19Jan

Adding a new hard drive to Ubuntu

This is a subject that I thought that I had discussed on this blog before but I can’t seem to find any reference to it now. I have discussed the subject of adding hard drives to Windows machines a while back so that might explain what I was under the impression that I was. Of [...]

19Jul

The peril of /tmp

By default, I think that Windows plants its temporary files in c:\windows\temp. In Linux or in Ubuntu at least, the equivalent area is /tmp. However,  not realising that /tmp when you shut down and start your PC could cause the silly blunder that I made today. I was doing a spot of reorganisation on my [...]

12Jul

Watch where you store your virtual machines when using VMware on Linux

My experience is with Ubuntu on this one but I have found that you need to be careful as regards the file system used by the drive where you keep your virtual machines. If it is NTFS, VMware can fail to start a VM because it cannot create a virtual memory file while it presents [...]

20Nov

The irritation of a 4 GB file size limitation

I recently got myself a 500GB Western Digital My Book, an external hard drive in other words. Bizarrely, the thing is formatted using the FAT32 file system. I appreciate that backward compatibility for Windows 9x might seem desirable but using NTFS would be more understandable, particularly given that the last of the 9x line, Windows ME, [...]

02Nov

Turning the world on its head: running VMware on Ubuntu

When Windows XP was my base operating system, I used VMware Workstation to peer into the worlds of Windows 2000, Solaris and various flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu. Now that I am using Ubuntu instead of what became a very flaky XP instance, VMware is still with me and I am using it to keep [...]

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