Back to Ubuntu

I bought a new laptop a few months back. It shipped with Vista and I became so annoyed with it I had to do something. Turns out that Ubuntu supports all of the hardware on my laptop, even the embedded HP web cam was picked up.

I still need windows for some applications so I installed VMWARE server 2 on Ubuntu 8.04. I could not get that version of server to work reliably though between reboots and other application installs so I back revved to server 1.0.6. That worked perfectly.

I installed my XP Guest and began installing software. I have an IPOD touch and quickly found out that this was not going to work with Ubuntu. VMWARE server 1.0.6 doesn't support USB 2.0 so my XP Guest would blue screen when I attached the IPOD. Upon further research I found that VMWARE workstation 6.5 does support USB 2. I downloaded the bundel from VMWARE and the install went alot smoother than VMWARE server. There's even a nice GUI interface.

I ran into my bomgar installation issue again, this time the commands to get it working were a little different:

robert@SideJacked:/usr/lib$ ls libpng*
libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.15.0
robert@SideJacked:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/libpng.so.3
robert@SideJacked:/usr/lib$ sudo ldconfig
robert@SideJacked:/usr/lib$ cd /home/robert/
robert@SideJacked:~$ sudo ./bomgar-rep-installer.desktop

I did start having trouble with my Wifi. My card is an AR5007. I found a tutorial here that seems to have fixed the issue:

http://my.opera.com/williamn/blog/2008/08/30/enabling-atheros-ar5007-based-wireless-on-ubuntu-8-04

I am still having trouble with some wpa networks where I don't recieve DHCP once authenticated. I am still working on resolving this, but it works at home at least and with WEP everywhere else.

I managed to get office 2007 installed through wine, but the word and excel fonts and interface looked garbled in some areas. I decied to just install office into my XP Guest and I use a samba share and a mapped drive to access my shared doc's and mp3's for itunes.

These links helped me with the Samba and original VMWARE server setup:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=296668
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=183209&highlight=vmware

I wanted a one note replacement that I could run from my host, I found that the software Baset is a pretty good replacement.

For screenshots I am using the Compiz screenshot utiltiy which is working great.

Another issue I still need to resolve is pasting into remote desktop. I use Terminal Services to manage clients and connec to the office at work and this is still posing me a problem.

I also manage alot of Cisco devices. Ubuntu picked up my usb to serial adapter right away and I am able to connect with minicom. It's not Secure-CRT, but it will work for my purposes and the tabbed Terminal windows are a good replacement for my favorite Secure-CRT feature.

That's all I have for now. I am up and 95% operational with Ubuntu. It took 4 days to get here, but DAMN it feels good to have dumped Vista and my laptop is performing so much faster!