I’ve blogged previously about how I hate dual boot configurations. I prefer the safer alternative, running a virtual machine on your parent system, running virtually whatever OS you want inside this VM.
I chanced upon Virtualbox as a good free alternative to Virtual PC 2007. Installed, booted up an ISO of Ubuntu 8.10 and after a bit of tweaking, this was the result. Efficient utilization of the dual monitor setup, if you look at the screenshot. The only flipside, I had a memory Utilization of about 2.14GB with Vista and Ubuntu running side by side. Processor Utilization was a measly 15% on the XPS.

For all you Virtual Machine junkies out there, check out VirtualBox, highly recommended!

Voila! The solution to my Linux predicament. Had a spare 2GB Flash drive lying around, so decided I’d get a Linux distro running off it, instead of carrying it around purposelessly. Downloaded every Network Security guy’s favourite distro, Backtrack. Copied the files over, edited a few files, changed boot order of computer to boot from USB first, and voila…Linux in all its glory.

There are multiple advantages to this. You can connect other external drives to this Live USB install, and copy stuff from the internal hard disk (yes, its accesible!), for starters. Only flipside, not all computers support booting off USB.

I think this should be possible with Ubuntu too, though I’d rather have it installed on my HDD instead.

For now, me is happy with Backtrack

The past couple of weeks at home have been spent brainstorming. I was running Windows Vista, but I’m simply not impressed with it. My dual core P4 with 2Gigs of RAm slow down to a crawl sometimes on it, with a 512mb NVidia Geforce 7300 Graphics card slow down toa crawl on it, and its quite disconcerting when that happens. Switched over to Ubuntu 7.10, and was more than impressed by it. Compiz Fusion knocks the living daylights out of Aero. The look and feel of the OS was very, very impressive. I then made the decision to switch over completely to Ubuntu. The overall experience seems so much more stable, and enough eye candy without having to compromise on resources.Unfortunately, I do not think its going to materialise in the long run, even though Ubuntu is a superior OS to MS Windows in many ways. Here’s a few reasons why. Read more »