William,

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 7:54 PM, you wrote:
> Bill Page wrote:
>> I think it is also useful to increase video memory to the minimum 7
>> Mb. required for seamless mode. I tried this since I usually prefer to
>> run in this mode where the linux system seems to share the same
>> desktop as windows. But I couldn't quite get it to work. Maybe it is a
>> limitation of the window manager?
>
> I don't know if it will work ever.   Regarding video memory, no matter
> what i set when I export the machine, it always resets the video
> memory to 4MB on import.
>

Well, after setting the display memory to 7 Mb. it almost works. The
only problem is that I can't seem to find the Menu bar.  Usually it
would sit just above the Windows start bar (or at the top of the
screen if the linux default is to show the Menu at the top).  Any
windows that are open however remain on the windows desktop.  So I
supposed that this might be a limitation of jwm.

>> I found 'Menu/Utilities/Resize Personal File' very useful because I
>> really wanted to try copying /sage into a writable area so I could
>> install optional packages like fricas-aldor.
>
> Wow, I didn't even know about that!  Did this work.
>

Unfortunately no because the vmdk disk has a maximum fixed size of
only 2 Gb.  It might be better and probably not take much more space
in the compressed file if this disk were at least twice as large.
Also you might consider using expandable disks like .vdi instead of
.vmdk. But I am not sure of the pros and cons of this choice.

Using a Windows file system shared folder does not work because it
does not support linux symbolic links. :-(

In the meantime I created a new .vdi disk as workspace and I am
playing with that. After copying /sage over to this disk I tried
'./sage -upgrade but something here is still read-only it seems...

# ./sage -upgrade
Testing mirrors...
[2 ] modular.fas.harvard.edu          145 [ms]
[0 ] mirror.switch.ch                 358 [ms]
[1 ] mirror.yandex.ru                 690 [ms]
[3 ] sage.scipy.org                   680 [ms]
automatically selected server modular.fas.harvard.edu
(http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sage/)
Downloading packages from http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sage//spkg
http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sage//spkg/standard
Reading package lists...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/sage/local/bin/sage-update", line 315, in <module>
    do_update()
  File "/sage/local/bin/sage-update", line 263, in do_update
    packages = spkg_list('standard')
  File "/sage/local/bin/sage-update", line 229, in spkg_list
    urllib.urlretrieve(web_url, file, reporthook)
  File "/sage/local/lib/python/urllib.py", line 94, in urlretrieve
    return _urlopener.retrieve(url, filename, reporthook, data)
  File "/sage/local/lib/python/urllib.py", line 239, in retrieve
    tfp = open(filename, 'wb')
IOError: [Errno 30] Read-only file system: 'list.tmp'
Error getting new packages!

---

This is just playing and I didn't really expect it to work. And of
course none of this is the kind of thing for which this virtual
machine was really intended. Like you said earlier perhaps there is a
need for somewhat larger version of this sort of virtual machine that
includes enough to actually do some development. But just how big is
too big?  Is it really worth the effort?

Puppy seems pretty solid but kind of in a "world of it's own" when it
comes to installing packages etc. I guess the main advantage of this
puppy is it's extremely small size for a linux distribution.

Regards,
Bill Page.

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