Linux Mint Cassandra

I bought a new 160GB hard drive from Wal-Mart with a gift card I received for my birthday (Thanks, Dad!), and I decided to install Mint on it. For those that may not have heard of this particular Linux distribution, it is built on top of Ubuntu. The benefit is that it also includes all of the codecs that you would need to hunt for around the web to get your audio/video/movies to play correctly.

I was expecting to have to do some weird tricks with my hardware setup since I still wanted to be able to boot into Windows. I have two 80 GB Serial ATA hard drives that are hooked into a Adaptec RAID card in a mirrored configuration. I wanted to keep this setup, and this necessitated a separated HD for Linux -- I didn't want to do partitioning, and I've had bad luck with separate partitions getting corrupted anyway.

Since the Windows hard drives boot off the Serial ATA card and my new Linux HD was a standard EIDE, I was happy to find that the Mint boot loader actually figured out my weird setup. The loader simply intercepts the boot process and offers me a menu on which operating system to choose when I start up. I was a little wary of picking the Windows option the first time, but it worked just fine.

Mint itself is terrific. The only hitch I had was that my Sound Blaster Audigy wouldn't work without disabling the onboard audio in the BIOS. No loss since I never use the onboard audio anyway. Last night I was coding in Python with PIDA, listening to my music with Amarok, and watching Rear Window (and Grace Kelly!) on DVD with Totem Movie Player.

Everything works together smoothly. I'm impressed.

Ubuntu install

Those who've been following my del.icio.us bookmarks know that I've been recently looking at laptops and desktops with Linux pre-installed. My interest in a new computer coincided with my old computer starting to fail. But wouldn't you know it! Turns out a new power supply and keyboard solved my problems, and I was still left with a serious case of Linux envy.

Once I got my computer running again, I decided to look at installing an Ubuntu image under VMPlayer for Windows XP. (This is the free virtualization software from VMWare that allows you to run one operating system under another one.) I was surprised how well it worked, although there were some issues that I had to look up on various newsgroups. Here's the process I used:

1. Download the latest Ubuntu 6.10 image.
2. Download and install the evaluation version of VMWare Workstation. (This includes VMPlayer plus VMTools, which you need for getting screen resolutions above 800x600.)
3. Run Workstation, start the Ubuntu image, and "install" the VMTools (located in Workstation's menu). Confusingly, this just drops a virtual VMTools DVD image on your Ubuntu desktop; you have to then open up the image and run its installer.

Now you can change your screen resolution to something higher, set VMPlayer to run full screen on startup (and unpin the annoying toolbar), and you're all set.

If you want, you can also uninstall the eval version of VMWare Workstation, and then download and install the smaller (and free) VMPlayer. Your image (with the VMTools install) will remain intact. This is also perfectly legal.

Having this image has satisfied my Ubuntu lust for the moment. I spent some time downloading lots of cool Python libraries using the Package Manager (even easier than using easy_install!). I'll still probably get a Linux friendly laptop at a later point, but Doris' VAIO is still chugging along, and it's hard to justify a new computer when we're still furnishing our basement.