ubuntu

Ubuntu 32bit and 4GB of memory

Duncan Epping · Nov 12, 2008 ·

For a 32bit OS you can theoretically address 4GB of memory, but when running a 4GB system with a 32bit OS hit you’ll probably hit a barrier around roughly 3GB. For Windows XP there’s no way of solving this unfortunately as far as I know, which is a shame cause 800MB was not being utilised. For Ubuntu there is, my former colleague Patrick pointed me out to this and it works great, thanks again for me helping me:

sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-headers-server

So what it does is installing the Ubuntu server kernel which includes PAE support. PAE stands for Physical Address Extension and it increases the address size from 32bits to 36bits which means you can address up til 64GB. For more info on PAE read this wiki.

Windows is “gone”…

Duncan Epping · Nov 11, 2008 ·

As some of you know, I’ve upgraded my home pc to Ubuntu 8.10. It’s doing what it should do, and probably better than it did with Windows Vista. Now I’ve also upgraded my company laptop from Windows XP to Ubuntu. My laptop crashed for the second time in 3 months, some weird registry corruption… I was really sick of it, so I wiped it completely, installed Ubuntu and a whole bunch of cool apps.

At VMware we’ve got a company virtual machine which holds all the company apps one would need so I installed VMware workstation. Added a second disk to the VM for my documents, which also makes it easy to backup my documents every once in a while!

Thanks Ubuntu, and if you’ve never looked into Ubuntu, download the live CD and just try it out. It’s free, and easy to setup… it’s a live CD so you don’t need to wipe your system to actually try it!

The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10

Duncan Epping · Oct 26, 2008 ·

I used to be a Windows Administrator and have been using Windows since version 2.0. During my career for some weird reason when teams where formed I was always matched with Unix, Linux or Novell Admins. You can imagine I had a lot of discussions around Microsoft Windows. Some fair, some and probably most were heated. One of my big arguments for the Desktop and Windows in general has always been “user experience” and “simplicity”. Everyone can install a Windows machine.

With Windows you just pop in the CD, install, next-next-finish and everything works out of the box. Yeah I know during the early years Windows wasn’t plug and play but most vendors provided you with driver disks anyway. As of Windows 2000 most plug and play issues were solved and my arguments were rock solid because there wasn’t a Linux desktop or server that could do the same.

Well I had to reinstall my home system because it was saturated again, one of the bad habits of Windows I guess, and I thought what the heck let’s give Ubuntu a try again. So I downloaded the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 and tried the live CD to see if everything would work straight out of the box or not. For 8.04 this wasn’t the case, my wireless wasn’t recognized and my videocard had some weird problems.

Hurray for Ubuntu 8.10 it worked straight out of the box. I installed Ubuntu on my disk and the first thing I noticed that compared to Windows Vista or even Windows XP it boots up fast! So let’s see what do I need to install to have the same capabilities as I had with Windows Vista…

video media player -> VLC
ftd -> openftd
newsleecher -> hellanzb+lottanzb(gui for hellanzb)
audio media player -> rythmbox, which includes last.fm and internet radio
browsing -> firefox
picture editting -> gimp
office suite -> open office
desktop notes -> tomboy
ftp -> filezilla

These are the main applications I used on my home system, well besides VMware Workstation, but I own a license for that one so I just downloaded the Linux bundle. After a couple of weeks I must say that I’m impressed. Updating via “apt-get” or the update manager gui works perfect, same for installing new software. I love Compiz, which gives you an amazing 3D cube for your workspace, and makes switching between applications and desktops really easy.

So Ubuntu just rocks and no negative point so far?
Well, after an upgrade my wireless was toasted, the binary firmware file was gone so I had to recover it from the Ubuntu CD. And Auto-Login just doesn’t work. I tried everything, but still receive some weird error and I can’t fix it so far.

Besides these two little nags I do think Ubuntu 8.10 is definitely worth trying out. So if you’re like me and want to learn a bit more about Linux than this might be the perfect moment. Just 4 days and Ubuntu 8.10 will be released officially.

Installing VMware Workstation 6.5 in Ubuntu…

Duncan Epping · Oct 22, 2008 ·

I just downloaded the .bundle file for my Ubuntu 8.10 Workstation at home. So what to do next? I’ve been using Debian and Ubuntu off and on for a while so I’m used to “apt-get install”. But this is a .bundle file, so no apt-get for this application. Well the answer was really simple just run the bundle file:

sudo sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle

So far I really like Ubuntu 8.10! It seems to do everything it needs to do straight out ot the box! By the way, Sven Warren wrote an extensive howto for installing WS6.5 on Ubuntu. It would be nice if VMware would create a debian repository for this download so we can update it with apt-get…