Windows XP Virtualization

So I have this partition with Windows XP installed on it, which I mainly use to sync and backup my iPhone (yeah yeah... closed, proprietary... but it's still a pretty gadget!), and since it's been going BSOD on me right on boot-up (i.e. I can't even log in!), I've decided that it might be a good idea to try and run it in a more controlled environment.

In the Ubuntu forums, I found this thread a while back, and decided to try it. Now, I have a SATA II drive, and the tutorial said the it might not work woth SATA drives, but I thought what the heck... it's not working anyhow, worst case scenario - it won't work!

The tutorial is for VirtualBox version 1.6, which is pretty old - the current version at the date of writing is 2.1.2, so I downloaded that version. And what do you know! it has support for SATA :)

Most of it went pretty well, except for the part where I had to change the drivers for the disk controller... since I couldn't boot into Windows, so I just skipped that part, and hoped for the best.

Almost everything works fine:

• It boots
• I can log in
• Sound
• Internet access
• VirtualBox extensions work (I'm not going to boot directly into it...)
• USB*
  

But it's very slow... I suspect it's the hard disk controller drivers, but I still have to experiment with that.

Also, for some reason, Windows seems to think it has USB 1 ports only! when in fact, I don't have any USB 1 ports on my system... only USB2. I'll have to check up on that. Maybe VirtualBox doesn't support it, or I'm doing something wrong.

But for now, I have a working Windows XP installation running in a virtual machine, and I still cannot sync/backup my iPhone (I hope nothing bad happens to my phone while I figure things out)

[edit: forgot the links to VirtualBox]

Follow-up on the wireless network card

After some digging around the net, it seems that I can't use the drivers supplied with the card! These are 32-bit drivers, and I'm using a 64-bit distribution, so there's no way around it.

Searching through the manufacturer's site for a 64-bit version of the drivers, I couldn't find anything (not even for other devices!)...

I heard that Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) has support for more network cards, so I figured that upgrading might help. But it didn't seem to matter much - the network card is still non-operational.

So I guess I'll be doing a clean install of the 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 distribution. Then at least I'd be able to use the supplied drivers.

LevelOne WNC-0301

bought a new wireless card, which should work using NDISwrapper [click^*]... but for some reason it just doesn't agree with my Ubuntu 8.04 installation.

doing a dmesg | grep ndis I found the following:

[   45.753384] ndiswrapper version 1.52 loaded (smp=yes, preempt=no)
[   46.323490] ndiswrapper (check_nt_hdr:150): kernel is 64-bit, but Windows driver is not 64-bit;bad magic: 010B
[   46.323495] ndiswrapper (load_sys_files:210): couldn't prepare driver 'net8185'
[   46.323823] ndiswrapper (load_wrap_driver:112): couldn't load driver net8185; check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver'
[   46.337517] usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper

seems I have to find me some 64-bit drivers!

* this is a rather detailed guide, short version in Ubuntu (8.04):

1. sudo apt-get install ndisgtk ndiswrapper-common ndiswapper-utils-1.9


2. get drivers for wireless card (you'll be needing the .inf and .sys files)


3. sudo ndisgtk and point it to the location of the dirvers

first post

well, it's a new year... last night, during my third serving of alcohol, I had this idea about creating a blog.

Since I'm sober now, and I still don't think it's a bad idea, I've decided to go for it! :)

Anyhow, a bit about me and what I will/might be blogging about:

I'm a programmer at Amdocs, I knew that I wanted to program when I wrote my first program, many years ago back in school. It was a simle LOGO program, and all it did was to draw a few simple shapes on the screen.

I love using GNU/Linux, so I'll probably be posting most about my experiences with it. I've been using GNU/Linux since 1997, when a friend of mine helped me install Slackware on my 133MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM!
A week later, I decided that I wanted to try installing it myself. That was when I started using Debian GNU/Linux. Since then, I've tried a few other distributions (Red Hat, Puppy, Mandriva, Gentoo, ... and probably others I don't remember), but I always came back to Debian. And then something wonderful happened... Ubuntu 5.04 - Haory Hedgehog was released! It was Debian-based, so I was right at home, and it felt simple, and looked really pretty! So I've been using it ever since :)

Ok, enough for my first post.