I’ve hired you to help me start a war. It’s an prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition. — Vizzini, from The Princess Bride

VMware is a great program, and I like it a lot. But there are some things you just can’t do in it… full 3D graphics in Linux, for instance. I was curious about the advanced desktop features, the ability to run a real Windows version under Xen (with my notebook computer’s hardware virtualization features), and various other interesting things. After examining the stuff on my hard drive, I realized that there were at least 30GB of stuff that I could offload to an external drive, or do without until I get one of the new (and much more capacious) perpendicular-recording hard drives for it. The time had come, at last, to reformat the drive and reinstall everything from scratch.

I created paranoia backups of absolutely everything, moved my Linux virtual machine to another system (so I’d have a working system while I rebuilt the notebook), and reinstalled Windows XP from my Dell OEM disk. Armed with the recently-discovered PC Decrapifier, I was ready to do battle with the preinstalled crapware that every ready-built system I’ve ever purchased came with… except that none of the crapware appeared. Odd, I know there was plenty on here when I first got it; maybe the XPS reinstall disk didn’t have it, or maybe it’s all hiding.

I didn’t spend any time looking for it though, there was too much to do. First, installing the 84 updates that had come out since Service Pack 2 (and declining to install the unnecessary Genuine Advantage Notification crapware one) — that took two reboots, and a lot longer than I liked. Then installing the drivers from Dell’s driver disk (a tedious manual process, but I shouldn’t need to do it again for a long while), and downloading the one for the integrated webcam since it wasn’t on the disk at all. Then I happily left Windows behind and moved to the fun part: installing Linux.

I’d set up the 93GB drive (supposed to be 100GB, but you know how that goes) as four partitions: a 15GB ext3 partition for Linux, a 6GB partition reserved for my encrypted Linux home directory, a 6GB partition for my TrueCrypt-encrypted Windows data, and the rest for an NTFS partition for Windows itself and miscellaneous data. I decided to dispense with the Linux swap drive; this system has 2GB of memory, and I rarely ever used even a tiny bit of swap space when I was running Linux in a quarter of that on the virtual machine.

After a standard install of Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”), I decided to try a few experiments before putting any of my data on it. The first was enabling the Desktop Effects option, so I could finally see what it did. After it installed the (closed-source) Nvidia driver, it said I had to reboot… no problem. Except that when I did so, the screen went black when it came time to log in. Not just blank, but black — the backlight even turned off, though judging by the sound effects, everything else was working properly. A three-fingered salute brought it back to life while it shut down and restarted, but as soon as it got back to the login screen, it did the same thing.

I won’t bore you with the troubleshooting details (including several more from-scratch reinstalls of Linux), but it turned out that it had switched to the external monitor connection, which was connected to my desktop monitor (as usual), but the desktop monitor was switched to show the desktop machine’s screen. Once I’d switched it back to the laptop screen, it was evident that everything was working as it should. It’s always the simplest things. 🙁 Apparently it is possible to run both monitors at the same time, but I would need to do some further setup to allow it. Right now it’s not worth the research time it would take; I’ll get to it later.

The Desktop Effects stuff is interesting, but I ended up turning it off after a couple hours. It slowed desktop-switching down too much when I had a few programs running on the desktop I was switching to. Maybe I’ll try again after I’ve tweaked a few settings, there’s one (for thumbnails) that could definitely have caused that.

[Update: Yes, blocking thumbnails definitely has an adverse effect on it. With thumbnails reenabled, it’s much better, and seems extremely fast. I’m leaving it on for now.]

The next stumbling-block was getting my external keyboard and mouse working with it. They’re Bluetooth wireless ones from the Logitech diNovo series (and they’re darn near perfect, the best keyboard I’ve seen in my twenty-five years of computing, and an excellent mouse too), and the machine has an integrated Bluetooth adapter. The adapter was found automatically, but the devices simply refused to cooperate… after some research, I finally managed to get them connected temporarily, but when I rebooted they’d vanish and I had to go through the whole rigmarole again. I finally found a post (I think on the Ubuntu Forums, unfortunately I didn’t bookmark and can’t now locate again) that described how to set it up properly. Now the devices will connect with only minor problems after a reboot (I have to manually press the connect buttons on them, and wait for a minute or so), and will work flawlessly after that.

[UPDATE: the aforementioned post is here.]

Once the peripherals were working, I turned to software, and allowed Ubuntu to install the 71 updates that it had. (They went a lot faster than the Windows updates had.) I decided to use dm-crypt for the encrypted home directory this time, following the instructions from a nice book I’d picked up a few days ago (O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks)… it had no problems with ext3, and it was automatically unmounted when I logged out, much easier than the TrueCrypt system I’d set up. Nice. 🙂

This morning, I moved my data over (in one command!), and using another tip from that book, I grabbed a list of the packages that were installed on my Linux virtual machine and installed them to the new non-virtual one in one big lump. There were a few glitches (packages that I’d installed manually, like one of the Python modules to enable 3-D mode on the chess program), but all in all it did quite well.

As far as moving computers went, it was very painless. No tracking down data mixed in with program files in all sorts of directories, and very little manual tweaking or driver installation needed. I’m quite happy with it.

Once I finish getting everything set up here, I’m going to try a virtual Windows system under Xen. This notebook computer is the only one I’ve got with the CPU virtualization features needed for that. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to use the Dell Windows XP disk for it, but I can get it from MSDN (the Microsoft Developer Network) if necessary. It’ll be interesting to see how well (and how quickly) it works that way.