Other titles: Misadventures In Linux, And Another Kernel Bites The Dust, Synaptic Needs To Be Default, Alright Who Activated The Virtualizer?

So... Been messing around with virtual machines since the weekend, which admittedly is partly why I haven't been here during the day since then. =P Lemme just tell you what I've been doing. =P

Ubuntu:

Saturday: VMware Player's installed, yep, downloaded Ubuntu 11.10, yep. Installing... Two hours later, it finished. After a reboot or two, I decided I'd install the tools so that I could do things. That's when the trouble started. =P I haven't used Linux in like a year, so, well, I kinda forgot some of the commands. >>; So, I had to use help and man like 100 times before I could figure out how to un-tar the package. Eventually, I decided to un-tar it to the main directory, and then it worked(After, I finally figured out the command to do that. =P). And then I couldn't figure out how to activate them. ; However, after about half an hour, I figured out how to activate it, after trying multiple other things. It never dawned on me at first to simply type the name. =P 'course, it wanted Super User, but... Didn't I just say, sudo fixes everything? =P So finally it all worked.

Since it was late, I decided to just leave it, and try and download the game thing I had wanted. And boy is that Ubuntu Software Centre awful. ; It takes like a minute or two to open with 384 MB RAM(Since I can't really spare much more than that, given I have to support my main OS as well), and then you have to go into different categories in the software thing, to find what you want. And then it's not even in alphabetical order. >_^ So, I finally track down the game, which was luckily in Role Playing this time(It wasn't even there back in 10.04). Install it. About 10 minutes later, since the thing's slow to install, I finally get that Software Centre closed. Go to the dash, which is really hard to navigate until you figure out the tricks to finding everything, and load the game up. Yeah, that's the next problem I had; it just continually froze on me. Of course, at that point, I hadn't found the Software Monitor, so I could only close it by logging out. Uninstalled it, and decided to just tyr again the next day.

Sunday: Oh boy. So, I got up, went back on the VM, everything worked perfectly. Then I decided to try Konquest, since it'd been a few years since I played that last. It installed fine, no problems. Launched fine. However, it ate up CPU at times as well, which, given the constant Unity panel it uses as the dash thingy on the side, wasn't really helpful, and it did freeze up a time or two, but overall worked. But then I tried that new media player they put on... Banshee I think it is? That took like 2 minutes to load when Konquest was open, and I didn't try after. However, when I tried to play a song, it was 'playing' it... But, you could tell it was having trouble playing it, since you only got like seconds of song compared to 30 seconds of dead air. =/ So, I closed that, went through part of a game of Konquest, but I had set the place to be way too open, so it was taking too long. Tried a second game, and epic failed as I lost in like the 10th round, and it then froze permanently on me. 0_o I decided to close that then, and try other things.

That's when I headed back to that other game, again. Tried to download it again, and once again it worked perfectly downloading and installing. But actually running it? Nope. Epic failed once again. It's like it couldn't read the server list correctly or something... Though it might be related to the theme it was using... I've had a few problems in it freezing on other versions of it when I change it's theme to be one that's not epic fail. So, I closed that, and tried again multiple times. Same result. I even tried to download one of the other versions that I was almost certain would work; but it wouldn't even configure so I could compile it. xD That's when I uninstalled it. Unlike the night before, which had given me tons of trouble since the Software Centre's uninstallation tool is very hard to work with, it actually uninstalled properly. So, I checked to make sure I even had GTK. I seemed to, but again, the Software Centre is fail, especially with finding stuff. So it wasn't really much help. However, in searching for that, I finally found the Synaptic Package Manager, and installed that without a second's hesitation. Once it was installed, and I launched it, I found the GTK stuff near-instantly. =P Tried to install the game through that as well, but it simply gave the same result, much to my disappointment, which leads me to think there was either no RAM left at all for the game at 384 MB(With the OS also running), or the current version just has some breaking glitch when running on my fail computer, on Ubuntu 11.10, at 384 MB RAM. =P

So, that's when I tried to move the VM onto my shiny new external Hard Drive. And to compound my day of fail, even that wouldn't work. Eventually, it was found out that since the drive used a FAT(32?) filesystem, it wouldn't support the 20 Gib Database file the VM needed. So, I had to delete the VM anyway. Wasn't too worried about it, since I wanted to start over anyway, so I deleted the stuff, and after waiting about an hour for the latest version of Knoppix to download, I used that as a base.

Knoppix:

Sunday: Well, I must say, this got off to a much better start. Since it's intended as a live CD, it loaded pretty much near-instantly, aside from the obvious boot sequence. But still faster than Ubuntu. =P And that speed just transitioned into the actual OS navigation, as everything was much faster than having to wait 30 seconds for stuff to load(Like the Home Folder) on Ubuntu. This was pretty much instantaneous. And to boot, Synaptic was actually default, as it should be. Didn't have any games or such pre-loaded, unlike what I remember, but I don't really care about that. Went to the package manager, spent a little time to figure out how to get it to show the packages that weren't simply pre-installed, and then downloaded the game again, albeit a slightly earlier version. SUCCESS! It actually loaded, though I quickly broke it again by trying to change the layout, and then spent a long time to try and find out where it's data folder was located. After combing the disk, and finally finding and deleting the glitched settings file, I finally got into play, and while it did seem to run slower than if it was actually a live disk(Since it's only tapping into not even half of the RAM that should be available), it indeed worked. So I played that for a while.

That's when I tried to install it to the Hard Drive. Oh boy. ; Well, for the most part, it worked alright. It indeed created a new partition, and then installed to that. Even though that took like half an hour. But then it rebooted. Not a problem typically, right? It's just a reboot? *Sighs* Remember that third title I suggested? Another Kernel Bites The Dust? Yeah, that's what happened here. =P Though I didn't know it then, all I saw was it taking like half an hour to boot, which wasn't normal. I simply shut it down, though, since it was like 10:30 then.

Monday: Wow. I quickly checked everything I needed to, and then I booted up my VM again. It just did the exact same thing, which made me wonder what was going on. So, after a couple tries, and reboots, I tried to manually boot it. Which, is a VERY bad idea when you have no clue what you're doing in that command line interface. I had no clue where the kernel thing was located, nor did I have a clue what half those other options were. The one command I became very familiar with was 'reboot'. =P After a little searching, and a weird place to look, I finally found the kernel. Tried a different one to start, but that just returned an error and kicked me back to the boot screen. So, I just changed it back. And then I tried to type that in the manual boot screen. That's when the fun started. It finally realized I had found a kernel, and when I hit boot, it worked. However, that's also when the reason for it freezing up became apparent. As it was loading everything, it suddenly paused, and started flashing caps and scroll lock on and off on my keyboard. Which seemed odd, so I read some of the text. 'Kernel panic'. Of course. ; So, I tried the other kernel file i saw. Same result. *Sigh* So, I just deleted that VM. Take three!

... Of course, I haven't tried to re-install that again, as I have no clue what partitioning and boot stuff to use, as seemingly the defaults are fail for this. =P Also, take note that I have nothing else on this VM, which is likely why it's been working perfectly for me since that, because it's just a 'CD' running over a seemingly empty Hard Drive. =P Just mentioning, because I can't do something like put a partition on it from Windows; because to the VM; there is no Windows. Like there is no spoon, or the cake is a lie.

sudo edit

sudo rmv italics

sudo fix italics

See? Fixes everything! =P