So I botched my triple boot of Windows XP , Vista, and Ubuntu on my laptop. It wasn’t that it didn’t work, it’s that my partition sizes were wrong. I totally underestimated how much space XP would need to run with everything that I use. I guess I didn’t realize how much software I actual install in XP.

On top of that, I created my largest partition as a FAT32 share so all my OSes could see it. But it turns out that Windows XP does everything considerably slower on that drive. So the huge enterprise java application that resides there takes forever to do anything with. It is even slow to open up a file explorer and search through that partition. When I use it in Linux, it seems fine. Could be because I used gparted during the Ubuntu installation to partition the drive, and Windows doesn’t like that. But I have a coworker who has a similar problem and he partitioned with Partition Magic.

In a completely separate debacle, last night I was trying to get a clean install of Apache2 on Ubuntu when I somehow removed all my packages, including network-manager (of “connecting to my WPA encrypted home wi-fi network” fame). I was running a “sudo apt-get remove” script, but the targets were only apache based, so I have no clue why it started removing everything. If I hadn’t stopped it, I really think it would have removed every package that was installed. I guess I need to boot from the Ubuntu CD to get things repaired… but with the state of my partitions it might be worth it to give the whole installation another shot.

I’ve found that I will never use Windows Vista, so there’s really no point in making space for it. I gave it 10 GB, and it used up every last bit of it just for the typical install. I also gave XP 10 GB, but I should have given it 20 GB. It started complaining yesterday that it didn’t have enough space.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about a shared partition. Maybe I’ll just have to resort to doing all my work Java development on Windows XP and all my web development projects on Ubuntu. I need Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and possibly Tomcat/Groovy/Grails installed in Ubuntu.

My problem with Ubuntu’s installation process is that I don’t really know whether to use the Synaptic Package Manager thing or do it from the command line with “apt-get”. I think I’m going to start from scratch. It would probably be safe to just split my hard drive space 40/40/20, with 40% for each OS and another 20% in a FAT32 share for anything I need to pass between them. I’m not planning on making this a music/movie/pic laptop since I have plans for a file server at home.

Okay, so Ubuntu rocks!

I’ve moonlighted with Linux in the past (Slackware, Suse, & Fedora), but I’ve always ended falling back to the old crotchety standby, Windows. I kept Slackware running on my extra PC for web development for a long time, but eventually I had to scrap it for parts. But now that I’ve got Ubuntu (7.0.4 Feisty Fawn) running on my new laptop, I don’t know that I’ll ever go back.

Sure, there are things that it won’t work for. My current work project pretty much requires a Windows platform to run on, so I’ll have to keep a Windows partition. Actually, I’m planning on setting up a triple boot with XP and Vista (why not?).

So I am still looking for something that will work as well as Launchy on my Ubuntu install. I’ve tried Gnome Deskbar-applet with no success yet; I’ve also tried Katapult, but it won’t pick up the hotkeys (Alt+Space should launch it). I think I may have problems with my hotkeys all around on the laptop with Ubuntu, because my Gmail hotkeys won’t work either. So that is the main thing I have to research right now.

But I’ll tell you the coolest thing about this crossover so far: BERYL. It’s awesome. Turns your desktop manager into a 3D cube with dragable windows. Adds sweet effects to lots of stuff, and makes working in the Ubuntu OS a very smooth and excellent experience.