Dell Inspiron 6400 Setup Notes

After almost five years with an old Inspiron 8100, the writer is now tapping on the new keyboard of the Inspiron 6400. This is the overall customization strategy:

• Leverage years of file management habits and copy thousands of data files over to the new machine.

• Connect newly installed applications and Virtual Machines to these data files.These are the current known issues with this strategy:

• Microsoft Office had to be installed twice (so far) once on a virtual machine (using the default stuff from Microsoft) and once on the real machine (using a very small selection of applications). For you lawyers out there, this is the MSDN version of Office (hope this disclosure helps my case).

• Windows Firewall does its job so well, it must be mentioned that an exception for File and Printer Sharing must be made. Once this is done, the Windows XP virtual machine is able to mount a mapped drive pointing at the files in the host machine. This article came in handy as well: “Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts.”

• Ubuntu desktops are too small on my machine (1680×1050). Playing with xorg.conf produced nothing recognizable to me. This means falling back to Virtual Linux servers and using eclipse on the host machine and SftpDrive.

• Speaking of 1680×1050, I was ‘forced’ to download several hundred new, scenic desktop backgrounds for this widescreen resolution at interfacelift.com.

• There are what seem to be Windows-Key issues related to Virtual PC. Under File > Options > Keyboard there may be something useful.

• Visual Studio 2005 has Code Access Security issues when loading Project data from a mapped drive. This article for Visual Studio 2003, “How Do I Allow my Visual Studio .NET Projects to Run from a Network Location?,” works for 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration tool. How about this as well for .NET 2.0: “How to: Grant Permissions to Folders and Assemblies.”

• One Virtual PC annoyance is addressed in “Changing the default location the Virtual PC uses for virtual machines.”

• The concept of the profile is very important when moving Firefox and Thunderbird data to a new machine. It was so easy after I stopped making it so hard. Is it possible to move this data from Windows to Linux and vice versa?The new Dell hardware makes it possible to have several copies of a Windows XP virtual machine crammed full of Microsoft development stuffing (differencing disks and undo disks feel too brittle). This means Microsoft can have its way with these virtual machines, ravishing the registry, while the actual host machine is relatively cool and clean. Of course my Linux virtual boxes will be there humming along…

rasx()