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I recently purchased a GPS (Garmin 2610) to tote around on motorcycle trips. If you have never tinkered with one - it is VERY cool. Unfortunately the MapSource software that comes with it requires Windows… Ugh.

I’ve run VMWare and QEMU on my Ubuntu box before. VMWare was very nice but a pain to install (granted it’s been awhile so that may have improved). QEMU was very fast but recently it’s been a bit flaky and this time when I tried to run Windows it wouldn’t find my USB mouse. I dug around online but was unable to fix it. I’ve heard about VirtualBox for awhile now and decided to give it a try.

While VirtualBox is free - I did notice they were recently acquired by Sun and now it appears they have two versions: one closed and one open-source. So far I’m very impressed. I ran into some issues installing the OSE version from the Ubuntu repositories. Downloading the .deb file from the VirtualBox site worked much better. Installation went well and I installed Windows XP without a hitch. And most importantly everything works - mouse, keyboard, internet, etc.

So if you are looking for a VM - check it out - they have an extensive list of supported platforms and Linux, Windows and Mac are all supported in one flavor or another. Lifehacker did a recent article covering installation and running Windows apps seamlessly on the Ubuntu desktop.

I always set ColdFusion to NOT run at startup - why have it eating resources when you aren't using it? On Windows I had a few batch scripts to easily kick off ColdFusion. I dug around looking for something similar for Linux... I found a few things which I've added to my wiki in the ColdFusion section.

I basically came up with a very simple bash script:

Save this to a cfstart.sh file or something. Give it executable rights. Then it's just 'sudo ./cfstart.sh'. And of course you can make the same thing to stop the services. I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 so if you are on something different (RedHat) you'll have to change your paths, etc...