Yesterday I finally had the time to continue moving to my new computer and the Ubuntu Linux installation on it. It was easier than I expected. I decided to put my old Windows installation in a VM and use it on the new Linux box, instead of burning all my data on DVDs and moving it bit by bit. I decided to go with a VMWare based solution because of two reasons:
- VMWare Player appeared on the list of software in the Add/Remove manager in Ubuntu. I thought this meant I can install it from there, but I was wrong. I had to go to VMWare’s website and download a command line based installation.
- VMWare Converter, which turned out to be a great tool (more about this in the next paragraph.)
VMWare Converter can take a physical machine and make a VM out of it that you can run inside VMWare Player. That’s exactly what I did. My entire Windows installation, complete with all the programs and user data, became a 10.5GB VM in 7 separate files, which I copied to my home directory on the Linux machine. There was a scary moment when I found out I can’t install VMWare Player from the Add/Remove manager, but the command line installation went smoothly (albeit with many questions I wasn’t sure about the answers to, but chose the default, which turned out fine.)
Another scary moment was when my (legal) Windows XP installation told me, while running inside the VM, that I need to activate the copy of Windows because the hardware changed. I was afraid it would lock up, but it managed to activate itself over the Internet without any trouble. An amusing thing is that Windows works faster in a VM inside the new computer than it did installed natively on the old one. It’s really an old computer. One thing I didn’t manage to set up is shared folders between the VM and the Linux host. It’s supposed to be easy, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work.
I got Flash to work on Firefox as well. I was afraid I’d have to install Firefox 32 bit just to get Flash to work (like many websites suggest.) Luckily I continued searching and as it turns out (from this bug report) in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 64 bit, if you ever get this message after installing Flash but it still doesn’t work:
flashplugin-nonfree already installed
Then all you have to do is type the following two commands in the command line:
sudo apt-get remove –purge flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
So now my Linux installation is my main computer. I still have to:
- Transfer all the user data from the Windows VM (emails, pictures, documents.)
- Set up MySQL server and Apache so that I can have a development environment for the website (without such an environment I can’t completely dump Windows.)
- Move the hard drive from my Windows machine to the Linux machine. This would be the final step, after which I’m putting an old hard drive in the old computer, installing Hebrew Windows and giving the computer to my mom.
- Make sure I have a decent backup solution that wouldn’t suck like my current burn-the-data-to-DVDs-every-few-months solution