Alex A. Hutnik

While Linux is a great operation system, often times it’s not as easy to get things done as it is in Windows, especially if you’re used to how Windows works (or doesn’t). I found myself in a similar situation several days ago when I finally got around to installing Linux on my desktop. My two servers have been running Ubuntu for some time now, and thanks to the efforts of Colin and Lann, I have started to accumulate a decent working knowledge of the operating system. Still, sometimes I want to use Photoshop instead of GIMP or InDesign or some program that only runs in Windows. So, I followed these steps to making both systems live together peacefully using VMWare Server and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn:

First, there are some prerequisites for this:

1. You should have a fairly speedy computer and plenty. Any virtualization software will tax your CPU and RAM. Personally, I recommend a dual-core processor, but that is by no means a requirement. As a bencmark, I have an Athlon X2 3800 and 2GB of RAM and I can hardly tell that Windows is being virtualized.
2. You should install Linux on a separate hard drive. I have Linux installed on a 15GB hard drive I found last week, Windows was installed on another drive years ago. Remember, what we’re doing here is running Linux while keeping our existing windows installation. You don’t really need to have a separate hard drive, but it will make things much more responsive and prolong your hardware’s longevity. I have a third hard drive used for data storage.
3. You should have some of your original install media with you. Sometimes during this process, some windows programs will become “unregistered.” For example, I have Adobe Creative Suite 3 and I had to re-register it (free) after this process because it relies on a hardware profile to stay authenticated. Since we’re changing to VMware’s virtualized hardware, we have to be conscious of programs that relied on the old setup.
4. You should have a basic understanding of manipulating and navigating the Linux file system.
5. Obviously, this tutorial comes caveat emptor. If you destroy your computer or its data by following this tutorial, all you will get from me is an unsympathetic “Yeah, you’ll have that.”

Great, now that we’ve got those out of the way, let’s start with our new install of Ubuntu:

1. Let’s assume the following: You have Linux installed on /dev/hda1 and Windows installed on /dev/hdb1. This is IMPORTANT! You will have to substitute the actual locations of your installations for these devices.
2. Your Windows installation is most likely on an NTFS partitioned drive. Ubuntu may automatically mount this drive, but it only supports read-only. However, there is a package that adds write support. Open up a terminal and run:
   sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
3. Unmount the Windows drive with:
   sudo umount /dev/hdb1
4. Edit /etc/fstab and locate where your windows drive is being mounted. Change the mount type from ntfs to ntfs-3g. Also, change the options to defaults.
5. Remount the Windows drive:
   sudo mount /dev/hdb1
6. Install VMware:
   sudo apt-get install vmware-server
7. Run vmware server:
   vmware
8. Add a new virtual machine. Choose the Custom installation and configure everything appropriately. When it asks where to save the virtual server data, you can accept the default location. We will tell it more information on the next screen.
9. Here’s the important part. When it asks whether or not to create a new virtual disk, the bottom option will say to use a current physical drive. We want that option. Select it and choose /dev/hdb and tell it to use the whole drive. Obviously, be sure to substitute the location of your own installation.
10. At this point you should be able to boot up the virtual machine and see your familiar Windows installation.

Tips:

1. You should either change the permissions of the mount point for your windows drive or run vmware as root (with gksu vmware) so that it can access that mount point. Otherwise, VMware will throw permissions errors.
2. If your Linux or Windows installations are on SATA drives, then your devices will start with sd instead of hd. For example, I have a SATA hard drive located at /dev/sda.

You can leave questions or comments below.

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Slate has an easy-to-follow article about the study of eBay auctions by economists.  An excerpt, with a link:

Are eBay auctions rational or irrational? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine
Auction theory offers an argument that a secret reserve price is better. A secret reserve price allows bidders to see each other’s gradually ascending bids and thus draw confidence that they are not alone in prizing the item. Even though the bids are too low to beat the reserve, they serve an important purpose of reassuring bidders that others are also interested. An open reserve price on eBay makes that reassurance impossible; nobody can submit a bid below the open reserve, and lacking any signs of confidence from other bidders, nobody may submit a bid above it either.

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This weekend, I switched over to running Ubuntu linux. I will be posting more tutorials on the random things I do so stay tuned.

Yesterday, I purchased a new LCD monitor. I was running with dual 15″ LCDs, but I decided it was time for an upgrade. Now I have a 19″ LG, which so far has been great. Plus it has a three year warranty! I also bought a really slick wireless keyboard/mouse combo and surprisingly I didn’t have to do anything in linux to get all the extra buttons working. I will be attempting to enable some other features and I will certainly post a tutorial here and on ubuntuforums.

Also, Colin informed be of WordPress’s ability to import OPML blog lists so I will be updating my list of interesting blogs (seen at the right of your screen) shortly.

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Everyone’s favorite cube-mate keeps his own blog, with such gems as:

“It is said, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Well I say, keep everyone as close as possible to you because you don’t know who is your friend or your enemy. Keep the people below you even closer if that’s possible. Even if they have to be inside you.”

http://blog.nbc.com/DwightsBlog/

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Greg Mankiw writes about some recent studies linking IQ with wealth that produce counterintuitive results.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-become-rich.html

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A model of efficiency (and empathy for the e-mail subscribers), I will combine several updates in to one post.

First, congratulations and wishes of luck and prosperity are in order for all of the people for graduated today!

I took a few pictures of the newly minted graduates.  You can find more over at Adam Derewecki’s blog.

Speaking of Derewecki, he and Zach Fredin are headed cross-country to San Jose and they will be attempting to update the blog as they travel.  Stay tuned.

Also, Derewecki posed a good question this afternoon as we were processing the pictures he took, leading to today’s Linux tip: If you have a bunch of pictures that need to be rotated automatically based on EXIF data, make sure you have the exiftran utility installed (Ubuntu and Debian users can install it with apt-get install exiftran), open a up a terminal, browse to the directory where the pictures are and type:

ls *.jpg | xargs exiftran -aipg

The a,i,p, and g tell exiftran to rotate automatically based on EXIF data (if you camera has an orientation sensor), change the files in place (don’t make new, rotate versions of the originals), preserve timestamps and other info (like ISO data), and generate (or regenerate) the EXIF-embedded thumbnail.

One new site I started following is http://www.security-hacks.com/.  They have an interesting set of articles and links and things are generally easy to follow for the intermediate-level hacker.

I also saw this article posted on my favorite news site.  Pretty interesting if you’re in to that sort of thing (game theory and economics).

That’s all for now.

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I upgraded to the new version of Wordpress.  Look around and see if anything broke!

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Via the Freakonomics blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2007/05/rethinking_the_fivesecond_rule.php

I think this might have appeared on Mythbusters?  What were their results?

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 From BusinessWeek.com:

 http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/may2007/ca20070514_406243.htm

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Maybe it’s just my computer, but it seems that when I download files in Firefox, it’s limited to around 2.2MB/sec (yes, that’s megabytes).  I know most broadband users don’t get even half those speeds, but on a college network I can cut loose.  If I use the *nix wget utility, I can often download in excess of 10MB/sec while Firefox tops out at around 2MB/sec.

Popularity: 10% [?]