The copier is busted, so I can’t do my note xeroxing prep-work for next semester. I’ve got about 30 minutes until I meet Dr. Satoshi Miura to re-install the gravimeter over in the library (this is part of the ISEA or International geodetic project in SouthEastern Alaska. Check out the recent ISEA AGU abstract about it. That link might even work..)
I’m trying to install xubuntu on my Mac OSX 10.4.8 machine in parallels. It seems really slow right now, but I am going to wait and see. I think it is because ubuntu is trying to repartition the drive (partman is the main process running), while I set parallels to dynamically create and resize the virtual disk. If I give up (it is hung at 15% on the installer), I might try to create a fixed virtual disk file. I might also switch over to a debian netinstall attempt. This all came about because the one app I need in OSX that I just continually battle with is gnucash. So if I have a Linux box running and gnucash is an apt-get away, perhaps life will be a tad bit better. I’ll document the battle in the comments, in case someone else has the same brilliant idea..
I gave up on that, made it a fixed (rather than dynamic) drive in parallels, and then decided to give the Debian 31R4 netinstall disk a shot instead of xubuntu. It all installed just fine, seemed happy, then booted to a kernel panic (just after trying to find the graphics card–something about address out of range or something). Welcome back to Linux desktops! AH! 🙂 Anway, a nice quick power cycle of the virtual machine (I was just about to give xubuntu another shot, but it wanted to boot off the hard drive before the CD).. And I get “welcome to your new debian machine–do we want to install some software?”! So now “we” are apt-getting to our hearts content–I just saw gnumeric go by, and gnucash was on the list. Progress!
Nice! gnucash no problem at all, all networking works smoothly, and the performance is really nice. Check it!
I cranked it from 640×480 up to 1024×768, but can’t quite get it up to 1280×1024 yet… It is good enough, and I’ve apt-gotten all sorts of goodies! It is nice to be native Linux for LaTeX, GMT, etc.. whee!