode I seem not to have had an issue with this.
The network card doesn't seem to get a DHCP address until I issue a /etc/init.d/networking restart... or it seems that turning it on with the icon up near the clock works.
The mouse doesn't work without a i8042.noloop parameter added to the kernel. (do it in install or by editing the Grub line for your kernel. Good idea to add it to the default options for future upgrades too)
Sound doesn't work until you add a line saying snd-sb16 to /etc/modules
With that all out of the way, it works very nicely.
Well, Vista did me in (refused to accept any of our corporate license keys and slowly timed itself out) and Feist Fawn wouldn't boot (fixable no doubt but I only had a day to get a workable machine) so I'm back on boring XP, but! Thanks to Steve Jobs I have something new to break my machine with, Safari for Windows.
