I spent the better part of this weekend trying to get Linux and Windows to play nicely together. I’m much more comfortable in Linux than I am at Windows, but I need both: Linux for development, and Windows to deal with all the other office productivity stuff. After I started running into frustrating Windows-specific issues, I realized that Linux-like workarounds on Windows just weren’t enough for me. So I repartitioned my hard disk, installed IBM’s Open Client for Linux, and switched over. 

It wasn’t easy to get VMware up and running. I saw more Blue Screens of Death than I had in the past year. It was frustrating switching back and forth, trying to figure out the right combination of drivers so that I could use VMware to run an existing Windows XP installation. After I installed the VMware SCSI drivers, my SATA drive finely worked.

Audio wasn’t enabled by default, but after I set that up, even Dragon NaturallySpeaking worked without a hitch. So now, I’m dictating into Windows, which is running in Linux. This makes me happy. =)