Uh, no. But I slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night and am now running Windows XP on Linux….
“!http://www.elburro.net/Desktop.jpg!”:http://www.elburro.net/Screenshot-Desktop.png
Should I do long-story-short? Nah. When two new computers invade the household, there occurs a drastic change in heirarchy. Apparently, 3 boxes I had been saving for uh, something, are now headed for charity. (I’m sorry, dammit; I appreciate everything you did for me in the past, really) My former machine at the fun desk is shivering and clinging to its life next to the bookshelf where it hopes nobody notices it until it can be put to use somewhere. It’s a good machine; an Athlon XP 2000+ with a gig of RAM and a 40 gig hd and a decent video card. It needs to be put to use, and I’m working on that, really, but we’re a little busy right now.
My former office machine, an Athlon XP 2500 with 1 1/2 gigs of RAM and 250 gig hard drive has been evicted from my work desk by the Dell SC440 server and scrambled to my fun desk where it nudged out the Athlon 2000. Having labored under Windows XP for several years, it has now been liberated to the world of linux and Ubuntu. It is happy.
During the install of “Gutsy Gibbon”:http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download , it reminded me how much easier and quicker the install goes than Windows. And how much more fast and stable and interesting linux is after sagging under the Windows workload for all those years.
But…..hardware has its disadvantages, and so does linux. A big hard drive and a lot of RAM can spell trouble for any self-respecting pc. There are Windows programs, essential ones, that aren’t found in the linux world. So install wine. Yeah, that works a lot of the time, and there are fewer and fewer bugs, but with VMWare, you can put your entire Windows operating system on a fast machine and enjoy the best of both worlds.
Okay, I’m tired and it’s long-story-short time. Following this “excellent tutorial”:http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/11/17/install-vmware-server-on-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon-updated/
I got VMWare up and running on a machine that formerly ran Windows XP, now ubuntu, and I was able to install the OEM version of the original XP software on VMWare because, duh, the hardware hadn’t changed. I set XP to use half my available ram, about 800 megs, and it works fine. As a final test, I installed one of my five Peachtree Accounting licenses on it. You can’t get much more bloated than that. And the fact that the data files are located on a network share doesn’t make it any easier, but XP on VMWare didn’t even flinch.
Anyway, I probably deserve a good beer by now, so catch ya later.