I am moving away from one of my clients, this is always sad in some respects but being the eternal optimist I look on the bright side. This client is one of the few who has a custom made windows application that will not run under linux. In preparation for this event I have finally installed linux on one of my desktops and do not need to worry about compatibility issues. But just to be on the safe side I decided to install VirtualBox.
I am not a fanboi of any OS and will pick the best one for the job. I use Centos on all the servers I install because it does the job without any fuss and never gets in the way. I am grateful to RedHat for developing it in the first place but their support charges are way over the top. I have wanted to go with them a number of times but as I do all the support legwork myself the costs far outweigh the advantages for me personally.
When it comes to the desktop I have attempted to use Fedora a couple of times but it was just far too experimental for my purposes. I wasn’t prepared to spend days looking for fixes and googling each and every hardware issue I had. I first used Ubuntu somewhere in the 7 series and was quite impressed. It looked good and worked fairly well. But wireless networking was a nightmare and this pretty much killed it for me before I even started.
When version 8.04 LTS came out, don’t ask me what the name of it was, may have been “heaving hussy” or something. I gave it a try “again” and with the pretty effects and WiFi that worked on my Vaio I was all set to move over. However some of my XP based software just wouldn’t work. I had spent a day or so getting Warcraft working under wine most successfully so it wasn’t exactly from lack of effort on my part.
Anyway, back to the point. I have just installed the latest release of Ubuntu on my Sony laptop and went to install VirtualBox and it told me that I had an unresolvable conflict with LibQT4-network on a fresh install ( I just download the fresh iso). I did a quick google and found nothing immediately and was about to give up. This was just an experiment and I didn’t have a day to waste playing at the moment. I then thought, lets just run the updater and try again…
This worked. So to cut a long story short (ish)
If you want Virtualbox to work on a fresh install of Ubuntu, run the updater first and get the latest version of all packages.
Leave a Reply