RIP my English blog

In the last 12 months I've managed to post whopping 14 articles into my English-language blog. That's six and a half times less than what I published on my main, Estonian-language site. Since the new Blogger has labels that you can use for filtering the content, I've decided to move all the articles over to wolli.blogspot.com and tag them as "english".

ppmotskula.blogspot.com is now officially obsolete.

Skype in parallel universes

Jaanus Kase bragged about running four [different] Skypes in one box, and Jim Courtney asked how would someone come up with (and have the time for) doing this.

Well, there are several reasons I could come up with quickly (in no particular order).

• Testing. You may want to test the new versions of Skype (and/or Skype Extras) every now and then. On Windows, uninstalls are almost never complete and clean, so if you don't like your machine's registry and other places getting clogged with all sorts of leftovers of the stuff you've taken a look at. Furthermore, "scientifically" good tests must be done in controlled environment, and a system contaminated with random remnants of previously installed software would not exactly qualify.
• Features. Skype does not offer identical feature sets on Windows, Mac, and Linux. While the Windows is still the most-used desktop operating system worldwide, there is a growing number of people who prefer Mac OS X or Linux. So if you're one of the "heretics" but still want to occasionally use the newest features that have only made it into Skype for Windows thus far, firing up a virtual machine with Windows on it would make sense.
  
• Hack value. Hey, it's a freaking cool hack, isn't it? ;)

As I do have to test new stuff, and as I don't boot my computers into Windows (I've been on Ubuntu Linux for nearly two years, and see no reason to switch back — but that's another story), I have a VMware Server and a bunch of (licensed) virtual OSes installed. So it takes me less than 5 minutes to unzip and boot into a "virgin" Windows XP or Vista without ever having to go through the entire re-installation of the operating system.

One thing I can not do (yet) is using Skype for Mac OS X on my Linux box. Apple's licensing policy does not support running OS X on virtual hardware, and although several hackers claim they've got OS X to run in VMware on Linux, I've not taken the trouble.

Installing Vista in VMware on Ubuntu

After several failures and a lot of web browsing, I finally succeeded in installing Windows Vista Business in VMware Server running on Ubuntu 6.10.
At first, I just created a new VMware virtual machine with default settings for guest OS Windows Vista (experimental). Booted it from Vista DVD, answered a couple of questions, entered the product key, started the installation and got as far as "Expanding files (0%)". On the next morning, the installer was still expanding files at 0% (the process had not crashed, it just failed to do anything useful).

Then, I tried to play with the virtual machine settings. Googling around led me to a configuration with 512 MB RAM, 20 GB IDE HDD, NAT networking, and 1 CPU. Booted from Vista DVD, and ended up exactly where I did before.

Finally, I resorted to a workaround provided in VMware's Guest Operating System Installation Guide (with regard to Vista beta; I was using the officially released version, though), installed Windows XP Pro into a clean virtual machine, and then upgraded that to Windows Vista without any further major problems.

However, I had to conclude that Vista's installer is designed by morons — just as those of any previous Windows versions. While all the Linux installers I've come across recently ask all necessary questions first, and then allow you to safely go to have a cup of coffee, a lunch, or even sleep, the "geniuses" at Redmond have put a question about whether to allow automatic updates or not somewhere halfway down the installation process. Smart, eh?