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I was so tired this morning I had to pay homage to the coffee gods as a survival mechanism. Luckily, this is a tactic that works extremely well due to the fact that I don’t drink coffee regularly. One of the nice things about working downtown is that there’s coffee nearby, no matter which direction you travel.

When I started at the new gig, they gave me a Dell laptop with Windows, which makes sense because it’s an Exchange/Office shop. This would’ve worked out fine, except that some of the tools that you use in Windows are harder to automate than the equivalent tools in *nix. (Okay, maybe that’s not true if you’re a Windows scripter, but I’m not, so let’s just assume that nobody else is either…) Solution: install VMware on the laptop and run Linux inside of a VM session. This works surprisingly well, even on a Pentium-M laptop. My only complaint was that it took way too long to completely shutdown the laptop - you’d have to wait for Linux to shutdown inside of the VM, then you’d have to wait for Windows to shutdown, and since most of the system RAM was being dedicated to the VM guest, the Windows shutdown process was even slower than normal.

Which brings me to solution #2: turn the Linux VM image into the laptop’s primary operating system, and turn the Windows installation on the laptop into a VM image. You’d think this would be relatively easy, given access to the necessary imaging tools (such as Symantec Ghost, g4u, and Partition Magic). As it turned out, turning a VM image of a Linux system into a physical installation is very easy. Turning a Windows physical installation into a VM image is not as easy, and as of now I still haven’t been able to do it. Fortunately, VMware has a solution for this called the P2V assistant. Unfortunately, you can’t get your hands on a copy without either having a VMTN subscription or by calling a VMware sales monkey to beg for a trial copy. As it currently stands, I’m happily running Linux on the laptop and the original Windows install is squirreled away in a Ghost image until I’m able to get my hands on a current version of P2V Assistant.

The moral of this story is that it is possible to use Linux on a laptop in an Exchange/Office environment. Oh, and Ubuntu rocks as a desktop/laptop OS (more on that later).