Daily Report

Foods:
3 Scrambled eggs for breakfast
Runza for dinner (the girlfriend came over and wanted Runza)

Virtualization

So when I got my new computer I was wanting to exclusively run Ubuntu on it, not for any other reason than I just heard enough bad things about Windows Vista I didn’t want to upgrade. I fell in love with Ubuntu, how it does things, some of the eye candy you can get through Compiz, and the simplicity of the operating system. Not to mention it’s free. Well I got everything I wanted running in linux that I might want to use a computer for. There are a few games I do not have running in linux that I used to run for various reasons but we won’t go there for now. The only problem I had was I could not find a finance software that I liked. I had been using MS Money and was used to it and there wasn’t much out there that I liked. The problem arose when wine does not do Money. So this led to me to start thinking in the direction of having a virtualized version of windows since I still had my old XP disk. Last night that is what I did. I virtualized Windows, installed Money and now I can easily boot into windows and go to town. Everything works in windows but I only gave it about 10GB of hard disk space so it will not be running too many applications. I’m not sure how well virtualization would work on an old computer but on the new one I have it runs without a problem. I used VirtualBox to do my tasks, after some research I found out that it was in the repos so it must be good I thought so I installed it and then it took me just a few minutes to set everything up and about 30 minutes for windows to install. I had to grab an ISO image from the Windows XP install disk in order to install but in the forums I found a cool command that made one for me. The command was

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=windows.iso

In case anyone ever may want to use it. So that was it it was the easiest experience of my life after I was somewhat dreading having to do it. Now I can boot up windows, do my finances and then just shut it back down without having to do a complete restart of my computer or anything like that. It is an extra step that I wish I didn’t have to take but I am happy with being able to use the programs that I like, so it’s all good. And that has been my experiences with virtualization so far.  Below I have included some cool looking screen shots.