Necessary Roughness

Virtual PC and Xubuntu
April 12th, 2007 at 7:56 am

Two nights ago I was able to get Xubuntu (a lighter version of Ubuntu Linux) running inside Virtual PC. I had to follow special instructions to get the screen to display correctly, but it’s done. I haven’t gotten sound to work correctly, even though sound is enabled in Virtual PC. Watching YouTube movies is a little flaky too. It would download a lot, move through the video very quickly, pause to download some more, and play it again really fast.

The Virtual PC file that holds all the data is about 2.5 GB, which for virtual machines isn’t that bad. For some of my simulation stuff I had a file 10 times that size.

It’s not very useful now other than just to wow some of the computer guys here, but the graphics program “gimp” is supposed to be powerful like Adobe Photoshop without the $650 price tag.

My favorite use for Virtual PC or VMware is for training. I can do demonstrations inside a virtual machine, and at the end of class, I can “revert” the machine back to what it was before class. This shows the class how the machine behaves during an installation or the first time a feature is used.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 7:56 am and is filed under instruction, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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3 Responses to “Virtual PC and Xubuntu”

1. Dr. Luther in the 21st Century Says:
   April 12th, 2007 at 8:27 am

   The Gimp is good. I use it in the office and at home using XP and Fedora core 6.

2. Scott Says:
   April 12th, 2007 at 3:49 pm

   Gimp is available under windows too, Dan…save yourself the headache.

   

   http://gimp.org/windows/

   Scott

3. Gino Says:
   April 12th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

   For light stuff, Paint.NET is VERY good. It reminds me a lot of PaintShopPro from about 10 years ago.

   As to running Linux in a VM, I’m having very good luck running straight Ubuntu in VMWare Player.

   http://www.easyvmx.com/ makes it very easy to get started. Tell it the second CD is an ISO w/ the name of your Ubuntu download. then boot the generated VM. I recommend the Ubuntu alternate install CD for the simple reason that it asks you about running the hardware clock on local time or UTC. Fixing that is a pain.

   This setup runs a MythTV Frontend just fine for me. The only caveat is to make sure you only run the VM w/ about half of your physical RAM.