Where the heck am I?

I'm here - just busy as heck. I was planning on installing Ubuntu today on a new partition when Partition Magic decided it would rather just screw up my drive. Now Windows won't boot and since Dell couldn't be bothered to ship me an install disk (well, maybe they did, but I have no idea where it is), I'm having to borrow an ISO and do a reinstall. Ugh. Luckily my Mac laptop was setup well for development so I'm on that for the next day or two.

p.s. Franz Schlennger(spelled wrong I think) - if you are reading this, please contact me via the Contact tab. I do not have your email address.

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Chris said on 04-24-2007 at 4:45 PM #
	Welcome to the world of Ubuntu! I would suggest installing Ubuntu and then running Windows Virtual with VMWare. It works great. If you need any help, just send me an email.

Raymond Camden said on 04-24-2007 at 4:54 PM #
	That was my goal. I was going to keep a 'real' Windows on a small partition for the last PC game I'm playing. At this point I'm going to see if I can just get Ubuntu working and then migrate my Windows app. Believe it or not I can still see my files from Ubuntu (from the CD I'm using).

Dan Sorensen said on 04-24-2007 at 5:08 PM #
	Unfortunately, most vendors don't include install media unless you specifically request it. Now they usually have a hidden 'recovery partition'. I usually request install media AND I pick up a fresh hard drive for any non-default OSes. I would prefer to use the factory hard drive, but it's just too hard to mess with Vendor installs and Microsoft anymore. :-P Good luck, I hope the rest goes well.

Nathan Strutz said on 04-24-2007 at 5:28 PM #
	I knew I should have blogged this yesterday :) http://www.dopefly.com/techblog/entry.cfm?entry=18... BTW, what's that "last" PC game you're playing?

Raymond Camden said on 04-24-2007 at 5:33 PM #
	Nice. GParted is on the Ubuntu CD I have. I didn't try to resize there as I didn't know it was an option. Does it keep the data safe?

Nathan Strutz said on 04-24-2007 at 5:42 PM #
	I can't validate the data dependency of GParted's data handling, but i will say it did a great job for me. I copied and pasted partitions, resized set boot flags, etc., and had absolutely no issues on any of the 3 HDDs I was playing with over the weekend.

Scott P said on 04-24-2007 at 6:18 PM #
	Sounds like you just blew away your boot loader for XP. If you are careful, you can get it all back without reinstalling. Might give this a try: GParted and click on your Windows partition. In the Partition menu, click manage flags. Make sure the boot check box is set. Also - what does your menu.lst file in /boot/grub look like?

Justin Lewis said on 04-25-2007 at 1:30 AM #
	Ubuntu had it's own snappy disk partitioner and even created a selection for windows in the grub bootloader. I tried to do the partition with a partition magic and it ended in tears....

Raymond Camden said on 04-25-2007 at 8:34 AM #
	UGH. I got my Windows XP Media CDs (from a friend) and I even get a blue screen during install.

Raymond Camden said on 04-25-2007 at 8:42 AM #
	Scott, the partition does have boot set. I have no idea what /boot/grub is. It doesn't seem to be a file.

Ken Dunnington said on 04-25-2007 at 8:49 AM #
	Why not just get an external Firewire drive and run Ubuntu and Windows under Paralells on the Mac? ;) Ubuntu is a great distro, I hope you get this problem fixed.

sethron said on 04-25-2007 at 11:14 AM #

I would suggest getting the VMWare player and the Ubuntu appliance image here http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/69... for the Windows PC.

I have an old IBM ThinkPad T22 that I have installed Ubuntu 5.10 and have upgraded to 6.10 and also added Kubuntu and Xubuntu to it. VMWare server is installed and I have an instance of Windows XP Pro SP2 running inside of it, but I would not recommend that for games.

The VMWare player and the appliance running within Windows XP is very reliable. Your mileage may vary, with sound and video within the VM, but this is exactly what VMWare was meant to do.

Raymond Camden said on 04-25-2007 at 1:12 PM #
	Just thought I'd add a note. I'm now running Ubuntu. Scott P gave me a LOT of help with my display, but I seem stuck at 1600x instead of 1920x. What is odd is that when I ran from the CD I was able to get the higher rez. Anyone else out there using Dell's 24 inch widescreen?

sethron said on 04-25-2007 at 1:39 PM #
	You may have to double check your settings in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Also, try the command posted here: http://www.robgonda.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/10/19/....

Raymond Camden said on 04-25-2007 at 2:30 PM #
	No go. I've tried the reconfigure a few times now. It just won't go over 1600x. The more I use it now the more I want to get it fixed. I may blog it just to draw in some traffic.

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