Destined to dual boot

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but a few weeks ago I broke down and purchased a new laptop. I went with a Thinkpad z60m. My intentions with it, is to run Linux as the primary OS, but because I also plan to use it for work when I’m on the road, I still need to have the ability to boot XP. So the same day I received the laptop, I wiped it and installed a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and Windows XP. This works fine, except for when I miss the boot menu and it goes into Linux and I need to reboot again and try to remember to catch it next time. I have an idea about about a feature Linux should have there, but I will post that some other day.

Over this past weekend I installed VMware server on my home workstation that runs Ubuntu. I was really impressed how easy it was to install and setup. And in no time I had XP installed as a virtual machine. I used this guide to help me with this. The only issue I experienced was that I needed to install xinetd to get vmware server to install properly. But with XP running in a VM, I was able to use it for everything I would need to while on the road.

So last night I wiped the laptop and reinstalled Ubuntu and then installed VMware server. Soon after, installed XP Pro in a virtual machine, and quickly realized there is a problem. Unlike my home workstation, my laptop is and will mostly being connecting via it’s WiFi card. The virtual install does not recognize the wifi card and XP has no network connectivity. Oh man! Now I haven’t researched at all to see if there are ways to make it work, but I really don’t want to jump through hoops to use wifi on XP installed as a virtual machine. So this weekend I’m going to re-do my install so I’m configured to dual boot again.