Windows 7 as Host: Choosing a Virtualization Program

I had previously used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in a virtual machine (VM) on Ubuntu Linux.  Now I was switching from Ubuntu to Windows 7.  I had found that WinXP was actually more stable in a VM than when running natively.  I also didn't want to go cold-turkey from WinXP; that is, I wanted to continue to have access to my familiar programs and other arrangements until Win7 felt natural.

I couldn't use my Linux-based copy of Workstation on Win7, so I would have to come up with a new virtualization tool.  I didn't want to shell out for another copy of Workstation.  I wondered if there were good free alternatives that would let me run WinXP in a VM on Win7.  I did a search, viewed some random remarks, and came up with some comparisons of several leading virtualization products.  These comparisons confirmed my sense that the main free contenders were Microsoft Virtual PC, Sun Virtual Box, and VMware Player.

Looking first at comparisons against Virtual PC, one reviewer suggested that Virtual PC was easiest for a purely Windows setup like mine, Virtual Box was more oriented toward Linux hosts, and Player was the most popular.  Another reviewer said that VirtualBox and VMware Workstation (not necessarily Player) had more advanced customization options, such as unity mode, snapshots, USB drive support, the ability to move VMs, and the option of allocating two CPU cores.  Another reviewer, comparing VirtualBox and Virtual PC, found that Virtual PC had the advantage of presumably greater Microsoft compatibility, better disk technology, a free WinXP license, support for Win7 and Vista guests, lower resource consumption on host, and easier physical drive configuration.  He favored VirtualBox nonetheless, though, because he found that VirtualBox supported more operating systems (especially Linux and Mac), supported 64-bit guests and multiple processor cores (i.e., better performance) as well as multiple kinds of virtual disks, and offered snapshots, unity mode, remote display, and 3D support.  Another reviewer, offering a video demonstration, said Virtual PC was better in supporting Aero, automatic login, USB device sharing, and integration into Windows Explorer (which he actually disliked), but favored VirtualBox for running on multiple operating systems and for other reasons stated by some of the other reviewers.  In short, there seemed to be some consensus that Virtual PC was the worst of the three.  I did a quick search to see if perchance Microsoft had upgraded it recently.  It didn't seem to have done so.

At about this point, I realized that probably I could continue to use my copy of VMware Workstation for Linux to make virtual machines containing WinXP, and use those in Player on a Win7 host.  So I wasn't sure if I should be comparing VirtualBox against VMware Player or Workstation.  I found both sorts of comparisons.  In what were probably the most professional reviews I saw, PCMag rated Workstation 6.0 (I was now using 7.1) at 4.5 stars, versus 3.5 for Virtual Box.  (At this writing, Workstation was on sale for $142 (with a free copy of VMware ThinApp Starter Edition thrown in) instead of its usual $189.)  One of the reviewers cited above encountered freezes in VirtualBox, and found that Workstation was the best performer.  She reported large differences in size between Workstation (~500MB) and the other two (~40MB), presumably reflecting more sophistication but also more resource demands in the former.  Another reviewer also compared VirtualBox against VMware Player.  He found VirtualBox faster in the guest, less burdensome for the host, and better in snapshots; but inferior in networking, and in support for Windows Aero, USB, 64-bit CPUs, and hardware virtualization.  Another reviewer favored VirtualBox because (s/he claimed) it was free, open source, more frequently patched, used fewer resources, ran faster, resumed faster, and was able to use its competitor's VMs.  The remark (above) that VirtualBox was more oriented toward Linux hosts was echoed in my own previous look at VirtualBox, where I cited a source indicating that VIrtualBox did far better in Linux hosts.

It seemed that VMware was ahead of the game or at least a solid contender in most ways, but that it was not a clear and obvious winner, especially when price was considered.  Having already played with VirtualBox a bit, and having learned VMware's approach, it seemed that I should start with whatever I could pull together from Workstation and Player.  If I ran into performance issues with a Windows host as I had with an Ubuntu host, maybe then it would be time -- especially before investing another $140-190 in VMware -- to give VirtualBox a more extended look, and that might also be true if I reached the point of having to build another WinXP VM from scratch.  I could do that in VirtualBox, and in that event might find it a relatively problem-free alternative.

Before proceeding to try VMware Player in a Windows host with my existing VMware VMs that I had created using Workstation on a Linux host, I looked into the recollection that VMware Server was also free.  Posts in one thread said that Server could create VMs too, but was not as fast as Player and did not have as many capabilities for an already existing VM.  I found EasyVMX.com and gathered that there were other ways to make VMs as well, though there didn't seem to be a point in doing so unless if I had been short of system resources to run Server.

I discovered at this point that VMware offered another free virtualization product, called the VMware vSphere Hypervisor, or ESXi for short.  This one differed from the others in being a "bare metal" hypervisor -- that is, not requiring a host at all.  In other words, I would install this first, before installing the operating system, and then I could install one or more operating systems, each in its own VM, without devoting resources to non-virtualization services being provided by the host (though it began to sound like ESXi would only run one operating system at a time).  In the long run, this sort of thing could be the end of dual-booting, and I could have Ubuntu, Win7, WinXP, and any other operating systems ready to run as needed, including those already packaged in free VMware appliances.  ESXi was said to offer better performance than Server.  It wasn't clear that it could be made to work on a PC as distinct from a dedicated server, though.  VMware's Hardware Compatibility Guide was not going to provide information for my puny little AMD Athlon (as distinct from Opteron or Xeon) CPU.  Another source made it sound like a home PC could run it, though.  Managing ESXi seemed to be the sticking point; for example, VMware's ESXi Management Kit cost $995.  Veeam offered a free ESXi manager, but there appeared to be a network administrator type of learning curve involved here.  Some people seemed to be using a minimal Linux to manage it.  It also sounded like there might be an ESXi manager within ESXi itself.  Apparently part of the reason Server was slower was that it was more user-friendly.  The purpose of the free ESXi seemed to be to get new system administrators into the VMware world and ready to upgrade to more powerful VMware server products.  Apparently there were ways to run ESXi in Workstation in Windows 7, but this seemed like the opposite of a bare-metal approach.  Basically, I liked the idea of a bare-metal hypervisor, but the sparse results I was getting on my searches told me that I was looking into something that was not happening for end users, at least not yet.  It could be done, but servers remained something that other people used for other purposes.

I wasn't quite ready to give up on the idea of a bare-metal hypervisor for home use, so I did another search.  Brad Maltz gave me a nice chart to compare the options.  His bottom line:  "You can expect plenty of hurdles and years for perfecting this technology, but the client-side hypervisor is the catalyst to many greater things to come."  My goal for the coming months, it seemed, would be to continue to focus on the usual multi-layered host-virtualization-guest scenario.  For that purpose, I would start with VMware Player and my existing VMs.  If I needed to adjust them, I would try to do so in either Workstation for Linux or Server.  If I had to build a new VM, I would consider doing it in VirtualBox as an alternative to Workstation or Server.

Using VMware Workstation; Time to Try VirtualBox?

A year earlier, I had tried using VirtualBox in place of VMWare Workstation as a virtualization solution.  I wondered whether I should try it again now.

I ran a search for recent comments and reviews.  A number of people had good things to say about VirtualBox.  It sounded like it had been progressing well in the year or so since Oracle bought it.  Rob Williams at Techgage listed some pros and cons.  A month after my previous try, an InfoWorld review said that VirtualBox had been gaining ground really quickly.  More recently, just a few months before this post, ZDNet's Jason Perlow did a comparison of VirtualBox 3.2 and Workstation 7.1.  Perlow said this:

In virtually all of our tests, [Workstation] matched or exceeded the performance of Oracle VM VirtualBox. Windows XP and Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit performance was extremely snappy, and close enough to native that when we were running it in full screen mode, we couldn’t perceive the difference between “On the metal” and virtualized on our test system.

That reminded me that, once again, I was looking at a "professional" review by someone who comes in, tries the software on a fresh system, does their benchmarks, and then closes the doors and turns out the lights -- not sticking around for a few months, that is, to see how the thing holds up in everyday usage and abusage.  Perlow admitted that VirtualBox, not VMware, was his workaday tool.  But for me, by contrast, VMware Workstation 7.1 was huffing and puffing, and it had never approached the performance of a native Windows XP installation.  (Perlow also noted that VirtualBox performed well in his tests, but failed miserably when using Windows rather than Linux as the host.  I was not concerned about that; I would be using Ubuntu Linux as my host.)

These sources reminded me of the issues that had become par for the course in my use of VMware Workstation.  There were quite a few, as readers of my many posts on VMware would know.  One, as just noted, was the slowness.  There were things I couldn't do in VMware, like video editing, because of the poor performance.  Another kind of problem was hardware-related.  While I had worked through many of those issues, as noted in previous posts, there were always others.  VMware would recognize only some USB devices, including my multifunction printer/scanner, and/or would recognize them imperfectly (i.e., permitting only some functionality).  VMware would slow to a crawl if I tried to get it to use multiple processors.  It had originally seemed to handle at least a couple of open VMs at the same time, but more recently would become unusably slow if I had more than one VM open.


On the other hand, I knew that a switch to a new virtualization platform would require some downtime and many hours of tinkering, as well as some lost work in the process of making mistakes and learning how it worked.  I was also curious about what was going to happen with VirtualBox.  When Oracle bought Sun in 2009, some were predicting that this was awful news for open-source projects like VirtualBox.  It may be.  But Oracle has recently come out with a relatively significant new release of VirtualBox.  Before making the leap, I would like to let more time pass, so as to see whether the naysayers are wrong or whether, instead, Oracle was just cleaning out the closet, putting the last of its in-process improvements into production before marking the VirtualBox product for shelving or sale to some other tech company.

A quick check also suggested that transitioning from VMware to VirtualBox would probably entail creation of new VMs from scratch.  While there are surely countervailing opinions, what I got from the first few hits of a search on the matter leaned toward "the Fat Bloke's First Rule of VM Migration," which he stated as follows:  "Don't, if you can help it. If you can create a new vm from scratch on the new virtualization platform, you probably should."  Wand Weaver likewise said that graphics issues made it "tricky to import existing VMWare machines into VirtualBox."

I had other fish to fry.  I was in no rush to get myself into a new mess, dealing with creation of new VMs for VirtualBox at this point.  It seemed to met that the better strategy was to watch and wait, to see whether VirtualBox (or possibly some other virtualization program) would become the champ or would instead fade away.  This seemed especially advisable since a recent effort to free up some space and relocate the paging file in one of my WinXP VMs seemed to have improved performance.  So before dabbling with VirtualBox again, I decided to see what I could do to improve VMware's performance.

Improving Performance in VMware Workstation 7.1

I reviewed the latest version of VMware's document, Performance Best Practices for VMware Workstation, to see what hardware purchases or sales it would suggest for my situation.  The document consisted of four main sections, pertaining to host system hardware, the host operating system (OS), VMware Workstation and virtual machines (VMs), and guest OSs.  I was particularly interested in information about running Windows XP on an Ubuntu host, since that was the setup I was using.  This post does not say much about Windows host systems.

Section 1:  Hardware

A.  CPUs

1.  Hyperthreading

VMware (p. 7) recommended using a CPU that would support hyperthreading (also called "logical processing").  (The OS and the BIOS would have to support it, and the user would have to make sure it was enabled in the BIOS.)  Patrick Schmid at Tom's Hardware said that the primary benefit of hyperthreading was to permit smoother responsiveness, but that it would not yield noticeable increases in performance otherwise, and certainly would not substitute for having multiple cores in the CPU.  Intel's own writeup of hyperthreading affirmed that responsiveness was a leading benefit.

AMD quoted VMware as saying, “Virtual machines are preferentially scheduled on two different cores rather than on two logical processors on the same core.”  That is, VMware tried to assign different VMs to different CPU cores, if available.  This seemed to imply that AMD CPUs would do better when the number of CPU cores matched or exceeded the number of VMs being run.  But AMD suggested that increasingly complex software (e.g., multithreading in Microsoft Excel 2007) could keep as many as 48 CPU cores busy, even if the number of VMs being run was much lower.

AMD's point in that particular article was that its Opteron CPU, with more cores, could significantly outperform Intel's Xeon, with hyperthreading and fewer cores.  Anandtech's comparison of state-of-the-art Intel and AMD CPUs in March 2010 found, however, that the Xeon did much better than the Opteron.  Recent observations suggested that AMD might be moving toward implementing hyperthreading after all.

A search on Newegg.com turned up 20 Intel CPUs with hyper-threading capabilities, starting at $115 and ranging above $1,000.  (The least expensive Intel CPU listed on Newegg at that point cost $41.)  Anandtech said that the AMD advantage was in terms of price, with good performance at much lower cost.  One Anantech commentator said, "The twelve-core AMD Opteron 6100 and six-core Xeon 5600 perform more or less the same," but suggested that Intel had two advantages at the enterprise level:  RAS (i.e., reliability, availability, and serviceability, including the ability of systems to heal themselves) and licensing.

2.  MMU Virtualization

VMware (pp. 7-8) also expressed a preference for second-generation hardware-assisted MMU virtualization, called rapid virtualization indexing (RVI) or nested page tables (NPT) in AMD processors or extended page tables (EPT) in Intel processors.  (Wikipedia indicated that NPT was used during development, but that RVI was the term currently used.)

VMware found that, in its ESX product, AMD's "RVI provides performance gains of up to 42% for MMU-intensive benchmarks and up to 500% for MMU-intensive microbenchmarks."  VMware found similarly dramatic performance improvements for Intel's EPT, provided the virtualization product made suitable adjustments -- which, VMware said, ESX did.  It was not clear that the same could be said for VMware Workstation.  Pending further research, this information made an AMD CPU with RVI the more certain performance boost for an ordinary user of Workstation.

At this writing, neither Newegg nor TigerDirect offered products featuring any of those CPU-related acronyms.  According to Wikipedia, MMU debuted in the third-generation AMD Opteron, and at Intel EPT debuted in the Nehalem architecture.  (That same Wikipedia page said that RVI was supported, at VMware, in ESX Server 3.5 and later -- and also, interestingly, in Oracle's VirtualBox 2.0 and later.)  At Newegg, at this writing, Opterons were available in the range of $190-1,300 (and would require motherboards in the $200-600 range).  The Nehalem appeared in the Core i7 line of CPUs, available at Newegg for $290-1,140.  (Newegg didn't list a canned search option for Nehalem or Westmere cores.)

I looked at some historical prices to get a rough idea of how processor pricing trends worked.  On the Intel side, the Core 2 Duo E6700, introduced in July 2006 for $530, was apparently available (in some form) for $316 in June 2007, around $212 in July 2008, $130 in September 2009, and $95 in July 2010.  These values suggested that prices dropped dramatically (perhaps 40%) in the first year, less dramatically (perhaps 20% of the original price) in the second year, and likewise (perhaps 10% of the original price per year) over the next couple of years.  (Intel apparently discontinued the E6700 (presumably meaning that manufacturing ceased) in February 2008.  At that time, the chip may have been selling for somewhat less than half the original price.)  On those data, the rate of discount from the original price was cut in half in each succeeding year, during the first several years of the product's life.

I took a particular interest in one of the Core i7 CPUs at the bottom of Newegg's list, pricewise.  The Core i7-870 that was available for $290 in July 2010 debuted at a list price of $562 in September 2009, representing a 49% drop in less than a year.  The data from the preceding paragraph suggest that the consumer might anticipate another 25% reduction from the original price (i.e., half of the previous year's price cut), for a price of around $145, by summer 2011.  On this basis, it seemed to me, personally, that I might thus save myself $150 (plus whatever price drop might apply to the corresponding motherboard) if I waited to implement these particular suggestions for VMware performance until summer 2011.

Intel described the Core i7-870 as having both hyper-threading and VT-x virtualization technology.  But VMware (p. 8) indicates that VT-x is the first-, not the second-, generation of virtualization technology.  Its potentially outdated status is reflected in a VirtualBox recommendation that VirtualBox has been designed to perform better without enabling this sort of hardware-assisted CPU virtualization at all.  As of late 2008, someone in a VMware Community post considered VT-x a major step forward, but noted that hardware-assisted virtualization in Workstation 7 was supported only on 64-bit hardware.  I did have 64-bit hardware, so that was not a concern for me.

But which Intel CPU would I have to be tracking, if I wished to get into the second-generation Intel EPT (or AMD RVI) MMU virtualization technology?  Intel characterized EPT as an "extension" of VT-x and, to revert to the (Wikipedia) observation offered above, that extension was apparently to be found on the Nehalem (45nm) or Westmere (32nm) architectures.  Evidently not all Core i7 CPUs employed that architecture, then, else the i7-870 would have it.  (I was not alone in being confused about this.)  It seemed that what I was looking for might be, in Intel-speak, VT-x2.  Further searches for insight led to a simple request for a list of VT-x2 features implemented in various Core i7 CPUs -- to which Intel provided the bizarre response that, no, actually, it was hard to provide any such list, and a pointer to lengthy software developer's manuals.  Indeed, it seemed that VMware was somewhat behind the curve:  while it was talking about EPT (as implemented in VT-x2), Intel was meanwhile moving on to VT-d and other technologies.  Then again, another Intel source seemed to say that VT-d was an older technology.

The message seemed to be that I, as a consumer, didn't need to know about this yet.  I decided to try a different approach.  I went back to Newegg's list of Core i7 processors and tried working my way up the list until I found one that did have VT-x2.  After the i7 860 and 870, next on Newegg's list was the 930.  My search regarding the 930 and VT-x2 led to an Intel Virtualization Technology List indicating, that, well, yes, a number of Intel CPUs did support VT-x.  I looked at them individually to see if perchance they supported VT-x2, that information unfortunately not being included in the alleged virtualization technology list.  Bottom man on this list was, again, the 860, and they confirmed that it did support both VT-x and VT-d.  At the top end of the set, we had the 970.  The 970's spec sheet didn't say anything about VT-d, so maybe it was indeed being phased out.  No mention of VT-x2 either; just VT-x.  Following some leads, I came around to the discovery that there was also something known as VT-i, referring to the Itanium processor.  It wasn't helpful information, but at least it was information.

Looking back at that page on the i7-970, I noticed that Intel said, in greyed-out letters, "No Datasheet Available."  But, hmm, did that mean there were datasheets for others on that virtualization technology list?  I tried the 920.  There, they had a "Download Datasheet" link that led to about a dozen Technical Documents.  I started with the 96-page Intel® Core™ i7-900 Desktop Processor Extreme Edition Series and Intel® Core™ i7-900 Desktop Processor Series Datasheet, Volume 1.  But no, according to Acrobat, there were no references to VT-x2 there.  How about VT-x?  Nope.  Alright, then, volume 2?  None!  Well, how about just plain old "virtual"?  Still nothing on what virtualization technology any particular CPU might have.  This was a contrast against another set of technical documents provided on that same page, for the i7-800 series.  Here, I found references to both VT-x and VT-d.  Volume 1 of that datasheet said, on page 29, that the i7-800 series did support EPT.  So that was pretty confusing.

I decided to try the Developer's Manuals.  The description mentioned virtualization only in connection with the Intel® Virtualization Technology FlexMigration (Intel® VT FlexMigration) Application Note and the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual Volume 3B: System Programming Guide.  The Application Note contained several references to VT-x, but did not distinguish it from VT-x2 or VT-d.  Volume 3B of the Software Developer's Manual contained no references to VT- of any type.  Both documents did refer to Virtual Machine Extensions (VMX), and the Manual contained lots of information on how virtualization works.  But I was not able to figure out, from this information, which CPU I should buy.  This was pretty strange, given the conclusion that Intel's whole reason for offering virtualization in only some CPUs was driven by marketing.

It occured to me that perhaps the people at VirtualBox would provide some insight into what they would recommend, if I opted for a VirtualBox-compatible CPU.  A search produced very meager results along these lines.  I went to the VirtualBox website and looked at their documentation.  They said that "the vast majority of today's 64-bit and multicore CPUs ship with hardware virtualization."  No distinction there between VT-x and VT-x2.  They also said, "The biggest difference between VT-x and AMD-V is that AMD-V provides a more complete virtualization environment."  The use of what they called "nested paging" (i.e., more advanced virtualization, apparently what others meant when they referred to VT-x2) could bring a "significant" performance improvement -- of up to 5%.  Five percent!  I was thinking we were talking about the difference between success and failure, and now it appeared this might be just one more incremental improvement.  Nested paging, they said, was standard on Intel's Core i7 (Nehalem) CPUs, and also on AMD's Barcelona CPUs.

I did finally find, at Tom's Hardware, a list of CPUs that would support "XP Mode" Virtualization.  XP Mode was the capability of running a near-perfect emulation of Windows XP within Windows 7 (which would enable people to use older applications on the newer operating system).  In March 2010, Microsoft altered Windows 7 so that it would no longer require hardware virtualization in order to provide XP Mode.  But the Tom's Hardware list dated from a year earlier, so it gave an idea of what Intel CPUs I would need to consider if I wanted hardware virtualization for purposes of improved performance in VMware.  The Tom's Hardware list actually drew from a list posted by Ed Bott on ZDNet.  Ed provided a list of Intel desktop and mobile CPUs.  His desktop list boiled down to the following, which I provide here, in ascending order according to their current prices according to Pricewatch.com (or, failing that, on Newegg or Amazon):

So, bearing in mind that these were approximate prices, a person dead-set on obtaining a virtualization-supporting Intel CPU for less than $100 would have more than a half-dozen to choose from.

It appeared, in other words, that we were no longer dealing in the rarified world of enterprise-level Xeon processors; we humble consumers were treating virtualization as a simple commodity.  Paying more would bring, not necessarily any improvements in virtualization per se, but rather in those other characteristics that people like in their CPUs, including hyperthreading.

In that case, I thought that perhaps I should take a look at AMD, just to be sure that I wasn't blowing off an already affordable option.  If we were forced to accept the simplistic conclusion that you should just be happy knowing you could get some kind of hardware virtualization with any Core i7 CPU, why not price any AMD CPU with AMD-V virtualization?  According to a simple statement from AMD, that meant almost any CPU that I would be looking at.  Here, comparable to the situation with Intel, a Newegg search for any desktop CPU with virtualization technology support gave me AMD Semprons for as low as $37.

I reflected on my current situation.  To improve VMware's performance, I was looking to replace an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU.  But that dual-core CPU, which was hot stuff four years earlier, did support virtualization already.  The question seemed to be, what kind of virtualization?  What they were offering now was AMD-V.  Seeing the amount of time I had already invested in this general line of questioning, I decided I should just assume that it was better than the virtualization of yesteryear, and that having it on a faster CPU would be better still.  It seemed, in short, that I might just upgrade to a somewhat more up-to-date CPU, without worrying much about understanding VMware's hardware suggestions.  VMware (p. 17) said that, if I did have hardware-assisted virtualization in my CPU, Workstation would typically set it up automatically, but there was the option of changing the default in VM > Settings > Hardware tab > Processors > Virtualization engine > Preferred mode.  They also said (p. 26) that, if the system was using MMU, performance would be best if VMI (i.e., software virtualization:  "virtual machine interface") was disabled (VM > Settings > Hardware tab > Processors > VMware kernel paravirtualization).  Mine was grayed out.  I assumed it was something I would have to set when the machine was powered down, or perhaps in root mode ("sudo vmware").  They also said, "No Microsoft operating systems support VMI," but I wasn't sure what the situation would be in the case of an Ubuntu host.

B.  Memory

VMware's recommentation on memory (p. 8) was just to make sure you had enough.

C.  Storage

VMware recommended (pp. 8-9) having enough disk storage space, but also emphasized making sure it was configured correctly.  They mentioned the potential for improved performance from RAID.  Browsing among various sources suggested, generally, that there could be significant performance improvements (and possibly greater performance smoothness) in a RAID 0 setup, where the program files were installed on two (or more) hard drives.  By contrast, it seemed to be generally agreed that a RAID array would make less of a performance difference in the handling of data files.

D.  Other Hardware

VMware offered suggestions about networking and hardware BIOS settings.  These recommendations were worth reviewing for some purposes, but did not seem to require any purchase decisions for my purposes.

E.  Summary

The Hardware section of Performance Best Practices for VMware Workstation left me with the impression that, all other things being equal, VMs will perform better on multiprocessor CPUs, and that hyperthreading is a plus.  I was not entirely able to penetrate the jargon about MMU virtualization; the general conclusion there seemed to be that I should shop for a CPU that supported a relatively recent generation of virtualization technology.  Assuming no bottlenecks due to inadequate RAM or disk storage space, the other main performance recommendation for my purposes was to use a striping RAID arrangement.

Section 2:  Host Operating System

This section contained virtually no relevant suggestions for Linux-based systems.

Section 3:  VMware Workstation and Virtual Machines

VMware said (p. 16) that most applications running in Workstation would perform nearly as well as in native Windows.  For the "small percentage of workloads" that would experience noticeable performance degradation, they had several CPU-related suggestions:

• Don't assign more of a load to the CPU than it can handle.
• Don't assign more CPU cores to a VM than it can use.
• Monitor CPU usage with the Linux "top" program.
• When using a single virtual CPU (vCPU), as I was likely to do, I would get better performance on an UP rather than SMP kernel or hardware abstraction layer (HAL).
• The guest operating system may not switch to the appropriate HAL if the CPU settings change later (p. 27).

They said that Windows operating systems (OSs) newer than XP would use the same HAL/kernel for both UP and SMP installations.  It sounded like that was not the case for WinXP, however.  Microsoft seemed to say that XP would detect the type of system and would install the correct HAL automatically.  They said this:

Microsoft does not support running a HAL other than the HAL that Windows Setup would typically install on the computer. For example, running a PIC HAL on an APIC computer is not supported. Although this configuration may appear to work, Microsoft does not test this configuration and you may have performance and interrupt issues. . . . Microsoft recommends that you switch HALs for troubleshooting purposes only or to workaround a hardware problem.

So the HAL issue seemed to be something to be aware of, in some situations, but not something of practical relevance for a user of Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.  I was curious which HAL was installed on my system, though.  As advised by Kelly's Korner, I went to Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Computer.  On my native WinXP installation, it said ACPI Multiprocessor PC.  In a newly installed WinXP VM in Workstation set to use just one processor and one core, it said ACPI Uniprocessor PC.

VMware (p. 17) said that, if there were other VMs or programs running in the background, performance of a VM in the foreground would be noticeably better if the settings were changed in Workstation (i.e., not in any particular VM).  The advice was to go to Edit > Preferences > Priority, and set "Input grabbed" to High, and "Input ungrabbed" to Normal.  But Workstation gave me no such options.

According to VMware (p. 18), memory-related performance could be affected in several ways.  First, there needed to be enough RAM available to the host system for its own purposes.  My system had 6GB of RAM. Normally, some of that might have gone unrecognized by a 32-bit OS, but I was running a PAE-enabled kernel in 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04.  Ubuntu's Sysinfo reported that my system's total RAM was 6050 mebibytes (MiB) (i.e., about 6.3 billion bytes).  Running Workstation as root (i.e., "sudo vmware"), I had set RAM to 5000MB (by which Workstation presumably meant 5000 x 1 million), leaving more than 1GB of RAM for Ubuntu system operations and whatever programs I might be running in native Ubuntu.  I did not typically run many programs in Ubuntu.  So it seemed that I had allowed enough RAM for the system.  It did occur to me, though, that if I was going to run two distinct sessions of Workstation (as opposed to running two VMs within a single Workstation session), I might want to cut that 5000MB figure in half for each Workstation session.

VMware (p. 18) also advised that the best possible performance would come from requiring Workstation to "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM" (Edit > Preferences > Memory tab > Additiaonal memory).  But they provided this caveat:

NOTE:  The setting described in this section affects only whether or not a virtual machine is allowed to start, not what happens after it starts . . . . After a virtual machine starts, other factors . . . [e.g., change of applications running in the host OS] can change.  In such situations, even if you selected the Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM option, virtual machine memory swapping might still occur.

Since I did most of my work in WinXP, the message to me seemed to be to make sure that there was enough RAM available to the Ubuntu host so that it would not need to be raiding the WinXP guests.  This was consistent with the advice of VMware (p. 19).  They warned particularly about host applications that lock memory.  While it did not apply to my configuration, it was also interesting that they recommended providing no more than 896MB to 32-bit Linux VMs.  To monitor what might be happening, they suggested checking for swap activity in the host and virtual machines.  Doing in this Linux, they said (p. 29), involved running "stat" to dispay the "swap counters," and verifying that both the si and so counters were near zero.  I wasn't sure that their remarks applied to the Ubuntu version of stat, though.  A search turned up a manual page that didn't say anything about swap.  That page said made me think that a different search, focusing on the bash shell, might be more illuminating.  But that turned up nothing.  This really did not seem to be something that the world was blogging about.  Eventually, it appeared that what we were really looking for was vmstat, for which a search produced a couple hundred hits.  Brian Tanaka recommended running "vmstat 5 10" to get an average impression of what was happening on the system.  That didn't work on my system, but the vmstat manpage led me to try "vmstat -a -n 5 10" and that gave me ten indications that si and so were at zero.  So I seemed to be OK there.

VMware (p. 29) also pointed toward a knowledgebase page about "excessive page faults generated by Windows applications."  To see if this was a problem, they suggested using Start > Run > perfmon. I tried that, inside a WinXP VM.  At the top center of the System Monitor graph, I clicked the + (Add Counters) button.  I got an error message:

System Monitor Control
At least one data sample is missing.  Data collection is taking longer than expected.  You might avoid this message by increasing the sample interval.
This message will not be shown again during this session.

I took that to be a statement that my VM was running very slowly, which was not surprising, because I had some very intensive processes going on elsewhere on the computer.  I okayed out of that message and, following the advice on that page fault webpage, proceeded to choose Memory as my performance object, selected Page Faults/sec as my counter, clicked Add.  To get an accurate sample, I considered the advice from their error message:  I clicked on the Properties icon along the top and thought about changing it to "Sample automatically every 2 [or 3] seconds."  But then I decided the one-second sample was ticking along OK, and left it at that.  I was seeing occasional spikes in page faults.  The webpage advised that I could trace this to a particular application by going back to the Add Counters button, making Process my performance object, and then choosing a process of particular interest.  I named one of the very intensive processes I had underway.  Sure enough, I got a line across the top of the graph, indicating that that process was accounting for 90-100 (percent?) of something related to page faults.  Very interesting.  So basically this seemed to be telling me that a process that I knew was soaking up a lot of system resources was, in fact, soaking up a lot of system resources.

VMware (pp. 20-21) discussed ways in which page sharing and memory trimming, intended to promote efficiency, could degrade performance in some instances.  My situation did not seem to fall into those kinds of situations, so I made no adjustments there.  They said that, of course, a local disk drive would be a faster home for a VM than would a network drive.  They provided other tips that they had also indicated somewhere during the VM setup process:  for best performance, use IDE rather than SCSI virtual disks, and preallocated rather than growable, and independent and persistent rather than nonpersistent, and don't use snapshots.  They also (p. 22) offered some suggestions that I hadn't encountered previously:  with the machine powered off, turn off debug mode (VM > Settings > Options tab > Advanced > Settings > Gather debugging information > None).  Other performance tips (p. 23):  run a general availability (GA) version of Workstation, not a debug or beta version.  Make sure you have designated the right operating system (VM > Settings > Options tab > General > Version).  Disconnect your optical drives from your VM until you need them (VM > Settings > Hardware > CD/DVD > uncheck Connect at Power On).

To sum up, section 3 of Performance Best Practices for VMware Workstation did provide a number of practical tips on how to adjust Workstation to run more efficiently.  I was not able to understand and apply all of them, and some (e.g., make sure you have enough RAM) were rather commonsense if not simply redundant.  What I derived from the discussion of cores was that, if I did get a new multicore processor, I should probably experiment, as I had done with my present CPU, to see how it performed with various numbers of cores assigned in Workstation.

Section 3:  Guest Operating System

In this section, VMware led off (p. 25) with suggestions:  make sure you're using a guest operating system that Workstation supports; keep VMware Tools updated; disable screen savers and animations; run backup and antivirus scans in off-peak hours; use a timekeeping utility suitable for the guest rather than the VMware Tools time-synchronization option.  VMware (p. 28) also referred to impacts on efficiency wrought by guest OS "idle loops."  It appeared that tweaking this would be painstaking and would likely yield minor effects.

VMware (p. 30) confusingly said, "It is best to use virtual SCSI hard disks in the virtual machine."  This differed from the installation process, which said (at least at one point) that IDE drives were recommended.  Bizarrely, VMware directed me to a Windows webpage dated December 4, 2001.  More promisingly, VMware also pointed toward their KB9645697 webpage regarding the splitting of large I/O requests into 64KB units.  The gist of their suggestion here was, "Changing the guest registry settings to issue larger block sizes can eliminate this splitting, thus enhancing performance" (p. 30).  The way to do that was sketched out on page 30 (section 2.2.6.1) of a PDF document entitled User's Guide: Fusion-MPT Device Management.  But in any case, this called for an edit of the registry setting HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Symmpi\Parameters\Device\MaximumSGList, and there was no such setting in my VM.

VMware (p. 30) also recommended that, if I did use IDE rather than SCSI virtual disks, I should make sure DMA access was enabled.  To do this, I went into Start > Run > devmgmt.msc > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers > right-click on each channel > Advanced Settings tab > look at Current Transfer Mode.  If it says PIO, toggle the other box, Transfer Mode, between PIO and DMA to get Transfer Mode = DMA and Current Transfer Mode = DMA.

Another performance suggestion (pp. 30-31):  defragmentation.  Start by defragmenting the guest, then use VM > Settings > Hardware tab > Hard Disk > Utilities > Defragment, then defragment the host (not applicable in Linux hosts).  Defragment before creating linked clones or snapshots; afterwards is too late.  I was only creating independent clones, so this did not seem to apply.  Nonetheless, I did have a defrag utility in the WinXP guest.  Defragmentation in VMware itself had always been almost instant, when I had done it.

For network performance, VMware (p. 31) recommended using the VMXNET driver.  They noted, however, that that driver was installed automatically with VMware Tools.  There were a few other network performance suggestions in the document.  Since I was not having networking performance issues, I did not investigate these.  VMware (p. 32) also offered some other concluding, sensible suggestions (e.g., use general-availability software, not beta versions; make sure the latest version of VMware Tools is installed.  Here, again, the advice did not seem to apply.

Summary (for My Purposes) 

A single problem with hardware or software could seriously impair performance.  I did not attempt to scour the Performance Best Practices for VMware Workstation document for every possible thing that might be improved.  Rather, at least in this first pass through it, I was focused on big-picture items that sounded like they might have a great impact on the performance of my system.  The Hardware section led me to think especially about upgrading to a faster multiprocessor CPU, perhaps with hyperthreading, but in any event with a recent generation of virtualization technology, and also to switch to a striping RAID arrangement for my program files (presumably including both the Ubuntu host program partition and the partition on which I kept my VMs.  Other than that, improved performance in VMware Workstation appeared to be a matter of tuning a variety of settings, some of which were becoming obvious as I gained more experience, and some of which would come to mind only as I reviewed the pages of the document and/or of this post.

Using Ubuntu Linux Tools on a Windows Machine

I was using Windows XP SP3 on one machine and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on another.  There were times when I found that Ubuntu (my preferred version of the Linux operating system) could do things that Windows could not.  For example, Ubuntu was much faster and cleaner at moving large numbers of files from one folder to another.  It could also delete files and folders that Windows said could not be deleted.  So I wondered if there was a way to use Ubuntu tools on a Windows installation.  This post discusses that question.

One solution that I already knew about was to set up a dual-boot machine, with Windows XP and Ubuntu coexisting side-by-side.  If you wanted to do something in Ubuntu, you could just shut down Windows and reboot into Ubunt.  This wasn't always the world's most convenient approach.

Another solution that I was currently using was to use both of them together via virtualization.  The virtualization tool I had been using was VMware Workstation.  The way it worked for me was that I installed Ubuntu as my base layer, installed VMware Workstation in Ubuntu, and then installed Windows XP in a virtual (i.e., make-believe) "computer" inside Workstation.  So if I was working in Windows and had something I wanted to do in Ubuntu, I could just go out of the Windows virtual machine for a moment, do my thing in Ubuntu, and then resume work in Windows.  I have written lots of posts on this combination.

A different approach, for those who didn't mind rebooting and didn't want to install Ubuntu or VMware on their Windows machines, was to use an Ubuntu Live CD.  In this approach, you wouldn't reboot into an Ubuntu installation that was already present on your hard drive; you would reboot into an Ubuntu installation that was self-contained on a CD.  The CD image was free, and could easily be downloaded and burned to a CD.  It would be necessary to adjust the BIOS settings (typically, by hitting Del or perhaps F2 while the computer was booting) so as to set the CD (or DVD) drive to be the first in the boot sequence, so that the computer would try to boot from a CD (if you had inserted one into the computer) before moving on to the option of booting from your Windows installation on the hard drive.  Assuming your computer supported it (and most did, by this point), it was also possible to boot Ubuntu from a USB drive instead of a CD.

Those approaches were all familiar to me.  Two other approaches or variations were not.  The first was to use an Ubuntu live CD or USB stick, but to customize it to include Ubuntu programs that were not included on the standard Live CD.  Among the various ways of doing this, two that seemed to draw frequent attention were Reconstructor and Remastersys.  A recent post made it sound like Reconstructor was especially easy to use.  Among other possibilities, these tools would apparently allow the user to create a bootable CD or USB stick that would contain the user's own customized Ubuntu installation.

There seemed to be an endless number of variations and possibilities, some of which would require a lot of work and/or would not work well.  The last one mentioned here involved running Ubuntu, or something like it, on a Windows installation.  In essence, Ubuntu in this approach would function like just another Windows application.  As such, it would tend to be limited by the things that Windows could do.  Portable Ubuntu Tres was a recent example of this approach.

These possible approaches suggested two steps I could take, as described in more detail in separate posts.  One was to update my knowledge of virtualization alternatives to VMware Workstation.  It had been a year since I had last reviewed that topic, and I did not know whether there had perhaps been developments that would give me a superior alternative to VMware.  The other was to try my hand at burning a custom live Ubuntu DVD via Reconstructor or Remastersys.

Other Virtualization Solutions to Play Audio in Ubuntu 9.04

I was running 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I wanted to use IrfanView to listen to .wav files. I had been using it in a VMware Workstation 6.5.2 virtual machine (VM) running Windows XP, but I had lately been having a problem with stuttering audio playback, and my efforts to fix it had failed so far. It was possible that I had not correctly applied all of the suggestions I had encountered, so one option was to go back and review the recommended steps, perhaps by spending a few weeks working through the Comprehensive Video & Multimedia Howto. Since there seemed to be users whose problems persisted after trying those suggestions, however, I thought perhaps I should try out some alternatives. I posted a question about the VMware problem and left it at that for the time being, reserving the option of trying the supposedly surefire solution of installing a second sound card.

One alternative was to try running IrfanView directly on Ubuntu, with the assistance of Wine. I had made some progress on that, but that, too, was still pending resolution of a posted question. Another possibility I had overlooked was to use VMware Player instead of VMware Workstation. Player (a free download) had been installed when I had installed Workstation, and was now available to me in Ubuntu at System Tools > VMware Player. I opened a VM that I had powered down (i.e., that was not merely suspended) in Workstation. I hadn't really used Player before. I was pleased to see that it seemed to run VMs a little faster and simpler than Workstation.

I tried playing audio in VMware Player. To my surprise, both IrfanView and Windows Media Player played .wav audio files just fine, with no stuttering! I had shut down the machine the previous evening and powered it back up again that morning, so I wondered whether the cold restart had made a difference. I started up Workstation, resumed a previously paused VM, and tried playing .wav files in there. Those, too, played fine. Apparently the restart had indeed temporarily fixed the problem - might, indeed, have been the reason why the other solutions I had tried had seemed to work. I had rebooted the system previously, but it now seemed that I simply hadn't left it turned off long enough.

Since the problem seemed to be fixed, I abandoned (at least for the time being) the other possibilities that I had begun to explore. In case I (or someone else) needed them, however, that list of possibilities included the following:

• Perhaps I could successfully run IrfanView inside a virtual appliance. These would seemingly be subject to the same VMware Workstation problems, but perhaps not, somehow. I searched the VMware Virtual Appliances webpage for IrfanView but, not surprisingly, found nothing. My Google Search for WinXP applications in the VMware catalog didn't seem to turn up anything special, but a search for "Windows 7" indicated that, for $10, I could download something called the Bagvapp RC Windows 7 beta. They said this thing also came with additional software installed. (Microsoft provided additional information on this free (possibly bug-filled) Release Candidate.) For ten bucks, of course, it made huge good sense to just buy the pre-installed VM from Bagvapp; but since I didn't really need it, I contented myself with signing up for Bagvapp's RSS feed. (Most of their stuff was free, but they said they were swamped with orders for the RC and had to pay for a ton of bandwidth.) There also seemed to be other free Windows 7 beta virtual appliances, such as one from Tuxdistro, although not all appeared to be as fully tricked-out as the one from Bagvapp. The Win7 RC, in any case, was said to be valid for another eight months, until March 2010.
• In March 2009, Jonathan DiPrizio discussed four virtualization options in Linux. Those four were Qemu, Parallels, VMware, and VirtualBox. DiPrizio found VMware and VirtualBox to be the clear winners among these four, and actually preferred the latter. So I would have the option of trying to run IrfanView in VirtualBox, if the VMware problems continued.
• I had also located Wikipedia articles on application virtualization and platform virtualization. These led to consideration of other possibilities, such as Microsoft Virtual PC and DosBox.

Ubuntu and VMware: New Installation

In January 2009, I decided to install plain-vanilla Ubuntu (i.e., not one of the official derivatives, e.g., Kubuntu, or many other unofficial distributions) on a new computer. This machine was running an AMD Phenom 8450 Triple-Core CPU on a Foxconn A7GM-S motherboard (with a maximum of 8GB RAM) and, at the start, a single 640GB Seagate hard drive. The latest release available at this time was Ubuntu 8.10 (meaning it was released in October 2008), known as Intrepid Ibex, so that was what I planned to install. I chose the 64-bit version of Intrepid because I wanted VMware to have access to more than the 32-bit maximum of 4GB of RAM. As with my 2007 and 2008 investigations of virtualization, I decided that VMware remained the best candidate for my virtualization needs. I had gone through many issues in the process of refining my VMware Workstation 6.0 (and, more recently, 6.5) installation, and this time around I hoped the process would be relatively straightforward. I installed Ubuntu on the target machine. Windows XP was already installed, and GRUB set up its usual menu. (I covered most of these details at length in my previous posts. For terms not defined here, use the search box at the top of this page to search my blog, and then use Ctrl-F or whatever is appropriate in your browser to find the specific locations where the terms are discussed.) Before the installation, I used a bootable GParted CD to add two Ubuntu partitions at the end, after my Windows NTFS partitions (for PROGRAMS, DATA, etc.) -- one for the Ubuntu program files, and the other for swap. That way, it was easier to see what I was doing when I got to the partitioning part of the Ubuntu installation. I modified the panels on my Ubuntu desktop, followed the steps to install my restricted NVIDIA graphics drivers, adjusted the font sizes in File Browser (Nautilus), and otherwise got the desktop in shape to suit me. Then it was time to install VMware. The file name was VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.x86_64.bundle (meaning that I was installing the 64-bit version). To run it, I opened a Terminal session, navigated to the folder where the bundle file was located, and typed "sudo sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle" (here, and elsewhere in these posts, without the quotation marks except as otherwise indicated). The installation was much smoother than it had been last time, when I had installed Workstation 6.0 instead of 6.5 (which was not out yet). In fact, the installation was painless and almost instantaneous. I rebooted into Windows XP and used VMware Converter to make a VMware virtual machine from that existing Windows installation. Unfortunately, when I booted back into Ubuntu, I found that VMware could barely run that VM. Performance was much, much worse than on my other computer -- partly because the VM was 40GB, larger than the 15-20GB VMs I ran on the other machine, but especially, I think, because I had only one hard drive. On the other machine, I had separate drives for Ubuntu program files, for data, and for the virtual machine. To speed things up, I ordered another hard drive. I had never owned a 10,000 RPM drive, but I found one on sale and decided to put my Windows and Ubuntu program files on it. I also revisited the Windows installation, removed some programs and otherwise got its size down to 15GB, used GParted to trim its size down to 25GB, and used VMware Converter to make another virtual machine. The next steps after that are the subject of a later post.

Ubuntu and VMware: Two Months On

In early July 2008, after Windows XP died on me and I reinstalled it -- only to find that my reinstallation wasn't working right either -- I decided the time had come to make the switch to Ubuntu. Since I still needed some WinXP programs, I installed Ubuntu alongside WinXP in a dual-boot arrangement; and since I didn't want to have to reboot every time I needed some little thing from Windows, I decided to see if I could perform those WinXP functions within virtual machines. After comparing the options, I decided on VMware Workstation 6 as my virtualization tool. I used the free VMware Converter to make a WinXP virtual machine from my WinXP native boot, and then I used Workstation to make clones of that machine. I had two computers, each equipped with similar WinXP and 64-bit Ubuntu dual-boot setups, and I typically used Firefox in Ubuntu, on one machine, to blog what I was experimenting with on the other machine. By the time I began writing the present post, it was early September,and I had been at this for two months. I had sorted out many technical issues in my growing series of long posts discussing VMware, Ubuntu, WinXP, and Firefox, but there still remained a number of things to fix or install before it would all be set up the way I wanted it.

I had noticed that a lot of the things I was fixing, at this point, were not a matter of first-time installation. There still were a few programs and functions that I had not tried to install, use, or perform; but for the most part, what I was doing, these days, was fixing something that was newly broken, or trying again to fix something that I had tried to fix previously. Thus, by the end of the previous post in this series, I still had not resolved some issues that I had attempted already near the beginning of that post.

One of those issues had to do with accessing my external USB SATA drive from within VMware Workstation. I had a Rosewill external hard drive enclosure, connected by USB cable to the computer. I could open that enclosure, take out the drive that was in it, and put in another. But when I did that, Windows would no longer see it as drive O, which was how I had previously assigned it. It would now give it the last drive letter in the series. So if I had drives C, D, and E installed on my computer, Windows would believe that the external drive should be drive F. (More details below, and also near the start of the previous post.) I needed to sort out that issue, because my hard drive was presently hard to access. I had already had a couple of instances where I had had to screw around for 10-20 minutes just to get a file transferred from one computer to the other, because neither my external drive nor my USB jump drives were being recognized. I wanted to rectify that situation. I normally used the external drive for backup, so I also wanted to get it back into regular contact with my primary computer for that purpose. I began this effort by returning to a thread that I had started in the VMware forum some days earlier. There had been a couple of responses to my question in that thread, and now it was time to try to apply what those respondents had advised. The problem at present was most visible within a WinXP virtual machine. There, I started Windows Explorer. The external drive, which I had named OFFSITE and had set to be drive O (using Windows' Disk Management program), was shown in the folders (left-hand) pane as "Offsite on '.host\Shared Folders' (O:)." If I clicked once on it, it showed one of the subfolders that existed on that external OFFSITE drive. But when I opened that subfolder and opened or otherwise played around with various files in it, the drive access light on the external drive stayed dark. Windows Explorer seemed to be looking somewhere other than that actual external drive. So I right-clicked on that O drive in WinEx and selected Disconnect. I then selected WinEx's Tools > Map Network Drive option and navigated to VMware Shared Folders/.host/Shared Folders/OFFSITE. But that drive contained only that same single folder, from among the half-dozen that should have appeared on that drive. I canceled out of that and went to VMware's VM > Settings > Options > Shared Folders. I highlighted /media/OFFSITE and clicked Properties. There were no error messages. I decided to Remove and Add it again. In Windows Explorer, I selected Tools > Map Network Drive, browsed to VMware Shared Folders/.host/Shared Folders, and OFFSITE was listed there, so I added it. It reappeared in the folders (left-side) pane of WinEx. I clicked on it. It still listed just the one folder, and again my browsing in that folder did not trigger action on the drive's activity light. So now, what were they advising in that thread? I reviewed their replies and updated the thread, but by now, as I tinkered with WinEx a little more, I realized that my situation had changed to a new problem or a more mucked-up version of the previous one. I decided to reboot Ubuntu. Ubuntu did not reboot. It stopped at a flashing white cursor on a black screen. I turned the computer off and left it off for a minute or so. I booted it back up into native WinXP. It recognized the external drive as OFFSITE, drive O, and the external drive's activity light flashed when I opened up a couple of JPGs on it in WinEx. I rebooted into Ubuntu. File Browser recognized OFFSITE immediately with no problem. I started VMware Workstation and resumed a previously suspended VM. It had been showing just one folder in the mapped OFFSITE drive, oddly enough. I hit F5 to refresh the view. It didn't change: "Offsite on '.host\Shared Folders' (O:)" was still shown as having only one of the folders that actually existed on the OFFSITE drive (as I had just verified in Ubuntu), and probing files in that folder didn't cause hard-drive light action on the external drive. I hit Start > Turn Off Computer > Turn Off to turn off the virtual machine. But it didn't turn off. I tried several times. Nope. Finally, I used VMware's Power Off button. I gave it a minute or two and then powered it back on. WinEx was still showing the same scenario: OFFSITE drive O had only one folder. Weird! I resumed a different VM that I had suspended. It was one of my 1GB machines (i.e., I had allocated 1GB of RAM to it, along with 15GB of disk space), and it took quite a while to get fully loaded to the point that the primary computer's hard drive light stopped running constantly. Once it was up, I checked WinEx and, as in the other machine, only the one folder was showing. Following some advice in that discussion thread, I went to Start > Run and typed CMD and then OK. In the DOS box that opened up, I typed DIR O: to see what I would get, and sure enough, only that one folder was listed for drive O. I typed NET USE O: /D in the belief that this would get rid of that O drive. Sure enough, Windows popped up a message:

O:\ refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network.

But it was still listed in WinEx, and I couldn't get rid of it. I hit Start > Turn Off Computer > Restart. When the VM powered back up, and the hard drive light settled down, WinEx no longer showed any drive O. Just out of curiosity, I went back into Tools > Map Network Drive and looked at the OFFSITE drive. No change; it was still showing just that one folder. Instead of going that route, I followed the thread's advice. Here's what I posted in reply:

net use o: "\\.host\Shared Folders" I had to use quotes because of the space between "Shared" and "Folders." That command gave me this in Windows Explorer: "Shared Folders on '.host' (O:)" That did not quite match how the other partitions appear in WinEx. They were like this: "Vms on '.host\Shared Folders' (H:)". I was able to rename it manually in WinEx, though. I couldn't tell for sure whether the site you pointed me to had info on that -- I didn't fully understand its options, but I will figure them out if I need them. Incidentally, my situation had mutated somewhat since the start of this post. For some reason, the drive O entry in WinEx was showing only one folder on the external drive. It was weird. It had files in it, but when I opened them, I got no hard disk light action on the external drive. It was like it had mapped to that folder on another partition. (I do keep a backup of that same partition on an internal drive as well, on a different schedule.) I used "net use o: /d" as you advised to get rid of it. I had to reboot the VM to make it go away, but then it was indeed gone.

But then I saw, on closer inspection, that this didn't solve the problem at all. Jeez. What I had, now, was a reproduction of my set of partitions under the OFFSITE drive heading in WinEx. I had apparently used NET USE to map one level too high. Back in the DOS box, I used NET USE O: /D again, to get rid of my ungodly creation, and then I tried this:

net use o: "\\.host\Shared Folders\OFFSITE".

Ah, but now I was back to having just that one folder showing. But I couldn't fool with this anymore right now because I had to get Firefox working here on the secondary computer. I had been writing this post in Opera, but for some reason Opera was not able to assign hyperlinks to webpages. I could have added them manually in Blogger's "Edit Html" tab, but what the heck, I needed Firefox to be functional anyway. So I bit the bullet: I shut down Firefox and renamed the .mozilla folder to be .mozillaOld, and then I started Firefox and went to Blogger, to see if it was going to be able to get it right on this webpage. I hadn't actually checked that out, when I was fooling with .mozilla previously, but now ... well, now, actually, it looked like Firefox wasn't going to start at all. I rebooted the computer (continuing to use Ubuntu, not going into WinXP), and that did it: I now had a fresh new Firefox, and it ran this Blogger page just fine. I spent a while restoring Firefox add-ons and configuring things, and I was back in business. This time, I made a copy of .mozilla called .mozillaBackup, and deleted the .mozillaOld folder I had just created. If I had another problem with Firefox, I would try replacing .mozilla with .mozillaBackup (which now held the current, working state of Firefox), and see if that did the job without all this reinstallation. Unfortunately, I was not *completely* back in business. The Session Manager add-on for Firefox was not able to see the previous session, the last one I had saved before reinstalling Firefox. The session was there, in my saved sessions folder, but Session Manager wasn't giving me the option of restoring it. I had a boatload of tabs that I needed from that session, and of course my browsing history was gone too, due to the reinstallation, so I couldn't even do it the hard way and manually browse through all of the webpages I had opened recently. So I posted a question on this and called it a day. Next morning, I saw that someone had posted a reply, there in the Firefox forums, within 40 minutes. The reply asked, "Are you still using that profile?" I wasn't sure what that meant, so I went to the Mozilla Knowledgebase webpage s/he pointed me to, on recovering a missing profile. That page linked to another that told me the location of my Firefox profile folder. It was, alas, a subfolder within ~/.mozilla, which I had deleted. While I was waiting and hoping for an insight on that issue, I went to the primary machine and tried to work in one of the VMs that I had left open when I had suspended that machine for the night. At first, it opened Windows Explorer and Microsoft Word as requested; but it would not scroll the Word document I opened. For a while, it seemed to be hung, and then the VM crashed, and I was back at the basic Workstation screen with an option to "Power on this virtual machine." When I tried that, I got this:

Failed to get exclusive lock on the configuration file. Another vmware process could be running using this configuration file.

I clicked OK and got another error message:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to.

I went back to the one other VM I had open at that point, there in VMware Workstation, and saw that it, too, now had an error message:

Failed to acquire lock to grab keyboard and mouse input. This may be because another virtual machine crashed or is hung. You can override the lock, but this may corrupt some of the X server state, such as keyboard autorepeat settings and the modifier mapping.

I said No, let's not do that. But that message kept coming back. I clicked on Workstation's Suspend button. It wouldn't suspend until I clicked No once more on that message, and then it suspended. When all VMs were either powered down or suspended, I closed and restarted Workstation. I had just started to resume that most recently opened VM when Workstation crashed. I think it may have been because of the funky problem that I had previously learned to correct with a SetXKBMap icon on the desktop. That is, I think the crash was due to a problem where switching into (or perhaps out of) Workstation's Full Screen mode would cause any keypress to close the current window in Ubuntu. I didn't recall having gone into or out of Full Screen mode recently, though, so that was a bit puzzling. Anyway, I double-clicked on my SetXKBMap icon and restarted Workstation. Now that VM was showing an error message:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (mks) NOT_REACHED /build/mts/release/bora-93057/bora/mks/main/mksX.c:242 A log file is available in "/media/VMS/VMware VMs/WXS-AlwOn/vmware/log".

Etc. I okayed that one and got another error: "Failed to initialize mouse-keyboard-screen control." I okayed that one and tried to power on this VM again. When I tried to get the mouse going inside that machine, I got the same "Failed to acquire lock" message as before. So apparently I was going to have to resolve things with that other VM first. I went to the one that had said, "Failed to get exclusive lock," above, but when I tried to power it on, it said the same thing again. So I went back to -- oh, let's use their real names -- I went back to the WXS-AlwOn VM and pressed VMware's Power Off button. Then back to the other one, WXMUProjectC, and tried to power it on again. But I was still getting that error message. I restarted Workstation again and still got that error. Apparently one of the other VMs, all of which were suspended, was causing the problem? I had suspended each of them in just the right place, with the files open that I needed to work on. I didn't really want to spend an hour resuming them all, waiting for the computer to catch up, powering them all off, restarting them, waiting for the computer to catch up again, and reopening and repositioning all of those files and windows. I thought maybe I would instead try rebooting Ubuntu and see what happened. So I did that. I then restarted the WXS-AlwOn VM. This time it seemed to be functioning properly. I went to the WXMUProjectC VM and powered it on. It, too, ran OK now. So the solution to this problem was to reboot the computer. Meanwhile, I got no further insights from the question I had posted about my missing Firefox profile and that list of webpages I had opened before I deleted the .mozilla folder. What I should have done, I belatedly realized, was to use the Firefox add-on called Tab URL Copier to just make a list of the URLs of all open tabs before I shut down Firefox and deleted the .mozilla folder. Then I could easily just restore those tabs. But now I remembered that I had a backup of the old .mozilla folder on my OFFSITE external SATA drive. I connected the drive to the secondary computer, using my nifty little AMC PW-141A USB Switch, and then I saw that, of course, the backup was in an Acronis True Image .tib file, and of course Acronis True Image Home 11 (my version) was a Windows program. So I unmounted and switched the external drive back to the primary computer. But for some reason True Image would not install in a virtual machine. I didn't want to suspend all the virtual machines I now had open for the sake of rebooting into native WinXP, so I switched back to the secondary computer (which was running Ubuntu but not VMware), rebooted into Windows, and installed True Image there. Installation froze before completing. I tried a couple of times. I also tried running True Image from the CD. That crashed the machine outright. Finally I just looked at the .tib file using Windows Explorer. Apparently Acronis had installed enough of itself to add some (right-click) context menu extensions in WinEx, so that with a combination of right clicks and left clicks I was finally able to get True Image to the point where it was analyzing all of my partitions. It froze while trying to analyze the external USB drive. I let it go for a while and then rebooted, shut off the external drive (having copied the .tib file to an internal hard drive partition). This time, I right-clicked and chose Mount. It started to do it, but then gave me an error message: "Cannot assign a drive letter to a partition from the backup archive." OK, I tried again. This time I chose Recover from the context menu. I told it to restore to a FAT32 drive. It looked like it was going to, but then it crashed. I tried the same thing again. The previous time, I had chosen to "Set the options manually" for the restore; this time I said "Use default options." Once again, a crash. So, basically, my attempts to restore files from my True Image backup were failing. Not that it was letting me select or browse individual files or folders (e.g., .mozilla) anyway: Acronis wasn't letting me explore the .tib file, and the restoration options I was seeing seemed to be oriented toward restoring the entire backup. That's why I had chosen the FAT32 partition -- it was essentially empty and I had nothing to lose if it did restore the entire backup there. I decided to bite the bullet and reboot the primary computer using the Acronis CD. I started to run the restore process that way, but it crashed that computer too. I rebooted the primary computer into Windows and installed True Image there. Or at least I tried. Again, it seemed to hang during installation. This time it didn't seem as far along in the installation process as it had been on the secondary computer, judging by the progress bar on the installation window. I went to bed. When I got up, I had an error: "Install server not responding." I clicked Retry. Still nothing. I canceled the installation. It wouldn't even cancel. I had to use Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to shut it off. I ran the installer once more. As on the secondary computer, I got the error message, "Another installation is in progress." It occurred to me that possibly the problem in installation was due to my using a backup of the original Acronis CD. I tried again with the original. When I inserted it into the CD drive, the installer started automatically; previously I had been clicking on Setup in the duplicate CD's root folder. It also showed me a different installation window. This one was offering to install Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, and that was the only option. This, too, had happened on the secondary computer, though I hadn't recorded exactly how. I clicked to install Disk Director Suite. This brought up a Disk Director Suite dialog, with options to install the suite, to open the user's guide, or for technical support. I clicked Install. This one complained that it could not register me because my firewall was blocking it. I shut down Zone Alarm. That didn't do it. But then it seemed to go ahead anyway; but then it said another installation was running. I rebooted Windows and tried again, this time inserting the CD and letting it autostart again after rebooting. It didn't autostart. I took it out and reinserted it. Still no autostart. I tried running it by clicking on Setup.exe in Windows Explorer. It gave me the True Image 11.0 Home installation dialog. I went ahead with that. This brought up the other Acronis True Image Home installation dialog. Confusing. I clicked on Install Acronis True Image Home. This time, I tried the Complete installation option. It got to the same point as before, on the progress bar, and then stopped. I tried canceling. It didn't cancel. The concept of installing into native WinXP was not working. I was going to research it, here on the secondary computer, but for some reason Firefox was not accessing the Internet very well: both Blogger and Google gave me "Server Not Found" error messages, even after restarting Firefox. I was going to run Advanced WindowsCare to clean up the native WinXP installation on the primary computer, but it wouldn't run. I rebooted into WinXP again and ran it. It detected 326MB of junk files. I told it to clean up those. That took quite a while. I thought, "OK, one more for the road -- maybe that was the problem"; I ran AWC again; it found no more problems; and then I inserted the copy of the True Image CD again. It didn't autostart, so I tried from Setup.exe. Same process as before. Same outcome as before: hung. I killed it and ran AWC again and then rebooted into Ubuntu. I went to the Acronis tech support page. It was early in the morning, so I sent them an e-mail. Meanwhile, I also rebooted the secondary computer, hoping that would solve the Firefox problem. It did, except that Hotmail was still not displaying properly. I was curious whether my favorite add-ons had been updated to run on Firefox 3, so I went to check out the current status of Tab Mix Plus and Session Manager. The answers appeared to be No and Maybe, respectively. Since I was in no rush to be screwing around with more beta software, and had already given Firefox 3 a try, I decided to hold off on the Firefox 3 upgrade for a while longer. So I wasn't sure what to do about Hotmail. Ultimately, I could reinstall Firefox from scratch or replace the .mozilla folder again, but I thought maybe I'd just let it go a while and see if it would fix itself or if, instead, it got worse. In other breaking news, I had another response to my thread on the Session Manager backup that contained an earlier browsing session. I had had a bunch of tabs open when I deleted the .mozilla folder (above), and I wanted to get those tabs back. The respondent told me that the old session was gone unless it was still in the Trash. This prompted me to tell him/her that I had actually been saving a backup of the Session Manager .session file, but when I opened it as a text file, I wasn't able to get useful information from it. His response also prompted me to click on the Trash can on Ubuntu's bottom pane, opened it, and what do you know, there was a .mozilla folder. So I renamed the current .mozilla folder to be .mozillaNew, and I copied this one from the trash to /home/ray. I tried to restart Firefox, but no go. I rebooted Ubuntu and tried again to restart Firefox. It started, but only as a brand-new installation. That one had the right date -- 9/9/2008, same as the .session file I was trying to restore, and it was earlier in that day -- but maybe that meant that was the day it was created, not last modified (even though File Browser said the latter). There was another .mozilla folder in trash, dated more than a month earlier. I renamed the .mozilla folder that was giving me a new installation to be .mozillaDud, and copied this one and tried Firefox again. It looked promising -- more than 3,700 files to be copied -- but for some reason it didn't copy as .mozilla. It copied as .2.mozilla. I thought that's what it had done, but it didn't make sense, so I tried again, and I got, "A folder named '.2.mozilla' already exists." I rebooted Ubuntu, renamed .2.mozilla to be .mozilla, and started Firefox. Same thing: new-looking installation. I killed Firefox and renamed these last two (.mozilla and .mozillaDud) to be .mozillaTrash1 and 2, just in case I would need them again; renamed .mozillaNew to be .mozilla; and restarted Firefox. I was back to where I had started the day: a working installation, with my recent tabs, but no progress on the old .session file and those 50 tabs I needed. Oh, and now Hotmail looked fine. I couldn't tell; maybe messing around with .mozilla folders had fixed it. I wasn't getting any more action from my post on the Firefox forum, so I sent an e-mail to the developer of Session Manager. He responded immediately, but the upshot was that there was no apparent solution. My 50 tabs were lost. Not to let things settle down too much, about this time I came to need to do some video editing. I had not actually tried doing that in VMware Workstation. Indeed, I had not even installed the programs that I would need for it. I had created a virtual machine, called WXMUMedia -- short for Windows XP Medium-sized, Updated (with Windows updates) virtual machine for working with audio and video. Now, it seemed, I should try to install Adobe Premiere Elements, my video editing program, and see whether the results were acceptable. I certainly did not expect them to be. Workstation was solid but slow, compared to native Windows. I was pretty sure that I would ultimately have to reboot into native WinXP and install Elements and other stuff there, if I wanted to do any video editing at all. Before doing that, I realized I had better install my new video card. I had previously tried installing Google Earth and multiple monitors in Workstation, but had run into problems that seemed to be due to the hardware and/or drivers for that card. So I had ordered another card. It had arrived, and now, before having more graphics-related problems in this video editing enterprise, I thought it would make great sense to have the better card installed. So I installed it and booted the machine. The Ubuntu login page came in distorted. Or maybe it wasn't even the login page. It was black instead of Hardy Heron's (version 8.04's, that is) customary orange background. I didn't see any login box. I typed my login anyway and hit Enter. Nothing happened. No mouse either. Now what? I punched the reset button on the primary computer and vowed to watch more carefully this time, to see what happened. When GRUB came up, I chose Recovery Mode. I didn't run dpkg or anything else there; I just hit Enter at the resume option. This time Ubuntu booted up normally. Nothing looked any different. I checked System > Administration > Hardware Drivers. As before, it listed an NVIDIA driver but said it was not in use. I decided to leave that as-is for the moment. In my VMware Workstation, I resumed the WXMUMedia virtual machine. The first thing I needed to install there was Microsoft Movie Maker 2.0, which I used to copy my video from my camera over to my computer. But the Firewire (IEEE 1394) interface was not recognized; VMware did not see my video camera. Ah, but maybe Ubuntu itself would. I found a thread where people said it would recognize their Firewire hard drives. But File Browser was not seeing the camera. Some people said that the program to use for video capture in Ubuntu was Kino. Their hardware requirements page advised this:

Kino and dvgrab work only with Digital Video (DV) camcorders and compatible equipment. A digital camera will not work, even if the camera has a ieee1394 interface. Likewise, Kino will not capture the video from a camcorders through a USB interface. However, you ought to be able to acquire still images over USB and use those in Kino.

So far, so good. It was listed in System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. The search there for kino also brought up dvgrab, which looked like it could be a very simple way to get stuff from the camcorder, so I installed both of them. DVgrab needed to install a bunch of other stuff too, but I felt that was OK. I saw an entry in Applications > Sound & Video for Kino, but nothing for dvgrab; but then I realized dvgrab was apparently a command-line tool. To try it, I went into Terminal and typed "dvgrab July" in hopes of capturing an AVI file named July. This gave me an error: "raw1394 - failed to get handle: Permission denied." It looked like quite a few people were getting this error. I found an Ubuntu bug report that seemed to indicate that they would be tackling this issue in the next version of Ubuntu, 8.10, due out the next month. Before calling it quits, I tried the advice to enter "sudo chmod 666 /dev/raw1394" and -- woo hoo -- that worked! It started capturing from the camera right where it was. I needed to rewind the video camera's tape first, and there were no controls in Terminal, so I killed it and did that manually, using the controls on the camera. (There was a webpage that gave instructions on how to make this chmod command permanent, but I decided to pursue that later.) While that was rewinding, I looked for the July.avi file that maybe it had created with the few seconds of video I had seen playing on my camera's screen. It landed in /home/ray. I played it. It looked OK. I decided to give it a whirl for the whole 42 minutes of video on my tape. I didn't have to retype the chmod command on the second go -- it had already recognized the Firewire connection. So when I typed "dvgrab July" it said this, which is more or less what I recalled it saying previously:

Found AV/C device with GUID 0x0800460104b51119 Warning: Cannot set RR-scheduler Warning: Cannot disable swapping Capture Started

It didn't look like the hard drive light on the primary computer was struggling, so I hoped the capture quality would be good. It finished the first file, July001.avi, in about five minutes, so evidently it would be requiring about nine files to capture my 42 minutes of video. Upon finishing July001.avi, Terminal said this:

"July001.avi": 999.91 MB 8436 frames timecode 00:04:41.15

So I guess it captured exactly 4:41.15 (281.5 seconds) worth of video in 8436 frames, or 29.97 frames per second. To my knowledge, the camera captured at 30 fps. So dvgrab had apparently dropped virtually no frames. Excellent! I let dvgrab run until it had created files named July001 through 010.avi, each exactly 1000.2MB. Now I needed to see if there was an Ubuntu video editor, so I wouldn't even have to worry about running Adobe Premiere Elements in VMware Workstation. My Google search suggested that Cinelerra might be among the more popular options. But I didn't see that one in Synaptic. Apparently that was because I had not installed or enabled the Akirad repository. I followed the instructions to do that, which meant entering this line in Terminal (it's supposed to all go on one line):

wget -c http://akirad.cinelerra.org/pool/addakirad.deb && sudo dpkg -i addakirad.deb

That gave me an error message:

dpkg: status database area is locked by another process

I guessed that was because I still had Synaptic open. I killed it and then pressed the up arrow to repeat the command, and this time it worked. The next steps were to go back into Synaptic, click on reload, and then search for Cinelerra again. Still nothing! What the hell . . . So I tried the alternative approach, which was to go to the download site and choose to open with GDebi Package Installer. Oh, but maybe I had misunderstood what was supposed to happen. This brought up a Package Installer dialog that gave me a Reinstall Package option. It was already installed? If so, why hadn't it shown up in Synaptic? I looked at my menu options. I didn't seem to have any new programs installed. Maybe this meant I had installed akiradnews, which was the name of the package that showed up in the Package Installer, and now had to do something additional to get to Cinelerra. I went back to the instruction webpage. No additional insights there. I did another reload and search in Synaptic. No Cinelerra there. I clicked on Synaptic's Mark All Upgrades option, and then clicked Apply. I wasn't sure what that would accomplish, but it made me feel better. I found another Cinelerra page that seemed like maybe it was more current. They emphasized that this was not officially approved Ubuntu software. So maybe it wasn't going to be in Synaptic, period. I got cold feet and went back to the Google search, but it seemed like everybody was talking about Cinelerra, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the 64-bit binary and said go ahead, open it with Archive Manager. I had no idea what to do with it in there, once it opened, but I noticed it was a .tar.bz2 file, so I searched my blog for instructions on those. Seems my blog didn't have any instructions on those. I was thinking of .tar.gz2, maybe. For .tar.bz2, I found a post that said, first, you type "cd" plus the location of the downloaded file. In my case, that was the Home Folder/Desktop, so the shorthand for that was "cd ~/Desktop". At this point, it appeared that I could use the same instructions as I had used previously for .tar.gz. So I typed this: "tar -zxf cinelerra-4-ubuntu-amd64.tar-bz2". But no, that was the gzip command, so I got an error message: "gzip: stdin: not in gzip format." What they had actually advised in that post was "tar -xvfj" plus the filename, so I tried that instead of "tar -zxf". But this gave me another error: "tar: j: Cannot open: No such file or directory." So I tried again: "tar -vxf": v instead of z, and drop the j. It worked. Or at least it did something. It listed a lot of files. The list was apparently the files that had gone into a new folder on my desktop named cinelerra-4-ubuntu-amd64. So my tar command had unpacked the archive. Very good. Now the advice was to read the README that should be in that folder somewhere. And there was, and I did. It was kind of funny. Here were its contents, in their entirety:

Run ./cinelerra from this directory. That's it.

So I did. And, whoa, I had a screen full of Cinelerra, along with an error message:

The following errors occurred: MWindow::init_shm: /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax is 0x2000000. It should be at least 0x7fffffff for Cinelerra.

But still no icon in Ubuntu's Applications menu. Apparently I was supposed to type cinelerra on the command line whenever I wanted to use the program. I didn't understand the error message just quoted, but Sven Arvidsson recommended typing this command to fix it: "echo "0x7fffffff" > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax". I killed Cinelerra and did that. I had to log in as root with "sudo -i" first to make it work. I then tried typing cinelerra at the prompt to start it up, but I got "command not found." I figured that the folder in which I had unzipped the program was sort of like a Windows program that runs wherever you put it, without needing to be installed into the registry. So I moved the Cinelerra folder from my Desktop to my /home/bin folder. As root, I renamed that folder to be just Cinelerra. Inside it, I double-clicked on the plain old "cinelerra" file, and that started the program. I right-clicked on it and chose Make Link. I renamed the link Cinelerra Video Editor. I right-clicked on the menu panel (i.e., where Applications and Places and System options appeared) and chose Edit Menus. I selected the Applications > Sound & Video menu. I dragged the Cinelerra Video Editor icon over to that box. It was godawful ugly. The spaces between words became "%20." I renamed the link to be just Cinelerra and tried again. That was better. I went into Applications > Sound & Video and there it was, albeit with an ugly icon. I clicked on it and Cinelerra started up, without the error message about 0x7fffffff. In Cinelerra, I highlighted /home/ray/July001.avi through July010.avi and, for an Insertion Strategy, I selected the second one, "Replace current project and concatenate tracks." Then I clicked on the check mark and let it go. But it crashed. I tried again. This time, I added just the first file, July001.avi, and then I selected the other nine files and chose the Concatenate to Existing Tracks strategy. That didn't work either. After I fiddled around long enough, it seemed to freeze. I said to hell with it and went to bed. When I started the computer and Cinelerra the next morning, I got that 0x7fffffff error and decided to look into a permanent fix. One advisor recommended, first, typing this in Terminal: "sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf". That opened up the sysctl.conf configuration file for system variables. At the end of that file, according to the advice, I added these lines:

#Fix Cinelerra error kernel/shmmax=0x7fffffff

I saved the file and, back in Terminal, I typed "sudo sysctl -p". I wasn't sure of the purpose of this line. It seemed to show me the value that kernel.shmmax had been set to. So, fine. I started Cinelerra and didn't get the error message. So hopefully that was taken care of. I realized, now, that maybe I didn't want to concatenate all 10 of those 1GB .avi files, making a monster file that would take longer to edit and save. I decided, instead, to start by editing just July001.avi and see what happened. I started with the Cinelerra documentation, and particularly the Secrets of Cinelerra chapter on editing. But no, that document didn't seem to be telling me how to cut my July001.avi file into separate clips. I thought maybe the first tutorial would do it, but it wouldn't play in Firefox. It did play in Opera, though. Tutorial episode no. 1 was said to appear at minute 45 through minute 60 of that video, so I let it load and I played with the program a bit. I watched July001.avi and decided that, actually, its action continued over onto July002.avi, and that I wanted to combine the two. I selected File > Load Files > July002.avi and chose, for my insertion strategy, "Concatenate to existing tracks." This either worked or didn't work, depending on your point of view. In the main program window, i.e., the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, where Adobe Premiere Elements had taught me to expect to see the second .avi appear next to the first one, there was no change. In the Compositor, however (i.e., the top right corner of the screen), the red line was now at about the middle of the timeline, so apparently July002.avi had been added up there. Playback in the Compositor was jerky, compared to in Adobe, but I assumed it would be OK in the final product. The tutorial was only about halfway loaded at this point, but I realized it was probably also available in YouTube. I did a search there and found a bunch of Cinelerra tutorials. This led to another problem, one that I had previously tried but failed to fix: no video in Firefox on Ubuntu. The weird thing was, I hadn't been able to get the video working on the primary computer, but meanwhile somehow YouTube had been playing fine in Firefox on the secondary computer. But now, since I had started over with a new .mozilla folder, Firefox wasn't even showing YouTube videos on the secondary computer. Opera, as just noted, was showing them fine. I decided not to tackle this issue again now. Instead, I just used Opera to watch the video mentioned above, starting at minute 45. They started showing actual usage at about minute 50. It looked like I might want to minimize the Resources and Viewer windows and enlarge the Compositor window slightly, so that I could see its complete box frame. They had a few other items of minor interest, but that first tutorial basically did not explain much to me. I tried again with Episode 2. I eventually found that tutorial no. 3 began at minute 45 of that video. But where was tutorial no. 2? I went back and realized I had read it wrong -- it was in Episode 1, starting at 32:45. A bit confusing, that. But this tutorial was much more relevant to me. I watched it to its end, at 53:45. The gist of it was that you select File > Load Files and then, after "arming" the first set of video and audio tracks (see the orange button at the left end of the main program window) and disarming the second set (i.e., those pertaining to July002.avi), you choose Tracks > Concatenate Tracks. So, having done that, I had July001.avi and July002.avi as a single track. But now there seemed to be something wrong with Cinelerra. I couldn't get any response to any clicks or menu picks in the main program window. For example, I wanted to save this combined July001 and 002.avi arrangement, now that I had managed to combine them; but nothing happened when I clicked File on the menu: no drop-down, etc. I couldn't even close the main program window. It was dead. It stayed that way while I did something else for several hours. When I came back, I ran xkill in Terminal and killed Cinelerra. When I started it back up, it had no memory of what had previously been happening, and it was still half-dead. It allowed me to load the .avi files I had been working on, but then it became unresponsive again. This was, for me, the end of Cinelerra for the time being. That left the question of whether to use Adobe Premiere Elements in a virtual machine. I started VMware Workstation and resumed the WXMUMedia VM. It was the only VM I had powered up at that point. Having been pleasantly surprised by dvgrab, I was not feeling any immediate need for Windows Movie Maker 2.0. When the VM was finally loaded and the computer was ready to go to work, I went to Windows Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs and looked for MM 2.0. It wasn't there. One source recommended writing a batch file to do the job, so as to remove various .dll files and so forth. Another source said no, all the files were contained in the single program directory, so you could just delete that and maybe remove some registry references (or, I supposed, run Advanced WindowsCare or some other registry cleaner) and it would be gone. Rather than hash out that issue, I decided to just leave it. Next, I inserted the CD and installed Adobe Premiere Elements (APE) into the WXMUMedia VM. After rebooting the VM (to complete the installation) and letting the hard drive light settle down, I moved those July001 through 010.avi files to an NTFS partition, where APE could see them, and then I imported them into the program. Or at least I tried. I got this:

Audio Conforming Error Disk Write Error. Verify drive connections, available disk space and disk access privileges. Then save, close and re-launch the project.

I went into APE's Edit > Preferences > Scratch Disks and changed all of those scratch disk assignments to other hard drives, which I suspected would make APE faster, even if it didn't solve this problem. Then I did what the error message advised. APE started up OK this time, but video editing was out of the question. The hard drive just couldn't keep up. It had been sitting quietly, because I had been working on something else for the past hour; but when I came back to this, replaying five seconds' worth of video was enough to put the hard disk at work for half a minute, and the playback was extremely jerky. After the first try, the hard drive light wasn't on so steadily, but the playback was still lousy. Also, for some reason, there was no audio. Really, by this time it seemed that the only game in town was to install APE on one of the two computers, in Windows native boot, and do my video editing there. I closed down APE and suspended the WXMUMedia VM, unsure of whether there would be any real reason to use it anymore. I had previously installed Compiz on the secondary computer. I had thought it would be just for decoration and fun, and mostly it was. But there was one feature I used quite often, and that was the ability to rotate desktops by positioning the mouse cursor on one desktop and spinning it to the other. Typically, I would have Firefox running on one desktop and several minor things (e.g., Terminal, gedit) in the other. I wanted this spin feature on the other computer, because I found myself looking for it frequently, and I felt things were slower without it. I went to the webpage that I had consulted the first time and followed it again. The instructions were, first, to use Synaptic to install Compiz. But Synaptic said it was already installed -- and I had thought so, because it had seemed like that ability to rotate had been there and then had vanished at one point. So I went on to the next step on that webpage, which was to use System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. But, aha! That was not there. So Compiz was screwed up, it seemed. I went back to Synaptic and marked for complete removal everything that was installed that began with "compiz." Then I searched Synaptic again for "compiz" and selected just that. It included a bunch of other things that I had just uninstalled, so that was fine. I closed Synaptic and looked again for that Advanced Desktop Effects Settings option. Still not there! Oh, but if all else fails, read the instructions. It seems I was supposed to make sure I had installed compizconfig-settings-manager. Another search in Synaptic: yeah, there it was. Duh. I installed it and looked again for the Advanced Settings thing. Yes! In that CompizConfig Settings Manager box, the webpage advised selecting Desktop > Desktop Cube and Rotate Cube. This entailed some other things being turned on and off. I also chose Wobbly Windows, because sometimes they made me laugh. Otherwise, I stayed on the conservative side, because last time I had overdone it. This had sort of messed things up, so I'd had to spend additional time getting my desktop back to functional. There wasn't a Save button on the settings box, so I just clicked Close. But, alas, no rotation of desktops. I added Cube Gears, Crash Handler, Desktop Cube, and Water Effect in the Compiz settings box. Still no joy. Oh, well. Another item to postpone until some bit of wisdom reached me. Later, I noticed that the secondary computer had an Applications > System Tools > Compiz Fusion Icon icon, whereas the primary computer did not; but I was not sure what that might mean. Somehow, the problems I was having in communicating with my external USB hard drive (above) had changed or faded at this point. I could see the drive and view its contents without a problem in at least some of my virtual machines. (I didn't bother testing them all at this immediate moment.) Sadly, however, Second Copy 2000 -- the Windows program I had used to keep a current backup of my data on that offsite drive -- was just not up to the job. It was great in native-booted WinXP, but inside a VM it just didn't seem to be working. This pretty much scuttled the idea that I needed a VM that would always be on (as in my WXS-AlwOn VM) so as to run Second Copy for backup purposes. I probably could have figured out some command-line solution within WinXP, but to me it made more sense to figure out that sort of solution in Ubuntu instead, and thereby continue to reduce my Windows dependency. My previous explorations had suggested that rdiff-backup was still in development and rsync was scary for complexity. (It had also occurred to me that rdiff had the drawback of not enabling me to do a simple verification of the backup by comparing the Properties of each drive, so as to insure that each was of the same size and had the same number of files.) But now it was time to bite the bullet: I needed to have regular, automated backup. First, I scoped out the Wikipedia page on rsync. The most important things to worry about, I decided, were (1) make sure rsync doesn't wipe out some other partition or folder by accident and (2) make sure it doesn't synchronize the external backup hard drive with the primary data drive. I wanted mirroring, not synchronization. I remembered that rsync had previously spooked me partly because it seemed to be designed especially for network backup, and I just wanted it for my little old standalone computer. I revised my Google search and found a discussion thread where people compared notes on their preferred backup solutions. Lots of ideas there, including two I hadn't heard of before: Ghost for Linux and rsnapshot. Since the latter was built on rsync but was supposedly simpler, I went to their how-to page, which actually contained a more or less complete introduction to the program. I was just about to start in when I remembered the easy way. Always remember the easy way. I went to Synaptic and searched for rsnapshot. It was there. I installed it. But I had no new icons in my menus. How to run it? Well, OK, it was still a command-line program, so of course there was no icon for it. I wasn't finding the how-to page quite right, so I typed "man rsnapshot" in Terminal. That gave me about 700 lines of text. Was this really better than just using rsync? I typed "man rsync" and got about 3,000 lines of text. So, yes, you could say this was better. But it made me think again about Sbackup. As I saw from my notes, however, I had previously disliked it because I couldn't tell whether it had backed up all my files. It put them into a zip file that didn't seem to be the right size. I really wanted a backup that would be file-for-file. So apparently it was going to be rsnapshot. I found a wiki page that said, after installing rsnapshot, "You then edit the file /etc/rsnapshot.conf to tell it where to put your backups, what to back up, and so on. There are copious instructions in the example config." I knew, from the man page, that the default configuration file was /etc/rsnapshot.conf. The man page recommended that you start by copying /etc/rsnapshot.conf.default to be /etc/rsnapshot.conf, and then modify it as needed. But I didn't see any rsnapshot.conf.default in the /etc folder. I just saw rsnapshot.conf. In File Browser, as root (i.e., type "sudo -i" and then "nautilus"), I copied rsnapshot.conf to rsnapshot.conf.backup and then opened rsnapshot.conf. It looked like whoever set it up for Ubuntu had already commented or uncommented a bunch of lines. (A line of the program could be "commented," i.e., made inoperable, by putting a # sign in front of it.) I left it as it was except for the following:

• Uncomment no_create_root 1, because I was going to back up to a USB drive
• Comment cmd_cp. Its instructions said to do so if your Linux coreutils version was 5.3 or newer. Mine, as I verified in Synaptic, was 6.10.
• Uncomment interval hourly and daily, and change it to hourly 12 (because I wanted to run it every two hours) and daily 14 (because I would swap OFFSITE hard drives every 15 days or so) and monthly 6 (although I wasn't sure the external drive could hold all this).
• Uncomment exclude. That is, allow the program to execute a line that would exclude a particular folder. The folder I wanted to exclude was /media/CURRENT/lost+found. The comment in rsnapshot.conf told me to see the rsync man page for more details, and I did. I paged down a billion lines and saw lots of more details. But I wasn't sure what they meant to me, so I just punted and went back to rsnapshot.conf. There, I uncommented one "exclude" line and, after a tab, in place of the question marks, I typed /media/CURRENT/lost+found/

I wasn't sure what to do with the "backup lines" at the bottom of rsnapshot.conf, so I checked the rsnapshot page. Apparently these were the actual command lines that said what would happen. So here I said "backup /media/CURRENT /media/OFFSITE/P4 CURRENT/" where the latter was the folder where I stored my backup. (They warned to be sure to end target path names with a slash, and to use tabs between elements.) Then I commented out all of the other backup lines that were supplied there at the bottom of the rsnapshot.conf file. But now this raised a new question. I wanted a mirror -- that is, I wanted the P4 CURRENT folder to match exactly what was in /media/CURRENT. So . . . if I deleted a file from CURRENT, would that file be deleted from the backup P4 CURRENT folder as well? It sounded like I would be saving incremental backups, so I would just be restoring as things were as of a certain time, which was even better -- except it might not give me a filecount I could rely on. I figured I'd just have to try it and see. I found an article by Joe Barr that seemed to confirm this way of seeing the situation. Joe then recommended running "rsnapshot -t daily" (and likewise for weekly etc.) to verify that things would go as intended. I saved rsnapshot.conf and did exactly that. I got errors on lines 27 and 213. The error on line 27 was, "snapshoot_root exists but is not writable." I figured that was because I wasn't running rsnapshot as root. The instructions weren't clear, but apparently this root directory was not going to hold the actual backups, but just some kind of index to them. So I tried again: "sudo rsnapshot -t daily". Now the only error remaining was line 213. It said this:

Backup destination /media/OFFSITE/P4 CURRENT/ must be a local, relative path.

So, OK, as I feared, it was going to see the USB drive as a remote drive. Now I had to figure out what to do about that. Incidentally, this was kind of a hassle; but at the same time I was thinking it was pretty cool that the program had remained substantially the same for years. This was an advantage I had noticed with my old DOS scripts too: once you learned how to do it, you could pretty much use it for decades with few if any major adjustments. But first, getting there. I moved on to a Debian article that spoke of rsnapshot's "extreme simplicity" (cough, cough). OK, it wasn't rocket science. Anyway, my next step, according to that article, was apparently to rewrite my rsnapshot.conf backup lines so that they would refer to a host. They gave this example:

backup root@hostname:/home/ hostname/

But could my external drive have a hostname? I tried this permutation:

backup root@P4-VM:/media/CURRENT /media/OFFSITE/P4 CURRENT/

(P4-VM being the name of my primary computer) and saved rsnapshot.conf with that alteration. But I still got the same error message. I would have loved to continue screwing with this all day, but I was meanwhile getting a funky new problem with Firefox, so I thought I'd better just post a question on this and move along to the next issue. The funky Firefox problem was that, when I hit Ctrl-K to type something into the Google search bar, instead Firefox wanted to move me away from my current page. I looked up and, whoa, the Google search bar was gone. I saved this message as a draft and restarted Firefox. Problem solved! (at least temporarily). Next issue, please. The next issue had actually arisen the previous day, but I was only now able to get back to it and log it. Basically, I wanted to run Second Life. I had taken a look at it before, but it had sounded like it wouldn't run in the 64-bit version of Ubuntu unless you jumped through hoops. Now, however, they had a 64-bit version that I just had to download, unzip, and install. I used "tar -vxf" to unzip it, and then I renamed the newly created folder "SecondLife" and moved it to /home/bin. Second Life didn't install an icon in my Applications, so I right-clicked on my top panel, at the very top of the screen, where the Applications and System menus were, and chose Edit Menus. There, under Applications > Internet, I chose New Item, and I pointed it toward the "secondlife" file within /home/bin/SecondLife (which was where I had installed/renamed the program file after downloading and unzipping). When I clicked on the Applications > Internet > Second Life icon, I got "Window creation error." I went back to Terminal and typed "cd /home/bin/SecondLife". There, I typed ./secondlife. Same result. (Confession: this was my second installation. This one was on the primary computer. The previous night, without taking notes, I installed it on the secondary computer, and it worked well, except that it had now crashed -- completely shut down the computer -- just like the Windows version did. There was plainly a hardware as well as software problem there. But in any case, I was still on the hunt for a stable installation.) The README-linux.txt file said:

Usually this indicates that your graphics card does not meet the minimum requirements, or that your system's OpenGL 3D graphics driver is not updated and configured correctly.

Ubuntu had given me massive problems with the graphics card on the primary computer previously. In fact, I had bought a new one, as indicated earlier in this post, because I could not find any way of making the old one work. Now I had the new one installed and was poised to try again, in a new post.