Ubuntu disaster

Previously, I had blogged that installing VMWare Server on Ubuntu would be no problem because I had installed it before on CentOS and it worked beautifully. Oh, cruel fate! Not only did it not go well but I had to reinstall Ubuntu from scratch. But first, a little of the backstory...

First off, I downloaded the tarball from VMWare, extracted, and installed from source. It went flawlessly, Next, I fired up VMWare Server and tried running one of my VMs. The guest VM was really slow. What's going on here? I did some googling and tried a few things but had no luck. My instinct was to turn off the host OS's graphical effects but I didn't do that for some reason.

OK, fine. I'll uninstall VMWare and then install the packages from Synaptic. Maybe they'll be optimized for Ubuntu. Well, they were but they also broke my XServer so that my graphics fell back to Windows 3.1 levels (aka VGA). The guest VM under VMWare ran at the correct speed but at the cost of messing up the host OS graphics. Grrr. I tried reinstalling the ATI drivers from Envy and the xserver-xgl packages but had no luck. I tried uninstalling VMWare but no luck.

Finally, in a fit of desperation early this morning, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu. After all, I had ironed out the kinks with configuring it already so it should go smoothly, right? It HAS NOT gone smoothly. I'm actually on my second reinstall since last night. This time, however, I have written down every step I had made in the configuration since I started. I'll post those up here if it makes sense.

I'm heading down the path of being a VMWare/Ubuntu/ATI hater. If I can't get this $#**#/ computer stable by next week, I'm going back to boring but stable XP for at least another year. I don't have time for this foolishness. By next year I'll have a new laptop, new graphics card, and Ubuntu will probably have released a new version.

A piece of advice...if you're in the office today you'd best avoid me since I feel like my temper is on a hair trigger!