Another day with Ubuntu

You know, users have to have a strange mixture of quickness and patience. Like you got to hit the keys to get at the systems boot settings or wait for stuff to download and install. The skillful can do it without a hint of frustration. It is an acquired skill. Been looking for work lately, which requires much the same skill. In my virtual Linuxville abode, I've also been playing with Virtualbox. This is a great program. It allows you to run one operating system as the guest of another. This means that I am running say XP as if it were an application inside of Ubuntu Linux. I could have used an emulator, but they are limited compared to running the full OS. So, this morning I installed XP as a guest virtual machine in Virtualbox which runs on Ubuntu Linux. I actually installed it 3 times because I could not get the mouse to work correctly. It took 3 times before I realized it was not a problem with XP or with Virtualbox or with Ubuntu Linux. The problem was with the Desktop Effects that I had enabled. I saw this in one of the forums while googling for answers. I turned off the desktop effects (no more wobbly windows) and it all worked fine. I just can't wobble and go virtual at the same time, no big deal. Why do this? I no longer have to dual boot which means using one OS or the other. Virtual machines means both OS's running at the same time. Of course this also means sharing resources, if you have less than 512MB of memory things might be a tad bit slow or not run at all. But, having most of what I need in Linux there are only a few things I want that only run in XP. As much as I do not care for MS Internet Explorer, many government agencies have concluded that MS IE is the standard. These government web sites only work correctly with MS IE. Sorry Firefox fans, your gov does not care for security or your access ability. What's the upside to this? Running XP as a virtual machine means that MS does not dominate my computer, to see it in a small window makes me laugh and I can delete the installation with one click, no harm done. You can even fool your friends by running XP full screen, they won't even know Linux is there.
The other thing here is I got a DVD-rom drive. It doesn't burn but it reads so that is a big upgrade to my system. Ubuntu provides many DVD tools but codecs for reading commercial DVD's are found elsewhere on the internet. I'll leave it too you to haggle over legal or illegal. A number of Linux distributions come as a bootable DVD iso. They contain everything, OS, applications, everything. I will get a burner in the distant future. Why not empty your filling hard drive of vulnerable photo collections and music files onto DVD's for safe keeping.
I guess I got to get back to work looking for work, see ya!