Today it’s President’s Day, it’s raining, and the kids are off this week. So naturally I am goofing around with my PC. I’ll head to the basement soon to play with the kids but first I want to setup something on my workstation.
My main workstation is a Dell 700 720 with a Core 2 Duo and a pair of nvidia GeForce 7900’s.
It’s a great machine and I am currently playing Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and a couple of others. But I really enjoy working in Ubuntu. I just don’t want to give up the games.
I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my workstation and enabled hardware-assisted Virtualization. I captured an Ubuntu 7.10 iso on my disk and began running the installation. I created a disk for the virtual PC and began the installation.
I knew that once the live CD booted up I would have problems with the X11 driver. So I ctrl-alt-F1 and ran “sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. I replaced the “Depth 24” with “Depth 16”, saved the file, did alt-F7 to switch back to the X11 screen and then alt-backspace to restart the X11 server.
The mouse still did not work. Google is my friend and I learned that when I boot the CD press F6 and append the following to the kernel boot parameters ” i8042.noloop”. The article suggested running the Virtual PC in safe graphics mode but that went very low resolution on me.
Wash, rinse, repeat the “Depth 16” portion. I’m now installing on my Virtual PC 2007 Ubuntu with a color depth of 16 and a working mouse. My system has only 2 GB of RAM but since I upgraded to the XPS 720 motherboard I can go nuts with the 800 Mhz stuff.
Vista 64 with 8 GBs of RAM, that sounds like a good upgrade.
After the install I modified the /boot/grub/menu.lst to add to the kopt line i8042.noloop as well as to the end of the kernel line. That’s probably not the place to put it but it works for now and I’m going to continue working on it. I’ve just got the networking going and I’m putting on 187 updates since the iso image was created.
