There’s no doubt about the fact that, for me, Lucid 64-bit is a vast improvement over Karmic 32-bit – in terms of performance, anyway. I’m still having a few teething problems, but happily they’re minor. One issue I have (again) is with VirtualBox and USB support. I had to install the 64-bit Karmic version of VirtualBox (3.1.6), since the Lucid version isn’t released yet. After importing my virtual machine, it booted up fine, but all the USB devices were greyed out! A seemingly familiar scenario, but I checked all the usual things, and it eventually became apparent that version 3.1.6 of VirtualBox has problems with USB support in Lucid 64-bit. Read more…

UPDATE 4th MAY, 2010: If you’re having problems with USB devices in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64-bit, then check this post instead.

The only thing that stopped me from completely deleting Windows from a hard drive partition, was the fact that I needed it for some proprietary telephone system programming software. Due to the weird USB drivers that the software uses, I couldn’t get it working under Wine, so decided to try and get it working on a virtual PC through VirtualBox.

I had already successfully installed Windows 7 (more of that in a future post), and all was working ok. So I installed the software, plugged in the USB cable hopefully and waited. Nothing happened – and Windows couldn’t even see the USB device. I had the Guest Additions installed, so clicked on the Devices -> USB menu in the little VirtualBox menu at the bottom of the screen and, although I could see my devices listed, they were all greyed out (or “grayed out” if you’re of the American English persuasion). Read more…