2013-Dec-17, Tuesday

"Why do you still care about dual booting? Why don't you just run everything in a VM?"

I gave it a go, I really did. Created a Ubuntu 1110 vm in VirtualBox. Fixed storage size, everything was going well enough. (Ubuntu has a problem with my wireless card, but that's almost traditional at this point.) I was using it for college work so I needed stability and didn't upgrade for a while. Too long it seems. When I went to upgrade the repos had vanished, and for added benefit, the vm lost the ability to use any network connection.

I noticed VirtualBox had an update, and thought, maybe they'll have better drivers. But instead the vm wouldn't even start. I attempted to mount the .vdi filesystem. Discovered the way I knew only worked with Windows vms, but found another method using guestmount. So I mount with guestmount, but seemingly my /home no longer exists!

Frustrated I try running the vm again, and for some unknown reason it actually starts, but the graphics crash and die leaving me with a text-only terminal. Grand, as soon as I remembered my password. I log in, and right there is my /home! I quickly copy everything to a previously set-up shared folder in the host, and exit.

VirtualBox says there's another update available. So I update, and now the vm won't run again, giving me error messages about something disabled in the BIOS. I should have known better.

And this is just another reason why I dislike virtual machines. (And before you start, it's not just VirtualBox, I've had even more problems with VMWare.)

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