Teleidoscope

Thu, May 06, 2010

Daisy Chain

Posted at 7:32 pm MDT to Technology

Tomorrow I fly to Minneapolis to attend my niece's wedding. It would be nice to have my GPS refreshed so that I can get from the airport to the hotel.

To refresh the GPS I have to use a Windows image, even though the TomTom GPS uses Linux internally. Their update toolif not available on Linux.

I have 2 vmware Windows images on my main laptop Ykchaua. I upgraded Ykchaua to Kubuntu 10.4 earlier this week, and downloaded the patch to allow vmware to run on the new OS version. The patch applied smoothly, but I could not bring up the console for the guest images in my browser. Googling indicated the problem is that the 10.4 upgrade also included an upgrade of Firefox to 3.6, which the vmware console plugin doesn't support yet. I tried downgrading Firefox, without much luck.

Fortunately, I have two other machines in the house that can run browsers. I haven't upgraded the browser on my server in a long time, so it should still work with vmware. And a couple of weeks ago I bought a Dell Mini running the Ubuntu Mobin package at the 9.10 level.

The Moblin browser is not exactly Firefox, but it is based on it. It turns out that it is close enough to FireFox 3.5 that I was able to use the Mini as the console to access the Windows images on the big laptop. I was able to refresh the GPS with the TomTom plugged into the big laptop and the TomTom Home app displaying on the Mini's browser.

This is a big relief.

However... this was a much bigger hassle than it would be if TomTom or VMWare or both were more reasonable about supporting Linux. I'm going to Europe for a couple of weeks in the fall, and will not have a Windows machine with me (that's what the Mini is for). If there is a TomTom competitor that will refresh via Linux, I may invest in one. (My Palm Pre has GPS functions, but I don't think it has coverage in Europe).

And I'm going to look into VMWare's competitors, too. I would hate to have to rebuild my images from scratch, but there may be ways to migrate the data from one virtual system to another. I have used VMWare for years (I was a paying customer until they changed their feature mix so that the free server was better suited to my needs), but I have had enough of being semi-supported.

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