Raspberry Pi

I read today that Raspberry Pi had set up its Pixel OS so that it could run under Windows and OS X. Consequently, I downloaded the ISO and ran it successively under VirtualBox. It's certainly lightweight and is very responsive when running in the virtual machine environment. As explained on the Raspberry Pi website:

PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.

Unfortunately, Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica are missing because the licensing agreement only applies to the OS running on a physical Raspberry Pi. No matter, it's still good to be able to experience and work with the software in a virtual environment.

Virtual Computers

I've decided to reformat the hard drive on my Toshiba laptop after 2.5 years of use. Initially I used Microsoft's Virtual PC software to install a virtual Ubuntu machine that turned out to have some virtual hardware issues. Later, I used VMWare's software to create another, rather more successful, virtual Ubuntu machine. Finally, I installed a dual boot system so that I could boot to either Ubuntu or Windows Vista. All of these installations consumed hard disk space, of which there was still plenty, but things were obviously messy and so this is an attempt to tidy things up. I intend to run Portable Unbuntu for Windows (link) which allows you to use Ubuntu from within Windows.

POSTSCRIPT: a day later I'm still trying to download the 439 MB file. Every attempt yesterday failed because the download just hung or because it was impossibly slow. The download today seems to be going better predicting 3 to 4 hours rather than 3 to 4 days! Fingers crossed.

Jaunty Jackalope: The Aftermath

Having installed Ubuntu 9.04, I now have to face the aftermath. As I discovered with the last upgrade, there are consequences and the first one that I've discovered this time around is that there is no sound when I play flash games or flash videos. However, there is sound for music and movies etc. Why this should be, I've no idea but my six year old granddaughter was not amused when she couldn't hear any sounds while playing her favourite Yahoo flash game this afternoon. I'm now under pressure to come up with a solution. I did reinstall some drivers that had been disabled by the installation and had been warned beforehand that "some 3rd party entries in your sources list were disabled. Reenable with 'software properties' tool or your package manager" (which I did). Maybe when I restart the PC tomorrow, all will be well. I doubt it however, and will probably have to begin the inevitable quest for answers. 

This little problem has been coupled with the failure of my laptop to connect to the home Wi-Fi router. It connects at school without any problem but not at home. For some weeks now it has been slow to connect when brought home from school. Initially, it would not recognise that a network was present but after five minutes or so it would and then the connection would remain stable. This latest trouble seems to be an escalation of these earlier difficulties. So far I can't see any obvious differences between 9.04 and the earlier version but I've really not had a chance to look around much. I'd also like to try to run a portable version of Ubuntu within Windows as outlined on this site. The download is 438Mb. so I might try it next weekend. I really do need to clean up the hard drive on my laptop. As well as having a dual boot system (Windows and Ubuntu 8.04), I also have two virtual PCs set up within Vista using Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare. I should just reinstall Vista and start afresh, after all the laptop is now two and half years old and it is full of all sorts of rubbish that I've experimented with briefly and discarded.