FishermansEnemy

Maybe it's because I'm trying to do "power user" stuff, but Ubuntu and my HP laptop are not giving me an easy time.

Problem the first:

Randomly on boot my HP Laptop will decide that when it is docked it will not enable the wired network connection. The only fix I've found so far is to keep re-booting while undocking the machine and switching the cable between the dock and the laptop. Apparently the BIOS option for WLAN/LAN switching may be causing this, so I'll have to give that a go when I'm brave enough to restart it again.

Problem the second:

And this one is a doozie! I'm running Ubuntu 10 on my laptop so I don't have to deal with crappy XP and can actually get some work done. As a number of tools my company use are on windows I have been given access to a nifty virtual XP desktop on our ESX cluster so I can use said tools. So far so good. I can connect via RDP and that works fine, but I need to use a USB webcam with windows live communicator for some video conferences. Can't use Terminal Server Client to do that so I thought I'd install vmware-view client as this is supported on the windows version of the software.

Over I head to the vmware website and lo-and-behold there is no Linux vmware-view client. That's kinda disappointing, but fret ye now, the open source community has created the vmware view open client. On it goes, I can now connect to my virtual machine ... and ... there is no support for USB device transfer in this software.

Damnit

So now I have to find a way of getting my Linux USB device connected to my virtual windows machine. It's not looking good.