Ubuntu 10.04.1 on Virtual PC

I am writing this post from my regular Windows 7 while watching Ubuntu running in a separate window as a guest OS inside a Windows Virtual PC.

Microsoft does not officially support anything but Windows XP+ as a guest OS but some of its well known employees tell the world how to work around it. My first attempt was not successful and fresh installed Ubuntu would not start. I scaled back to the original instruction on Installing Ubuntu on Windows Virtual PC that Scott referred to in his post and it worked. Either I did not do something right the first time, or it's not exactly predictable for Ubuntu to install correctly on Virtual PC, or it was the network device that I first time mapped to a physical card (as was suggested by Scott) and the second time left in a default "Internal Network" state, or maybe it was the memory (I only let the VM see 1GB of RAM first time and then sacrificed one more just in case Ubuntu doesn't like greedy users).

I powered it down and brought back up two times in a row just to make sure it was not a random accident. Looks like it wasn't. It's running now.

Update [09/24 00:15]: it does not only work, it now talks TCP/IP with the host. Tomorrow it should sing "Hello, World!".

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If reading this you wonder why I needed it in the first place I can try to elaborate just a little bit. For the last few months I felt like missing something. That itchy feeling was with me all the time, but as much as it was irritating and annoying it was distant and vague. Only recently I figured what it was and the discovery surprised me quite a little. Apparently, all this time I missed working with the code, working with the code hands on, doing something very real myself, doing something not only real but also meaningful, something worth my energy put into it. Something I haven't done before.

You know how they say in sales commercials: "There has never been a better time".

Over the last few years I collected a few ideas and I finally felt like giving one of them a try. And to spice it up I want it done on Linux, CouchDB, JavaScript, and no backend per se. And if I end up needing backend it will be RoR or node.js (meaning Geddyor Express) or whatever.

I needed Ubuntu to start hacking. I should not have waited. Whatever it is you would rather be doing instead or on top of what you do you should not wait either.