VirtualBollocks.

[reddragdiva]

Current geek toy is VirtualBox, which is a usable-quality (unlike QEMU or Bochs) virtual machine (so you can run another computer inside your computer) that happens to be GPLv2 free software. And so happens to be in Ubuntu. And its arse is nothing like as fat as VMware's.

You need to hack /etc/group around and the Windows drivers are proprietary (but then, so is Windows). But Windows 2000 runs relatively efficiently. I can play MP3s in the virtual machine over the network from the house server better than I can in KDE. o_0

So now I just have to work out what on earth I would actually use this crawling horror for.

(May I just say that anyone who ever, EVER suggests Linux is painful should be forced to install Windows 2000 or XP and get all the updates and drivers installed and working by hand. Three hours of download install reboot download install reboot.)

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That's not painful; that's tedious. RPM hell, that's painful.

[reddragdiva]

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get upgrade and HAHA.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Upgrading is the easy part. Removing a package, that's balls.

[untermensch.livejournal.com]

dpkg --purge [--force-depends] package

:)

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

RPM? What's that, like a new kind of DLL in Vista or something? I just use Linux.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

"Painful" is trying to get Linux sound working properly in a variety of apps. So many different libraries and interfaces, getting them all to play nice together on random generic hardware is a bit of a black art.

May I suggest you install a copy of AutoGK in that VM and try it as an alternative to AcidRip? You'll need DVD Decrypter as well to get data off the shiny spinny things.

[reddragdiva]

Thankfully setting VirtualBox to ALSA worked. I'm sure PulseAudio will unite all previous sound interfaces, just like ALSA did.

"Painful" is trying to use apps designed by programmers who think an "intuitive" interface is one with a button for every command-line switch (like AcidRip).

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

VirtualBox also works fine if you point it at PulseAudio, dunno about whatever comes with Ubuntu but the version downloadable from Sun includes explicit support for it.

AutoGK hides most of the fiddly bits with video encodes. You can tell it how big you want the output to be, whether to use DivX or XviD, whether to use subtitles, and where to write the files. It then figures everything else out for itself. It'll run Just Fine in a VM, though I'm not sure about the DVD decryption stage -- I've done it in a VMware VM but had to enable the "exclusive" and "direct" options for the DVD drive.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

I like Handbrake for DVD rippping -- http://handbrake.fr/

Convert to h.264 and AC3 audio -- and you'll never go hungry again.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Sometimes you have to choose between an evil corporate overlord or a bunch of nerds whose innate pedantry still doesn't seem to

Then again, the last time I tried mucking around with Debian (probably made a mistake with that, but that was the recommendation I got before whatever little anarcho-syndicalist committee belched forth Ubuntu) was so painful that I decided to go back to stabbing myself with the corporatised fork instead.

This is from someone cut their teeth juggling 20 floppies to get SLS Linux working on a 486.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Last couple of XP installs I did weren't too bad - I mean, nobody expects support for five year old video hardware out of the box, right?

[untermensch.livejournal.com]

Last weekend I pulled of a heroic data recovery from a laptop with 2xHDDs in a RAID 0 volume whose Vista install decided to cannibalise itself. To do so required getting XP to install on and boot from an IDE drive (which Microsoft says is impossible), and then scouring the 'net for the appropriate AHCI SATA RAID drivers for XP, which was a mean task considering every person who has tried the same has failed, as Dell has only released Vista drivers and the chipset is quite rare. The whole process took about 24 hours solid.

The moral of the story is the newer the hardware the less likely it is to be supported :)

OT: What audiophiles drink:

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/new-arrivals/magic-pourer/index.html

Re: OT: What audiophiles drink:

[reddragdiva]

Oh dear Lord. With credit!

[lproven.livejournal.com]

The last time I wrote that Linux was quicker and easier to install than Windows, I not only got a dozen outraged replies calling me a liar, a few of them asked how I could claim such a palpable untruth.

So I explained the patching and the drivers and the apps and the repatching.

Some went quiet and went away. Some went "but but but that's different."

All, though, were bloody idiots.

[reddragdiva]

And of course:

"Command line!"
"Registry."