Col. Panic* arm-wrestled into submission

I'm living la vida cross-platform, and I like it, like it, like it. Presently, my Dell is running Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is running Parallels, and Parallels is running Windows XP. It may seem like a house of cards, but in practice, it lets me take advantage of the power, security and flexibility of Linux (not to mention the great open source software and tools available for it), while still being able to use Windows for the applications I depend upon that aren't available for Linux (e.g., iTunes). It's not perfect (this arrangement does not support my iPhone, for example, and there doesn't appear to be a way I can boot directly into Windows XP in this configuration), but I'm excited by its potential. And it's another way to deal with my Mac-envy. ;)

NERD ALERT: This rest of this post summarizes what it took to get this set up. If the preceding paragraph felt too techie, you probably just want to skip it.

*Okay, so in reality I only encountered a kernel panic once in the process of installing Ubuntu (the "Feisty Fawn" release) on my home PC, but it turned out to be a lot more technical that I'd have hoped to get Ubuntu running, primarily because I was trying to use an external boot device. The trick had to do with correctly configuring the GRUB boot loader to reference the drive, and it turns out that the standard GRUB settings created by the Ubuntu installation process are not correct for external devices. There furthermore appear to be some counter-intuitive interactions between GRUB and your machine's BIOS settings for boot order. The BIOS boot sequence defines how these drives are enumerated, and GRUB uses hard-coded references to the drive sequence, so that (1) you have to have the BIOS and GRUB settings in sync, and (2) changing the BIOS boot sequence will cause GRUB's load process to fail. Although the problem is understandably technical, let's just say that this approach seems inelegant, trapped (by requirements to support legacy devices and configurations) in the terse, command-line oriented world of PC computing circa 1990. Why not just have a BIOS-based menu that pops up with all of the bootable OSes available to the machine, with descriptive names for each of the boot options? (My Dell has something similar, but it identifies devices, not bootable hard-drive partitions, so if you have multiple bootable partitions on a drive, you're back to dealing with GRUB.)

With Ubuntu installed, my next task was to get Parallels running. The primary challenge there was that I began this process with only 512MB of RAM. I did, in fact, succeed in getting Ubunutu-running-Parallels-running-WinXP working in that configuration, but it was painfully slow. I've since added another to 2GB of RAM, and now things are performing reasonably well. My remaining challenges with Parallels include figuring out how to configure its full screen mode to use my secondary monitor, instead of my primary one, and crossing my fingers that the Parallels folks will add iPhone support to Parallels Workstation for Linux. (They've already succeeded in doing so for Parallels Desktop for Mac, so hopefully I'm not wishing in vain.)

Right now, I'm considering my set up to be a platform (1) for testing whether this configuration will meet my needs going forward and (2) to address the malware infection with my original Windows installation. If there are other big a-ha's on either front, I'll write about them here.