Now on Ubuntu, with more bits!

This blog post is coming to you from Win XP, running as a Virtual Machine inside Ubuntu Gutsy 64 bit. :)

That's the "short version" of what happened. It was more messy than that (mostly due to my being pretty green still with Ubuntu, but also due to major headaches with Windows XP).

My Dev box is an AMD Athlon 64 and up until 3 days ago was using Windows XP Pro as it's Host operating system (with a handful of virtual images running for various programming tasks). In my "infinite wisdom" (ha!) I thought maybe I'd get better performance if I switched to the 64-bit edition of Windows XP Pro. If nothing else, I'd be able to use all 4GB of memory in this machine (whereas XP 32bit can only see 3.2 of them).

I've got a copy XP 64 laying around, along with what SHOULD be my legit s/n from an MSDN subscription I used to have. Installation started just fine, but it was only AFTER the hard drive got formatted that XP asked for the serial number.

And that's where it all fell apart.

Try as I might, XP would not take my serial number. I re-installed (turns out I might have grabbed the wrong "flavor" of XP 64 the first time), tried everything I could thing of, but no dice. (I even Googled for other serial #'s, to get a look at another one, in case I was missing something.) Nothing would take, and I was now dead in the water on my Dev box.

Before going to bed, I decided to download the Ubuntu 64 bit ISO as a Plan B. Hey, my "every day" computer runs it with no issues, and I don't really need the Host OS to be Windows...all it does is serve VMWare guest OS's, and they make that for Ubuntu...

Yesterday morning I burned the ISO, and after one hard reboot (not sure why the CD hiccuped the first time), the install seemed to go fine.

And then, it was discovered that although there do appear to be ATI video drivers available for Linux, my card just wasn't happy with them. Try as I might, the best I could get was a) a black screen or b) booting into that "safe mode" thing, and poking around that way...but the video driver was obviously still not happy.

Installed the latest ones, tried various config changes off the web, Google'd for more info. I tried everything. No dice.

Now we were well into "this is taking up WAY too much of my time" territory. I needed to get back to work. Now. So 30 minutes later, and another trip to Frys, I installed an NVidia GeForce 8600 and POOF....everything just magically worked. Grabbed VMWare off the web, some trial and error with permissions, and I'm FINALLY back up and running.

Anybody want to buy a slightly used ATI Radeon 2400? It works great...but only in Windows. :)

-n