VirtualBox on Ubuntu

For some time now I have been running Windows XP inside Sun's VirtualBox on top of my Ubuntu 8.04 OS on my Dell Inspiron 1420N.

Since writing this a new version of VirtualBox, 2.1.2, has come out, you probably want to use that instead (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads ). It's just that mine works.

Installation was relatively painless. I downloaded the package straight from the VirtualBox site instead of from the apt-get version, which seems to be the best bet immediately, and basically followed all the instructions here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualbox_ubuntu

Now that my book is out more than one Twitter intoxicated colleague has instructed me as to power twitter-mastership, and that I must replace my tired old Twitter offerings.

I searched around and came up with the following procedure, which worked for me on my Ubuntu laptop like a charm, using all Open Source tools.

Edit: Solved! Thanks to the comments of several people, I was able to find the magic sequence of steps necessary to fix my specific situation:

[Be sure to see the more recent update to this article,
VPS! Getting Drupal up and running on a linode (revisited)]

Well, after realizing the limitations of shared hosting for Drupal development, I decided to go with the big boys and use a dedicated server or VPS solution, at least for development. So I can make a multisite install for the docs and I can make subdomains for each development site.

So after perusing various options, I decided for linode. After checking out the various plans, I decided on the Linode 300, and got 50% more disk space by paying for a year.

While I was waiting for my account to be ready (after all today is Thanksgiving: but it still took no more than 40 minutes), I mosied over to ZoneEdit (see excellent tutorial reference below) and signed up for DNS service and domain management (free for the first 5 domains that you add to your account).

In Synaptic I installed cogito (and therefore git), and gitk (gui).

I'm going to follow the advice on the Git Cogito page:

If you want to start to use Git and are considering Cogito, the best way to go about it is to first learn Cogito, then pick up Git commands if you need to do something extraordinary.

For quick introduction to Cogito, follow the Git Crash Courses - they are presenting Cogito commands.

So I cd'd to my project dir and did:

cg init 

This is the equivalent in svn to both creating the repository (which is now local!!! although I can "push" my stuff to a centralized directory somewhere) and doing the initial import. I make the initial comment, save the file and exit).

Then I made a change in a binary document file, and did:

cg commit

Typed in "modifiqué sección 3.6 Ambientes del Usuario" and saved and exited. Then saw my changes: