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 as physical memory to a guest operating system. Use ext2 or ext3 and there should be no problem, even if that means formatting a drive to fulfill the need. That’s what I did and all was well thereafter.

Over the last week, I have had VMware misreport the speed of my CPU and have virtual machines like they’re on speed. To cure it, I tried restarting the PC a few times but that yield no joy, even if it did work the last time that VMware did this on me. Following some instructions from the Ubuntu forums set things back onto an even keel again. The commands required follow:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4

tar xzf VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.x86_64.tar.gz

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 && cd vmware-distrib && sudo ./vmware-install.pl

The first of these adds in a specific version of the GNU C compiler while also adding kernel headers; the latter weren’t needed on my system since I already had them. The second extracts files from the tarball while the last performs the required installation rites.

Choice is a very good thing but too much of it can be confusing and the world of Linux is a one very full of decisions. The first of these centres around the distro to use when taking the plunge and there can be quite a lot to it. In fact, it is a little like buying your first SLR/DSLR or your first car: you only really know what you are doing after your first one. Putting it another way, you only how to get a house built after you have done.

With that in mind, it is probably best to play a little on the fringes of the Linux world before committing yourself. It used to be that you had two main choices for your dabbling:

• using a spare PC
• dual booting with Windows by either partitioning a hard drive or dedicating one for your Linux needs.

In these times, innovations such as Live CD distributions and virtualisation technology keep you away from such measures. In fact, I would suggest starting with the former and progressing to the latter for more detailed perusal; it’s always easy to wipe and restore virtual machines anyway and you can evaluate several distros at the same time if you have the hard drive space. It also a great way to decide which desktop environment you like. Otherwise, terms like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc. might not mean much.

The mention of desktop environments brings me to software choices because they do drive what software is available to you. For instance, the Outlook lookalike that is Evolution is more likely to appear where GNOME is installed than where you have KDE. The opposite applies to the music player Amarok. Nevertheless, you do find certain stalwarts making a regular appearance; Firefox, OpenOffice and the GIMP all fall into this category.

The nice thing about Linux is that distros more often than not contain all of the software that you are likely to need. However, that doesn’t mean that its all on the disk and that you have to select what you need during the installation. There might have been a time when it might have felt like that but my recent experience has been that a minimum installation is set in place that does all of the basics and you easily can add the extras later on an as needed basis. I have also found that online updates are a strong feature too.

Picking up what you need when you need it has major advantages, the big one being that Linux grows with you. You can add items like Apache, PHP and MySQL when you know what they are and why you need them. It’s a long way from picking applications of which you know very little at installation time and with the suspicion that any future installation might land you in dependency hell while performing compilation of application source code; the temptation to install everything that you saw was a strong one. The learn before you use approach favoured by the ways that things are done nowadays is an excellent one.

Even if life is easier in the Linux camp these days, there is no harm in sketching out your software needs. Any distribution should be able to fulfill most if not all of them. As it happened, the only third party application that I have needed to install on Ubuntu without recourse to Synaptic was VMware Workstation and that procedure thankfully turned out to be pretty painless.

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 a foot in the Windows universe. In fact, I have Windows 2000 and Windows XP virtual machines available to me and they should supply my Windows needs.

A evaluation version of Workstation 6 is what I am using to power them and I must admit that I am likely to purchase a license before the evaluation period expires. Installation turned out to be a relatively simple affair, starting with my downloading a compressed tarball from the VMware website. The next steps were to decompress the tarball (Ubuntu has an excellent tool, replete with a GUI, for this) and run vmware-install.pl. I didn’t change any of the defaults and everything was set up without a bother.

In use, a few things have come to light. The first is that virtual machines must be stored on drives formatted with EXt3 or some other native Linux file system rather than on NTFS. Do the latter and you get memory errors when you try starting a virtual machine; I know that I did and that every attempt resulted in failure. After a spot of backing up files, I converted one of my SATA drives from NTFS to Ext3. For sake of safety, I also mounted it as my home directory; the instructions on Ubuntu Unleashed turned out to be invaluable for this. I moved my Windows 2000 VM over and it worked perfectly.

Next on the list was a serious of peculiar errors that cam to light when I was attempting to install Windows XP in a VM created for it. VMware was complaining about a CPU not being to run fast enough; 2 MHz was being stated for an Athlon 64 3000+ chip running at 1,58 GHz! Clearly, something was getting confused. Also, my XP installation came to a halt with a BSOD stating that a driver had gone into a loop with Framebuf fingered as the suspect. I was seeing two symptoms of the same problem and its remedy was unclear. A message on a web forum put the idea of rebooting Ubuntu into my head and that resolved the problem. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, though.

Otherwise, everything  seems to be going well with this approach and that’s an encouraging sign. It looks as my current Linux-based set up is one with which I am going to stay. This week has been an interesting one already and I have no doubt that I’ll continue to learn more as time goes on.

After a pretty rotten weekend attempting to keep Windows XP running, I finally lost the will to persevere and began yearning for stability. That has taken me into the world of Ubuntu; I am writing this in Firefox running on the said Linux distribution. Thanks to the wonders of VMware, I have been able to observe the swish and slick nature of Ubuntu and I must that it did sway me. Installation has been slick and efficient and is a dream compared to XP, let alone previous Linux incarnations that I have encountered over the years. Start up is also speedy. All in all, there seems to be a certain confidence about the OS that was sadly absent from my Windows experience in recent times.

I am not deserting the world of Windows completely though. As it happens, I installed Ubuntu on a spare hard drive that I had so the Windows installation is still out there. In addition, VMware virtual machines should allow me to stay in there without the ever present risk of a PC getting rendered inoperable. There is also the unfinished business of making myself at home in Ubuntu, hopefully without my wrecking anything. I have yet to give my hardware a full work out to check that all is well. Setting up a web development capability is also on the cards as is getting those virtual machines. Assuming that there are no show stoppers, it could be an interesting ride.