Marco Steinhäuser

After publishing my last blog post about switching to Ubuntu, I took a short break for a while. I had a few problems:

• I couldn’t get the VPN running as my company was using a proprietary protocol.
• I couldn’t find a good Exchange client replacement under Linux.
• My company had bought me an iPhone and iTunes was not available on Linux.

I came up with a solution to bypass these problems. I installed Oracle’s (Sun’s) VirtualBox OSE from the sources on my Ubuntu installation, and then added Windows 7 to it. Everything worked well, except for the USB connection. Googling the problem, I found VirtualBox OSE doesnt support USB on the virtual machine.

I decided to try the proprietary version of VirtualBox. VirtualBox OSE didn’t de-install at first attempt, so I had to remove it via the command line:

$ sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-ose

After that, I downloaded and installed the proprietary version of VirtualBox. Hooray! It supported USB and recognized my iPhone as a USB device. All systems were now go!

The process of switching over to Ubuntu continues…stay tuned for more of my experiences.

If you are in business, your companies’ IT policy is perhaps to run Microsoft products like Windows OS only. Although you might have a bit of freedom in this manner (let’s say because you are presenting on Open Source software fairs and need to run a Linux for this case) the switch might be not that easy thinking about Microsoft Exchange, Skype, VPN, Microsoft Office and so on. For me, it is really fun working on Linux and I would like to switch over completely as soon as possible. That’s why I ran Kubuntu as a parallel operating system.

Somehow, I got rid of running KDE on my Ubuntu installation and so I decided to install the Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) on a Gnome basis and I was really surprised about it’s simple handling. By the way: Gnome was suspect to me all the times I tried it before. Today I believe it was only about a simple and stupid marketing effect: I didn’t like the combination of brown, purple and orange on the desktop…

So now, let’s beginn with the Skype installation.
As you might know, Skype is proprietary software but obviously everybody in IT uses it. Nevertheless, the installation on Ubuntu is possible even including the update services. First of all you have to implement the Medibuntu sources to your sources.list file running this command on the terminal:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
--output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update


As a next step, install the Skype application:

sudo aptitude install skype


Despite Skype is only provided with version 2.1 on Linux, you are done mate! Somehow you will be connected to your colleagues, friends, etc. in this first step. More to follow.