Virtuosity

For the last two days, I've had a difficult time studying for the Windows XP Professional class. Some of options necessary to do some of the lessons weren't available. The instruction told me to "right click, and select create new partition", but the option to create a new partition wasn't there.

Part of the problem is that I'm working on a virtual computer in Windows XP. That's right, I'm using Windows XP Professional within Windows XP Professional. For a Linux guy, that's like committing two sins with one fell-swoop.

Evidently, I didn't set up the original virtual machine to be able to do the selection I needed. That's why the option didn't show up. Evidently, no big deal. I was able to continue through the lesson anyway.

On windows, I use Microsoft Virtual PC. It works as long as you use Windows. At school, they have a few Linux distributions on it, but I haven't been able to get it to work right. When I try to load a Linux distro on MS Virtual PC, it only shows the upper left hand quarter of the screen. Even when I use the Windows XP Professional installation on Virtual PC, it intolerably slow.

Lately, I've been using VMware. I have it loaded on My Windows Desktop, and my Ubuntu Laptop.

I took about 4 installations to finally get the network to connect on the laptop, but I eventually got it to work. I'm not really sure how. I used the scripts from easyvmx.com to create the virtual computer, downloaded it, and installed Windows on it. Weirdly enough, Windows runs faster on the vmware virtual computer than it does natively, or in Microsoft Virtual PC. I also use vmware to create a Kubuntu virtual computer, and a SuSE Linux virtual computer. I needed the SuSE one for my Linux class at school.

Now, I'm virtually overwhelmed.