A Virtual Change

This post was written 4 years 4 months 23 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

I posted recently about trying out Linux via VMWare. VMWare was incredibly easy to set-up but has had 2 frustrating problems…

1. It’s slow (this is apparently on purpose to get you to buy the commercial version. Allegedly)
2. The network bridging that it uses causes my network connection to not start for about 5 minutes after a reboot. Frustrating and nobody on the VMWare forums seems to want to suggest an answer to it.

The other free alternative is Virtual PC from Microsoft but, having tried it, it’s a typical Microsoft product that doesn’t seem to want to know anything about any possible rival. Hence you can set up various flavours of Windows OS’, but everything else is clumped into a big generic “other” pile.

PCPro has recommended VirtualBox so I gave that a go.

Again it was easy to use and, yes, quick. Again I installed Kubuntu, but every time I tried to change the resolution (from 1024×768 to my screens native 1280×1024) or specify the monitor or graphics card model, it refused to boot up.

I also had a frustrating time – my own fault for not reading instructions – with the Snapshot facility.

In the end I gave up with trying to change the graphics properties and just created a clean install of Kubuntu with Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey browsers added to the existing Konqueror.

I uninstalled VMware and now can get an internet connection immediately my PC has booted. It’s also, as previously mentioned, quick. I’m limited to having it in a window on my Windows desktop in the aforementioned limited resolution, but I can live with that.

I should also take the chance to update my own instructions on updating the above browsers…

Firefox & SeaMonkey. These can be installed in one go using the automated script. For some reason I found I had files missing that caused this script to fail. I simply looked these files up in the Adept Manager.

Opera. Download from their site in .rpm file format, right click on the resultant file and select the option to install it.

And so I don’t have to keep going back to my original post to remember how to request root access – you put sudo at the beginning of the command line.