IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

Well, I decided that while CentOS would work for a desktop, it’s not as easy to manage to an intermediate (if you can call me that) user as another OS.  So I’ve installed Ubuntu version 8.10, which they’ve labeld as Intrepid Ibex.  The installation was a little slow on my laptop, but that’s alright.  It runs fast enough after being installed to the hard drive.

Why Ubuntu?  I wanted the latest version of Evolution, the open source groupware client software.  You can install it on CentOS, but only from the source.  And I’m still a little shaky when it comes to checking dependencies when building from source and making sure the kernel knows where all of those are.  I wasn’t sure that Ubuntu would have the latest release of Evolution bundled with it, but it did.  Just in case it didn’t, though, someone had already created a system that will install and check dependencies for you (but not for CentOS).

So now I’m happily using email and calendars on my Linux platform with a MS Exchange back end without having to launch my Windows virtual machine just to read email.  I was using the Exchange web access client, but that experience stinks when you aren’t using Internet Explorer.

Well, I did it. I installed VMware Server 2.0 and assigned 1GB of RAM to Windows XP. I had to reactive windows and MS Office in the Virtual machine, but after that, it all worked nicely. Now I just have to work out how to nicely switch between wireless and wired networks – at the moment i have to manually change the configuration of the virtual machine so that it will use the wired or wireless bridges, but other than that, I’m pretty set! Now, in order to set up shared network space, I’ll have to configure samba on the workstation so that the host and guest share space. I haven’t worked out if I can use a raw partition for the hard disk yet, but if I can’t, the performance is okay enough for me to continue.

I’m pretty psyched!

I’ve been using Linux for a little over a year now on a server level.  I like the control it gives and I like how I don’t have to buy another OS license every time I need a new server for some purpose.  It also allows me to better evaluate a lot of the open source software that is available.  Combine my joy for this with my jealousy over my business partner’s Macbook (with Windows running in a virtual machine) made me wonder how well I might be able to transform the mighty ThinkPad into something of a similar setup as he had.  So I took the plunge and decided I would install CentOS 5 on my laptop.  My first step was to preserve my system as-is in case I didn’t like it.

Clonezilla is a great tool to clone your system to an image file on external media (like a USB hard drive).  So I uninstalled a few unnecessary apps from Windows XP Pro, ran Windows Cleanup 4.52 from Steven Gould, and moved data to folders on the USB drive (deleting them from the laptop).  As you may recall, I performed a whole drive encryption on my laptop with TrueCrypt, so before I make an image of this laptop I had to remove this encryption first (it was pretty painless, though time consuming – and I could still use my laptop during the process: brilliant).

I booted into the Clonezilla live CD and used it to make an image file of my laptop onto the external USB drive.  I decided I wasn’t done there, because I didn’t want to have to reinstall my Windows XP OS, so I ran the VMware vCenter Converter v3 Starter Edition – this was able to convert my physical laptop into a Virtual Machine onto the USB External Drive (that I will later load with VMware Server or Player, whichever gives me better performance).  So now I have an image of the hard drive itself, and a virtualized Windows OS to run when Linux is operational.

I chose all the goodies I wanted from the CentOS 5 installation DVD, but left about 40GB of unpartitioned space just in case I can utilize physical disk in VMware Server instead of only virtual disk (should give a performance increase if its possible).  After first boot, I ran “yum update” and waited for an hour or so while it went to the repositories and downloaded everything I needed.  My wireless card was not working, however, so I had to go through some steps to get the Intel 2200bg wireless adapter I had put into the laptop to work.  This is an IBM ThinkPad T40 with a non-OEM card in it (see previous entries for what I had to do to get this to work with BIOS).  The good news is that its a very popular wireless card and Intel had started wireless drivers for this, which come with CentOS.

What needed to additionally happen was to install some linux firmware for the card into the OS.  I first added the RPMforge repository for YUM and then ran: yum install ipw2200-firmware

Additionally, I ran:
chkconfig network off
chkconfig NetworkMonitor on
service NetworkMonitor start

After a reboot, I was able to activate my wireless adapter from the System tools and connect to my wireless connection from home!  Very nice.  I will write more about how well my laptop will run a virtualized operating system.  Travis thinks I may be asking too much from my laptop, since it doesn’t have any virtualization extensions in its processor and doesn’t even have HyperThreading and is single core – he may be right but I still want to try.  I’m hoping 2GB of RAM and access to the physical drive might offset some performance hits I’ll take.