Greedy for Operating Systems...

I knew when I began to make and modify my Linux box that I was inevitably going to encounter quite a few potential problems when it came to compatibility and getting devices or programs to work with this machine. In truth Linux actually plays quite well with Microsoft and Mac devices, as it'll recognize any formatting that a flash drive or external hard drive might have. When it comes to getting it the other way around however, unless the system has installed special drivers, ext3 or ext4 formats tend to be unsupported. For both this reason, and because of a Windows boot sector conflict with my GRUB 2 bootloader, I decided that the oft used dual-boot solution wasn't for me. Sure Linux offers Wine for running a variety of Windows programs, but there seem to be a few programs that don't play nicely in wine. In the end it was actually the necessity for getting my girlfriends LG Pocket Photo printer to work with an Android device (we both use iPhones) that led me to experiment with VirtualBox. This was basically opening the floodgates. Within a week I had installed Windows and Mac OS in addition to the aforementioned Android.



Some observations so far: This isn't perfect. The "guest" machines do run rather slowly, (with the exception of Android, due to it being made for smartphones maybe?). Mac OS in particular tends to have problems with freezing up and won't shutdown by itself, requiring me to "turn the power off" through VirtualBox. Despite these slight flaws, in theory, I have 4 functioning computers set up for running pretty much ANY software all slotted into one 14 inch laptop... Sweeet.

An interesting problem I noted however when attempting to re-arrange some partitions, was that apparently I can't download GRUB2 from within Korea, I'll be checking in to this, but for some reason when trying grub-install I got an error message referencing a Korean URL. Hopefully I'll get my bootloader fixed...

...

Hah, got it fixed while I was editing this... a few other gremlins too. This really does seem to be a good option, however I'm considering downgrading my Windows install from 7 to XP (or XP based server 2003). I can't find much documentation of any programs being made that will work with Win 7 better than they do XP; plus with all the controversy around XP no longer being supported by Microsoft I figured I'd remind myself why this was such an awesome OS in the first place. As a side note I'm having no regrets over my choice in Linux or in this implementation. In the future I might experiment with newer LTS releases or different desktop environments, but for now I've got bigger fish to fry... Like a motorcycle that desperately needs a wash... And an actual fish maybe... for dinner.