the corner office : tech blog

So, downstairs, the new gaming-spec Dell, which with Windows 7 is more sluggish than the old Acer, running XP, now consigned to the spare room. And for development work, I'm pretty much sticking with the Acer. Now that I'm the only one using it, I'm slowly building up the energy to re-install Linux on the spare partition (extra-slowly now that my right hand is in a cast). The existing Ubuntu installation is going - thanks Mr Shuttleworth for many years of a great OS, but I'm not sure if I care for where you're taking things.

Enter Linux Mint, and in particular, the LXDE edition. Still Ubuntu based which is nice, but lighter and a traditional feel. I'm still using a years-old version of VMware which powers the wee server exposing the Acer's ext3 partition (via samba), database and source code repos, but decided to give Mint a test drive using VirtualBox. VirtualBox has come a long way since I last tried it, and it's all working so well and seamlessly that I'm wondering whether I should just stay with XP and do all my Linuxey stuff virtually. Very tempting.

I'm impressed with two excellent pieces of software.

Update: two blue screens later, which I'd suspect is down to raw partition access, I'm thinking VMware isn't totally out of the running.