Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I have been struggling with blogs and forums trying to find the working solution for my dilemma since I originally installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I needed USB support for my virtual machines in order to really smooth out my work flow. My guest OS is Windows Server 2003 and my host OS is Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to be able to clone the virtual machine’s hard disk using Clonezilla and my external Western Digital, USB 500 GB hard drive. I realize that it is possible to “clone” a virtual machine through VirtualBox but, as I work on multiple physical machines, I needed the disk image to be able to install a fully configured guest OS without having to worry about the ID conflict that is common with cloning virtual machine’s the wrong way. I have compiled a step-by-step process on how I was able to successfully set up USB support. If at any point, your not seeing the same results I saw, just reboot. It is recommended by everyone who wrote an article about this. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19.generic. Here we go…

Welcome back Hardy Heron. I’ve been using 8.10 on my Toshiba Satellite but after the upgrade, I was having issues with the suspend - or standby - process. Sometimes I would be able to bring my laptop out of the suspended state and other times I would lose my work and the work located on my virtual machines. Not good. I suppose that explains the long-term support (LTS) version of 8.04 that makes it so stable. I had read that your graphics driver can cause issues with the suspend stand. Since I am using an ATI Radeon X1200, I attempted to use both the open and restricted drivers that are available for that model. No luck. I also adjusted power management settings but that had no affect.

Last night I upgraded my Toshiba Satellite from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 with only minor issues. I had an 8.10 CD so I added that as a software source, allowed version upgrades and refreshed my update list. I began the upgrade to 8.10 and waited. I had to download around 1 GB of files for upgrade. I restarted my computer and, because of my previous tinkering with the Alsa sound mixer, was greeted with a banshee-like (mic and speaker feedback) call from my laptop’s speakers during boot-up. I plugged in a pair of headphones and let the boot-up continue.

I’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to get VirtualBox setup and running on my Fedora 10 system. I’ve scowered the web in search of assistance for a “can’t create COM object” error - whatever that might be. I’ve had no luck. No support on any forums from anyone. I’ve even found where other Fedora users have complained of this issue, but so far I haven’t found where anyone has followed up or solved the error. First Adobe Flash Player had issues, now VirtualBox. Currently, Sun is only providing a Fedora 9 compatible package. It’s lacking full compatibility with version 10 and that causes a few problems.

In my last post, I mentioned an audio problem I was having with Ubuntu. The mic was not capturing audio so I went through a tutorial on how to fix my audio with a few modifications. Those modifications set me my audio askew and I realized what the problem was. If you bring up the volume control panel and click on File > Change Device, you might see 5 or more choices for audio devices. You must be sure to choose the correct device for audio to function properly. For some reason, the Alsa mixer works almost universally from what I’ve read and experience personally. It is my default, or 1st option, on the device list. There was another option for “analog input: front” which turned out to be my front volume switch however the Alsa stilled managed to function better (as in more volume). I’m still trying to figure out why my mic isn’t working when I’m able to get feedback and echos when I bring up the Alsa Mixer app by typing “alsamixer” in the terminal window, but we’re making progress.

Much learned in this past week. I’m blogging from my laptop while I watch the Fedora install and update on my HP xw9300 Workstation. Yes, I went ahead and decided to install trhe 64-bit Fedora 10. My xw9300 was running a 64-bit Ubuntu 8.1 and Windows XP Pro. I’ve been doing a lot of software testing recently and XP absorbed quite an infection. You know the type - incessant IE pop-ups that just will not go away. After trying every spyware, malware and virus scanning program I had, I dropped XP and pushed Fedora into the xw9300. The HP xw9300 hardware was originally developed in cooperation with Red Hat, Microsoft and Nvidia. I’m tired of XP so I decided to give the machine a try with Red Hat’s Fedora. I installed Windows Server 2003 first just for dedicated Adobe CS3 support and then installed Fedora. Fedora was quick and easy to install and also provided a Boot Loader section for dual-booting. Wifi worked immediately along with other hardware. Two minors bugs related to additional package installation and updates but mostly a walk in the park.

Over the past week, I have been exploring some of the other Linux distro options available to me. Initially I branched out when I had to do some data recovery on a corrupted Windows XP hard drive. A friend in the business recommended Puppy Linux for fast load times and non-destructive viewing of the hard drive’s contents. Puppy Linux has the very useful ability to load itself directly into RAM as opposed to loading itself on the local disk drive. The Live CD is only around 90 MB but is amazingly a fully featured OS with an office suite, CD/DVD burners, graphic programs, audio editors and more. I quickly loaded Puppy Linux onto a bootable CD and a few minutes later I was extracting the data I needed from the corrupted hard drive. Nicely done. I might also mention that Puppy Linux is among quite a few different Linux distros that can be completely loaded to RAM.

I realize I’m more than one week behind on this post but it was time for a VirtualBox shout-out. In case you’re not familiar with VBox, it is an open-source, virtualization software package that allows you do some amazing things. VirtualBox is available for the majority of OSs available and it’s free. As you might have read, I recently switched over to Ubuntu Linux on my laptop and work desktop. So far so good if you exlude the fact that I use Adobe CS3 for work and play around the clock. Yes, I’ve tried Wine (Windows Emulator) for Linux but it doesn’t meet my standards - I needed full compatibility. I needed software that would run the Adobe apps I needed to run in a somewhat optimized and efficient manner. That’s when I discovered virtualization, or, the act of virtualizing an entire computer and OS on your current computer and within your operating system. To summarize, I’m running Windows on my Linux laptop thanks to VirtualBox. The beauty of the software is that I can run “seamless” mode which creates the illusion that a Windows application is actually running on my Ubuntu desktop. To switch gears entirely, I can just run full-screen mode and tuck my Ubuntu desktop out-of-sight while I Photoshop away and create websites with Dreamweaver and Flash Professional. It is fairly impressive as far as switching between Windows and Ubuntu as if it were just another app. The primary OS (in my case Ubuntu) is referred to as the “Host OS” whereas the secondary OSs (Windows, OS X, Solaris, etc.) are referred to as the “Guest OSs”. You can add as many Guest OSs as you would like. The OSs share the resources on your machine (RAM, processors, hard drive space, etc.) which can all be fine-tuned and adjusted as necessary to give you the performance you need. Another added feature is the ability to “save the current machine state” and essentially hit the pause button on your guest OS, saving the layout and current view in your guest OS. This put an end to my dual-boot and multi-boot OSs. The next step for me is to optimize my virtualization process to get the machines running at full capacity but that’s a completely different post.

So I’ve decided to wipe Vista complete off of my system and rely on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and a virtualized Windows XP Pro. Just so everyone is clear: Getting Ubuntu configured correctly can lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’ve decided to be objective with the presentation of Ubuntu to the people who are still debating it so here are a few qualms I have with this distro of Linux…

In this post, I will be explaining how my installation of the 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 OS went on my Toshiba Satellite. The specs of my laptop can be found in the “Getting Started with Ubuntu” post I had last month but just to sum it up; this is a Vista compatible machine that I bought fall of ‘07. It has an AMD chipset and Atheros wi-fi built-in.