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Wanting to exploit my latest workstations hardware's fullest potential and commit to some research at the same time, I've grown my desktop from it's humble beginings as a Socket A 750MHz, then Athlon XP 2500+ barton, then Athlon64 3000+ to a full fledged dual-core 3800+ complete with shiny 250gig hard drive and two gigabytes of ram.

For what purpose? Why, virtual machine multiple operating systems of course! Well.. simply put there can be no better cross platform web development experience than co-operatively running both Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD at the same time (although I'm not too sure about running XOrg via a VM for OpenBSD overtop of a host OS, but I digress).

My first task with this beast of a system was to find out which linux distribution worked best with VMWare. Sadly, I was unaware of other excellent virtualization products that may be able to accomplish the same thing (more on that later). Of course the host OS needed to run in 64bit mode (damn Macomedia and their lack of 64bit flash support), and of course the host OS needed to be smp-ready. A pure linux 64bit environment for vmware is actually, not possible. That left my favourite KDE distro, Kanotix, out of the picture. Apparently VMWare requires 32bit libraries around on your system for certain things, and if you don't have them you will not be able to complete the vmware installation. At the time I was not able to figure out how to install 32bit libraries that VMWare required for Kanotix, so I left that distribution for Ubuntu, which was recommended as a host OS on the VMWare website.

I used vmware & ubuntu for awhile, but I felt that the gnome interface was a touch heavy. I snooped a bit and discovered XFCE, a lightwieght window manager with some pretty good features, and I'm sticking with it this very day.

However, one of the biggest flaws in XFCE is the lack of ability to add printers easily. After searching the Internet for what seems liked far too long for a simple task, I finally came across the answer and wanted to post it here:

sudo adduser cupsys shadow
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

That's it. Those two lines above. After typing that, load Mozilla and point it to localhost:631 and follow the prompts. When you get to the point where it asks you for a user name and password, simply provide login inforation as if you were going to use SUDO.

Anyways, part one is done, mainly because the 2.6.17.4 smp-k8 kernel I was compiling is finished. I want to install the kernel and boot it so I can download the version 1.0 release of VMWare server. Enjoy the rest of your day, peepz!