Virtual Machines
What an adventure I’ve had recently. It all started when I learned that an open source Mathematics software called SAGE had been developed by a Mathematics professor in the United States and that it was challenging some of the established products like Mathematica, Maple and MATLAB. The website is here and the download was a 627Mb zipped file that unzipped to a whopping 2.18Gb. That wasn’t the end of the matter however, because in order to run it another program was required called VMWare. This was a 215Mb download from here and introduced me to the notion of a Virtual Machine with its own virtual RAM, hard disk, sound card, network card etc. I immediately thought of running Ubuntu using VMWare but it turned out that I wouldn’t be able to use my existing Ubuntu. Instead I’d have to download a special VMWare-compatible version.
I think it was in the Wikipedia article about Virtual Machines that I stumbled upon Microsoft’s Virtual PC and I learned to my surprise that it was a free 30Mb download. It was an easy install and all I needed to do was to capture my physical DVD drive to use as my virtual DVD drive. I then inserted my Ubuntu disk and installed the operating system onto a virtual machine with 256Mb of RAM and a 16Gb hard drive. Nothing is that easy of course and it turned out that there was a bug that prevented the mouse from working, which was pretty frustrating because everything else was fine. An Internet search revealed a fix to the problem but it meant reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch. After doing that it worked fine and now I can play around with a real, live version of Ubuntu while operating Microsoft Vista at the same time.
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