Despite the issues with Virtualbox, I still felt the VM approach was the way to go to run Ubuntu 11.04 with Windows 7 on the Dell Vostro. It seemed as if there was no free virtualization proram available that would do the job, so I went to the VmWare site expecting to pay around $80, as in years past. I didn't like the idea of having to pay just to use my personal system when on the road, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that VmWare now offers a product called VmWare Player that is available free for personal use. I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on the Dell laptop using VmWare Player.
The installation went smoothly and it was easy to see what was going on at all times.
Just as with Virtualbox, VmWare Player "thought" the system lacked the hardware necessary to run Unity. I don't understand well enough how virtualization software works to have a guess as to why that might be. The "real" hardware is certainly adequate. Of course, for this limited purpose the classic Gnome desktop is perfectly adequate, too.
On edit: Found a solution from David Tam on his blog. It seems Unity depends on hardware 3D graphics acceleration, which is not supported in a guest VM. The solution is to switch to a 2D version of the Unity desktop:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-dailythen log out and in again. Voilá!
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-2d-default-settings
Network connectivity from the guest OS was seamless. I plugged a USB stick into a port, and VmWare Player connected it to the Ubuntu instance with no problem.
I shut down the Ubuntu guest from inside the guest, then double-clicked its entry in VmWare Player's list to restart it. All normal.
Good to go.
Next: GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu 11.04
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