Trying Ubuntu 6.10 on VMWare

I haven't been using linux for a while; last time I used it for daily stuff is probably 4-5 years ago at work. My first experience with linux was with Redhat 5.X which I bought from Tattered Cover; and the last time I used linux extensively was with Mandrake 8. Basically my previous experience were on RedHat-derived system using rpm for the package management, which is quite different from Ubuntu. Since then I mostly setup linux for development servers, for running tomcat/jboss, cvs/subversion, etc. So my linux knowledge is really obsolete and not very well verse on the desktop end.

I recently gave Ubuntu a try because I want to explore more on using linux as my daily working environment. I know..I know a lot of people has been using it daily,..I just been away too long, okay? The reason I chose Ubuntu because I just need something simple and I don't want to spend to much time tweaking and configuring the system. I just need something that will let me do what I want to do, which is mostly coding and browsing. I did not do a fresh installation of Ubuntu yet, instead I am giving it a try running on VMWare. I grabbed Ubuntu version 6.10 vmware from here.

I am quite happy with the default vmware image I had downloaded; it have most of the stuff I need. I do not need any specific stuff, since I am using it mostly for development ruby stuff. The only packages that I installed outside the default are: ruby, irb, rdoc, mysql, and full vim support.

Running Ubuntu under VMWare is pretty smooth, the only extra configuration that I have to do are the XOrg configuration for the video card and mouse driver. The video card configuration to allow higher resolution and the mouse driver change is for fixing the slow and jerky mouse response when running under vmware. I wanted to post the links to the information on how to do the video and mouse configuration, but I had lost the links and too lazy to find them again. I can tell you that I found the information from vmware's forum and ubuntu's forum.