I need to test our applications on several versions of Windows and the Flash development environment only runs there. My machines still dual-boot but that is a bother. So I decided to check out ways to run windows on Ubuntu. I first tried QEMU with the kernel accelerator. There are lots of fiddly command-line flags to get right but it worked pretty well. I successfully installed Windows XP though it took a long time. I discovered some tips about disabling ACPI and that sped things up quite a bit. Now full of confidence, I decided to install Flash CS3. The install took a while but it does when running native as well. Unfortunately, when I tried to run the Flash IDE, QEMU would crash hard with bus error, core dumped. I've posted a query on the QEMU forum but haven't gotten a reply yet.

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I wanted to make /home its own partition to ease backups, synchronization, and future upgrades. This is how I did it. I'm no expert so beware of taking these as instructions. I got most of this from this post .

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When I type ssh gb-cs I mean ssh gb-cs.cs.unc.edu but I couldn't get that to work consistently at home. I'd add it to the Search Domains section of the DNS tab in the Network Settings dialog but next time I hibernated or rebooted, it would be gone. This tip suggested adding a package and then making a simple change:

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Pete says check out istanbul when I need to make a screencast. xvidcap is another possibility but it doesn't seem to be in Synaptic Package Manager.

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My Dell 690 at work has lots of audio devices and I couldn't figure out how to get all sound to go to the Audigy2. I found a tip about changing /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to include the line #options snd_emu10k1 index=0 and that worked but... ALSA would get hung up occasionally when a window opened. Pete suggested that I turn off ESD and I tried that, but then the Audigy2 was not detected. I found that either enabling ESD or deleting that line above would restore its function. I deleted that line and found this tip for how to fix it. The simple answer appears to be:

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I hate the default font on Feisty. Capital J should NOT descend below the line! I followed this tip and got some nicer fonts.

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I've been fooling with Ubuntu for just over a week now. I started with wubi, then did the standard install with a CD I made. At home on the old Dell D800 laptop it was super easy. Wireless didn't work at first but a quick Google search on feisty d800 showed I had the kind of wireless card that needs some microcode. Asking for the fwcutter-??? module fixed things right up. A work on this old Dell 690 things were made tricky by the funny interaction between the scuzzy disks and the ide disk in the bios. Murray fixed that in just a few minutes with some grub incantations.

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