Living with Vista 32, running Ubuntu inside VirtualBox, surprisingly happy
I’ve had my Dell XPS M1530 for a couple weeks now and I’ve hit my stride with it, for sure.
Ubuntu travails
One of the first things I tried was installing Ubuntu 64 right over the main Windows partition. I was a little peeved that the 64-bit machine had shipped with 32-bit Vista, so Ubuntu was a good candidate for taking me to the full 64. The touchpad support in Ubuntu was messed up, and I managed to improve, but not completely rectify it (not like I tried too hard). The dealbreaker, though, was that I couldn’t get the built-in Verizon 3G card to work. As yet, I haven’t used the mobile broadband much, and I’m wasting a ton of money every month, but I like the idea that I’m not at the mercy of WiFi availability. After a little research and much hand wringing, I went back to Vista from the factory DVD. Ubuntu supports a number of 3G cards, and I think the problem may have been Verizon. Embarrassingly, I’m not 100% sure the physical radio switch wasn’t turned off on the 3G card when I was trying to get it to work in Ubuntu. However, I’ve run out of steam on the issue for now. When Windows 7 comes out, I’ll probably buy it, and I’ll probably tinker with Ubuntu 64 again when I do that installation.
VirtualBox
After ‘giving up’ and going back to Vista, I installed Sun VirtualBox, the free & open-source virtual machine environment. Ubuntu 32 runs great and starts quite quickly inside VirtualBox. After installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox, it’s pretty much critical to install the VirtualHost guest host additions for Ubuntu (also note that you may need to re-install the additions after upgrading VirtualBox). Once those are all set, you can set up shared folders between Windows and Ubuntu, tinker with screen resolution, and, best of all, run Ubuntu in ’seamless’ mode. Check this out:
Firefox, puTTY, and Pidgin under Vista, Gnome Terminal under Ubuntu, and the Gnome desktop controls nested in the Vista Desktop
Vista is not as bad as they say
This is probably not going to win me any friends to say, but I’m pretty happy with Vista, at least on this machine. I’m sure the semi-steroidal hardware has something to do with it, but every program I’m using positively screams. Even Ubuntu in VirtualBox and the Vista VirtualPC instance I use to test IE6 run faster than either did natively on my last machine. In terms of interface and user-friendly-ness, Vista’s really not bothering me. I’m still a big fan of maximizing, the quicklaunch, and the taskbar. The start menu also has super-fast search-as-you-type so I pretty much never navigate the applications tree. The only semi-annoying thing so far is it asking me permission when I run installers and new programs (which can be disabled), but I’ve gotten used to it and it’s actually interesting to see what programs are launching that I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.
Cygwin, sshd, PuTTY
One thing that Windows still lacks is a decent shell. I wish they would just add one already; average users could care less and it positively delights guys like me (who buy a decent amount of computers), so I wish they’d get with the program. I installed Cygwin, as I always do on Windows machines. One thing I’ve never liked is the actual Cygwin interface. puTTY is a terrific terminal, and I totally love the “highlight to copy” and “right-click to paste” behavior. I found some pretty solid instructions to install sshd as a Windows service via Cygwin, and now I just log into my own machine using puTTY. Cygwin provides the shell but not the terminal. Works great!
Having a fast new laptop has improved my productivity, since I really quite enjoy using it. Tinkering with virtual machines and cygwin hasn’t taken too terribly much of my time, and developing is as efficient as it’s ever been on any platform.
Tags: cygwin, dell, putty, sshd, Ubuntu, virtualbox, virtualpc, vista, windows