vbox

A couple years ago I was using vmWare to have linux running on my work laptop.  It did it's job but for some reason felt just clunky enough to where I just ended up using putty terminals instead.  They're light and quick even if a bit featureless and I got accustomed to running emacs without a mouse.  vmWare was one of those things that I installed and didn't want to touch again because I recall it being a little confusing, particularly finding the right product.  They had a bunch, they all required some kind of registration, it wasn't always clear to me which one I was to download.  Eventually I just gave up.  Not that it was bad, just that it wasn't something I needed to spend time on.

A year ago or so I saw some positive press on Virtualbox (prior to Sun being acquired by Oracle).  I gave it a whirl (coinciding with my new laptop purchase).  My impressions were quite positive. It seemed less complicated.  Of course, the REAL reason I gave it a try was because the reports were that there was finally a VM that could run COMPIZ.  Back when I had my own Gentoo workstation at the office, I grew addicted to Beryl/Compiz.  It made work just a little more fun, and I'm also one of those people who's productivity is increased by multiple desktops.  But if I'm gonna stare at a screen all day, why not make it cool too right?  (and I get a little pleasure from the wow factor in other people who saw me at work)

Anyhow since then I've been using it more often.  I normally work on remote servers because I have little choice (that's where the data is) but for development It really helps to do things locally, especially when I'm on the road with intermittent internet access, or when I know that the servers will be down, or when they're running really slow, etc. etc.  Mostly though, I prefer having a full environment than just putty terminals.

So for months, I've been seeing this popup whenever I launch vbox that there is 4.0.4 out but I never made the upgrade.  Upgrades terrify me because when it's important, something almost certainly will go wrong.  But finally the mood struck me and I gave it a try.  And it failed!  It was start installing and then hang there doing nothing.  Meanwhile, it uninstalled my old version.  Horrors!!!  Panic!!!  Did a bunch of searches, tried several things, had to reboot countless times (primarily because installing vbox turns off the network, very annoying).  After many hours of following what turned out to be the wrong post, I found another that simply stated you turn off DropBox.  Boom! It worked quickly and cleanly.  If I hadn't found that post I don't know what I would have done.  I completely forgot about DropBox, it auto starts (another rant) and it interferes with the network changes.  It's completely unrelated to vbox so I don't know how long it would have taken for me to make the connection.  It never fails, something always goes wrong.

As I mentioned I have some trepidation about upgrading software but I figured that since the upgrade was already months old it might be safe, and what's more I finally got around to moving my home directory to it's own partition; making me a little more cavalier about making OS modifications now.  I used to simply let the home directory exist along with the OS because with limited drive space I've been burned before about how big to make each partition.  But that's less of a concern now so I finally got around to it.  Need to do it on my other computers now tho.  Now that I have it, I can finally play around with other linuxera with more impunity and vbox makes that a lot easier to do.