never got around to posting this. rather than clean it up, i’m posting as is.

i’m currently using vmware player to run a virtualized winxp under ubuntu on my dell latitiude d620. i’ve tried to migrate as much crap off my winxp install that i can but i still have a vmware image file that is almost 10gb. i really want a 2gb winxp image so it’s a lot easier to maintain.

i’m also not sure if i want to use vmware player, qemu, or virtualbox. over at the ubuntu forums, out of 242 votes virtualbox has over 50% of the votes. hrm, i guess i’ll try virtual box then.

ubuntu virtualization poll
VMware		80	33.06%
VirtualBox		130	53.72%
QEMU		32	13.22%

ubuntu virtualization links:
http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17531
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsXPUnderQemuHowTo
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareEquivalents
http://www.osalt.com/

p.s. i’ve gotten my vmware image down to 6gb, but i really need to create another vmdk vmware image ( shooting for something that can be burnt on a dvd so ~ 4gb ) and use g4l to copy my current vmware image to the newly created image. shrinking a vmware image isn’t as easy as you think it would be… sdelete & JkDefrag are helpful utils you’ll need to help you shrink a vmdk image.

right now, the only reason i’m using a virtualized winxp is for:

• outlook (boo.. hiss. boo!)
• tmobile wing activesync
• sysadmin java programs & apps that require internet explorer
• ubuntu’s nm-applet stomps on the resolv.conf [ launchpad ]
• issues configuring nm-applet-openvpn (manual openvpn works though)

most of the windows specific things i can offload to a virtual machine running on my work network. the archive email i’m still trying to figure out though, i’ve never really been good at going back through old email and seperating the cream from the  noise. the noise from my work group’s default alias has been piped into a new ticket system so i can easily take my current outlook psts and crunch them down to a fraction of their size. currently don’t have a lot of meeting requests or other work outlook calendar items, so i can easily just add those manually to google calendar when something comes up. i guess i really don’t need to worry about syncing my personal evolution with my work outlook mail, but i do need to go through and clean up the email from this year and just archive it.

it’s just a lot of different blobs of data… not as difficult to manipulate as i’m making it. i should really stop focusing on how to get it to plan nice in my new environment because some of the data/apps don’t play nice off their native windows systems. syncing the pocketpc shouldn’t take any priority either, i’m definantly switching to an android handset as soon as they are available in Q2 2008.

arg. i finally got vmware converter to convert my winxp install into a virtualized machine… BUT of course since i have a new ‘vmware’ profile in winxp i keep getting this stupid error.

boo. i tried to be cute and tried safe mode and safe mode + networking. the later doesn’t work AT ALL. wtf. i do not feel like talking to either the automated system or some dude that’s gonna grill me about a perfectly legitimate winxp license.

i think i might have missed a step in the p2v conversion. gotta reboot into the windows partition one last time. woot. hopefully it all works after that.