Computers
So I really wanted to write about computers but the topic is pretty much limited to those lonely souls who enjoy tech things. Because of that I avoided lengthy posts about the topic on the home page, even though a great deal of my time is devoted to computers.
I spend all day at work in front of several computers at my desk, let alone computers at other people's desks when they have troubles I need to fix.
When I get home it is very easy to plug in my laptop and spend another few hours checking out stuff not related to work.
What do I use my computer for? Here's the list:
- Web site design - this is my primary outlet for writing.
- Listening to music
- Listening to baseball - great during the offseason.
- Watching movies
- Reading political commentaries (blogs), news sites, and sports sites.
- Research - anything from finding local businesses to looking up why there's a seat belt law. Pretty much any question I encounter each day is passed by Google.
- Photo storage.
- Finances (Quicken and Turbo Tax)
- Bible studies
- Sync my PDA (Blackberry... stopped the phone service but the calendar and contacts still sync with Outlook)
- Games - for a while Spider Solitaire was big, and before that Sudoko was pretty popular.
The good thing about this is I don't watch much TV anymore...
VMWARE
My first experience with VMWare was last year when I installed a demo version of Workstation but couldn't get it to work. In looking back there were some simple network settings that should have been adjusted, but I didn't have a lot of time to play with it and had to move on to other pressing needs.
After a while the buzz about virtual computers was such that I took a closer second look at VMWare as well as Microsoft Virtual PC. Both were impressive, and when I discovered I could load old operating systems on new machines I started having fun. Windows 98 all over again... wow - flash back to the early days of Microsoft.
LINUX
2007 was also the year I first played with Linux Ubuntu and PCLinux. Both were easy to install, but I found them a bit buggy and at the time couldn't spare a separate system just for Linux.
Then I tried the new version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron 8.04) and was impressed that it would install on a Windows machine. Except what it did was partitioned the free space and setup dual booting. Each time you booted a menu would ask whether to start Windows or Linux. VERY impressive, plus the new version was pretty stable.
ULTIMATE COMBINATION
In 2008 I became totally frustrated with waiting 10 minutes for Vista to boot up and decided to risk it all for what I imagined might be the Ultimate Combination:
Base operating system of Linux Ubuntu hosting two VMWare virtual installations of XP - one for work and one for home.
To get this I had to reformat and repartition my 160 Gb harddrive into four drives:
- 11 Gb partition for Linux Ubuntu as my main OS.
- 98 Gb data partition has all my files - music, photos, and docs for both personal and work use.
- 25 Gb partition for VMWare to run Windows XP for my work computer.
- 20 Gb partition for VMWare to run another XP system for my home computer.
All of this happens on a Dell M65 laptop with 2 Gb of RAM and an Nvidia FX350 graphics card. Not bad...
The only concern (and a big one) was the virtual system running my work computer might not connect to the network at the office. Our network support group is getting pretty restrictive about which systems can attach to the LAN, so I if my virtual system couldn't login then the whole experiment was dead.
But it does indeed login to the work network. About the only thing I can't do is remote access using a VPN. The network is able to distinguish non-work system and will no longer grant access to anyone having a VPN account.
Eventually I'll figure this out though.
UPDATE - just found out there's a "Connect to Server" application in Ubuntu, and I'm such a n00b I don't know which app this is BUT... I've been able to use it to hook up with MANY Active Directory servers - WITHOUT WINDOWS. Way cool...