The Noble Experiment: Part II (implementation 1)

Okay, so I've been a little distracted lately, what with changing diapers and feeding and just plain enjoying the company of my 1-month-old son.  My distraction, however abruptly ended when, in one week, my Windoze Vista single-handedly:

  • Destroyed my Flash Drive (not kidding... my Lexxar USB drive doesn't even open anymore.  It's just dead).

  • Deleted files I was backing up to a CD on the CD and the HD because it "lost the connection"

  • Wouln't record sound in Macromedia Captivate (perhaps the only program for which I keep windoze around).


With renewed fervor, I installed Ubuntu Feisty 64 bit (thinking this was a good idea because I have an Intel Core 2 Duo.  After two days of "force architecture" headaches. I decided to just put good old 32 bit Ubuntu Studio on the old Acer.  It's awesome.

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First, I ran all of the updates and installed Crossover Office.  I opened Synaptic and added JRE, Flash Plugin, and Adobe Reader.  Then with excitement, trepidation and fear in my heart, I added Virtualbox.

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The Package installer was pretty slick.  I just clicked on it, and let it go.

After I ran the installer, I added myself to the Vbox Users group under "Users and Groups".  Then, I restarted the system, set up a new box, and popped in my win2k disc (you really didn't expect me to mount Vista again did you??).  Anyway, I nstalled the vbox guest additions to get 32 bit color depth in win2k and installed Fireworks (or tried).  It turns out that I needed SP4.  No problem!  I downloaded SP4.  Then I installed Fireworks.

Voila!

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Then, I used the how to at http://luiscosio.com/how-to-dreamweaver-and-flash-8-running-on-ubuntu-dapper to install Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, through Crossover Office.  Fireworks actually works in crossover, but there's some functionality lost.  For those features that don't work in Crossover, I can open FW8 in my Virtualbox.

Here's a shot of Flash 8 in Crossover.

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The current challenge I am now facing is getting my screen resolution in Ubuntu to a widescreen format.  My monitor, for example calls for 1440x900.  I've tried several suggestions from "How To"s newsgroups, etc. and I've had every result from no change at all to a complete loss of my monitor necessitating a login in the failsafe terminal to recover my old 1024x768 resolution.  Any ideas??

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