The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.
…
[Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.
"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing."
Why Haggard chose to act out in that manner is something Haggard and his advisers are trying to discern, Ralph said.
I’ll hazard a guess…because he’s gay. This is the guy after all, who said he didn’t even know the guy he was paying for sex, right up to the moment the answering machine tapes came out. Not your most trustworthy source, this guy.
On the other hand, this could also just be the usual ex-gay double-speak too. Haggard isn’t gay, because according to ex-gay dogma nobody really is anyway. He’s just in therapy to control his acting out behavior. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. His acting out was on the order of seeking sex under less then wholesome circumstances. But that was because of denial, not homosexuality.
Sex is one of the strongest of all instincts, and you can’t bottle it up inside a person without damaging consequences. Haggard’s adventures with the prostitute were eminently predictable. You see that kind of behavior all the time in married, closeted homosexuals. The ex-gay solution is merely to bottle it up even more. So it looks like Haggard’s first step out of therapy is taking him right down the same old road he was on before he got caught with his back being rubbed. No wonder they were encouraging him to stay out of the ministry.
What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.
Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.
…
Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.
I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion. But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:
The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.
So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.
(Emphasis mine) And there it is. At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women. And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used. But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not. You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living. You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is. But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people. Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not. And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people? Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons.
One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for. And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing. Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church. But there is no excuse from ignorance today.
And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals. It’s startling to look at sometimes. The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have. Why? For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world. But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings. They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads.
What have we been doing to these people all this time? What have we done? What have I done?
…I think I have enough material now, both in the cartoon archive, and in stuff I never posted to the site because it wasn’t topical when I did it, to consider doing my first book of political cartoons.
A co-worker who also cartoons recently showed me a book he’d done, using a printer who takes small job orders (100 or so copies). For the past several years I’ve been gathering material on how to go about getting an ISDN number and such. The mainstream media won’t review stuff by self published creators, but this is a new world now, and I can simply bypass the commercial publishing world if I want to. And there are online sellers, big ones including Amazon.Com, who will take orders for books from self publishers. Scribus is an open source page layout program that I keep hearing good things about. My co-worker used it to do his book.
Typically, a book of political cartoons is just one page after another of recent cartoons, with the occasional explanatory text written beside them. What I want to do is something more like what Herblock did with his books. Every four years, during a presidential election cycle, Herblock would publish a book of his previous four years work, organized into chapters by topic that started out with his really killer essays about the times he was living in. He was every bit as good a writer as he was a cartoonist. I may not be at his level, but I’ve always thought that was the way to do a book of political cartoons.
I probably need to re-work some of my early stuff, and that will take some time. I need to figure out how to divide the material into chapters, and what I want to say in the essays for each one. But I’ve already got a title for it, and a cover page. It’ll be the cartoon I did for March 4, 2002, reworked a tad to fit on a book cover. The title of the book will be Deviant Signs.
NEWS ITEM: Michigan Court Of Appeals Says No To Benefits For Same Sex Couples.
The judges said that a the ban on same sex marriage, voted into the state constitution back in 2004, applies to domestic partner benefits. "The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
This wasn’t exactly what the voters were being told would happen back in 2004. Marlene Elwell, campaign director for the Amendment was emphatic, stating that "This has nothing to do with taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman." But that was double talk. The clear intent of the groups working to pass the amendment, was to insure that same sex couples could only be legal strangers in the eyes of the law, and the language of the amendment reflected that intent precisely. When they told the voters that their intent wasn’t to take benefits away, they were only telling a half truth, if that. Their intent, was to take everything away from same sex couples that the law might legally provide…not benefits specifically.
Their rhetoric during the campaign was tactical and dishonest and it worked. And the proof of that is their silence now, as the rights they kept insisting would not be taken from same sex couples are now being stripped relentlessly away by the courts, who are only following the plain and unambiguous language of the amendment.
A January news article in The Christian Science Monitor quotes Ian Douglas, professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., on the troubles now facing the Episcopal church as it continues to schism over homosexuality. Observing that the Anglican Communion’s tradition of inclusion is being put to the test, Douglas goes on to say, "Part of the problem with the Anglican community today is that the different constituencies are so convinced of their own truth, that they say they have no need of others – and that goes against Anglican tradition."
In other words, the blame for the hostility toward homosexuals now raging through the Episcopalian Church is at least partly the fault of gay people, who are too convinced of their own truth to listen to others. On the other hand, you could argue that gay people have been beaten over the head with the viewpoint of people like the Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola (who supports a proposed Nigerian law which would ban gay people in that country from so much as sitting down together in a public restaurant) for generations. What part of their own truth, should gay people renounce in order to accommodate others like Akinola?
Every time the homophobes put one of those all embracing anti-same sex marriage amendments forward, the ones that ban Any legal recognition whatsoever of same sex couples, they take pains to reassure the public that their amendment isn’t intended to strip everything away from same sex couples. Oh no…they say…it’s only about keeping marriage between a man and a woman. The gays will still have rights too, they claim. Just not the right to marry.
Public universities and governments can’t provide health insurance to the partners of gay employees without violating the state constitution, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Friday.
A three-judge panel said a 2004 voter-approved ban on gay marriage also applies to same-sex domestic partner benefits.
"The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
The decision reverses a 2005 ruling from an Ingham County judge who said universities and governments could provide the benefits.
A constitutional amendment passed by Michigan voters in November 2004 made the union between a man and a woman the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose." Those six words led to a fight over benefits for gay couples.
Gay couples and others had argued the public intended to ban gay marriage but not block benefits for domestic partners.
But the court said: "It is a cornerstone of a democratic form of government to assume that a free people act rationally in the exercise of power, are presumed to know what they want, and to have understood the proposition submitted to them in all of its implications, and by their approval vote to have determined that the proposal is for the public good and expresses the free opinion of a sovereign people."
In Michigan, Citizens for Protection of Marriage repeatedly stated in its literature and in press interviews that a ban on same–sexmarriage would not affect domestic partnership benefits.
“This has nothing to do with taking benefits away,” Marlene Elwell, campaign director, told USA Today on October 15, 2004. “This is about marriage between a man and a woman.”
The campaign’s communications director was equally adamant. The proposal would have no effect on gay couples, Kristina Hemphill told the Holland Sentinel. “This amendment has nothing to do with benefits,” she said.
To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."
And that’s standard operating procedure for the religious right: lie through your teeth…Jesus won’t mind if you’re doing it for him.
But look at what the judges decided. Even though the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of the amendment supporters was telling the voters one thing, the voters are assumed to have meant to vote for what they were repeatedly told they weren’t voting for anyway.
And, in a sense, you can’t blame the judges here, because it’s right fucking there in the text of the amendment: "…the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose." What part of "For Any Purpose" didn’t you understand when you voted?
And you have to figure that a lot of voters Did intend this result, even as they were nodding their heads and saying to themselves yes, yes, yes…this isn’t taking anything at all away from the homos… Hypocrisy is how you save face, when you’re busy putting a knife in your neighbor’s back. But given the results in Arizona, I expect that just enough people were fooled by the rhetoric, that the amendment might have failed if they saw clearly what it was they were voting for. Maybe.
And of course, that’s exactly why the religious right lies.
Adventures In Home Ownership: Hey, Where’d That Leak Come From…?
I feel lucky to have caught it. I had shirts that I’d left in the dryer overnight, and I went down into the basement to flip the dryer on for a few minutes to de-wrinkle them so I could wear one. When I came back about ten minutes later to take them out I noticed a trickle of water across the floor that hadn’t been there ten minutes before. It was coming from the bottom of the hot water heater.
Learning about hot water heaters was another one of those things I’d never really appreciated, having spent nearly my whole life in rental apartments: just like a roof, the damn things will eventually start leaking. But unlike a roof, a hot water tank will leak with the force of your municipal water system pressure behind it. I’ve heard stories about those things failing all of a sudden and flooding basements, and between that and supply hoses on washing machines (which I’ve also heard these stories about) it’s kept me very nervous about my basement. Since I bought the house I’ve developed this tick of checking for leaks every time I go down there.
So I turned off the hot heater and shut off the water supply to it. Then I called around for a replacement. I’d been hoping to replace the tank when it’s day came with one of those new "tankless" hot water heaters, not only because it appealed the techo-geek in me, but also the waste-not-want-not side of me. They don’t waste energy keeping a tank full of water sitting around at temperature waiting for you to use some. But when I asked I discovered that the price of one of those things, installed, was around four grand. Yikes! I’m still paying off the new furnace I had to buy last year. The top of the line water tank for my size house (just 40 gallons) cost eight-hundred installed. Which was still more then I’d expected to be shelling out this month. But better that then a flooded basement. I still feel lucky.
I’m always reluctant to post about Hubble and my work at the Space Telescope Science Institute, largely because I am not any sort of leading engineer or astronomer on the project. I am merely one of the support Nibelung down in the software engineering services branch. A happy Nibelung, if such a thing is possible, yes. When they offered me the job at Space Telescope I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. But I cannot possibly speak for the Institute on anything that’s news breaking. You are far better off getting it from our public outreach people then me. They see the whole picture. I can only see my little part of it.
But I have family and friends who are expressing some concern about Hubble, in light of the news that we’ve lost one of the really good Hubble cameras, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Well…actually we’ve only lost two channels of it, the Wide Field channel and the High Resolution channel. There is still the Solar Blind channel, which I’m hearing now they expect to get back online eventually.
What you need to remember is that we still have NICMOS, and WFPC2. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has brought us many wonderful images, including the famous "Pillars of Creation" image from the Eagle Nebula. The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer has been used to penetrate deep into the heart of star forming regions, revealing features connected with the process of star formation.
So Hubble is still very much a capable telescope. And NASA is committed to our Servicing Mission 4, which is currently scheduled for September of 2008. SM4 will give Hubble a new and improved Wide Field Camera, which the folks at the Institute are expecting to be will essentially be an even more sophisticated successor to ACS.
Space is a hostile environment, and you have to expect that even our best, most ruggedly built instruments will take hits that do serious damage the longer their missions go on. But Hubble has kept plugging away, thanks in large part to our astronauts who have done such a wonderful job keeping our telescope healthy and up to date. They’re going to give it one more service call and that, I’m afraid, will be it. But the expectation is that Hubble will, after that servicing mission, give us many more years of breathtaking science. Hopefully the James Webb space telescope will be in place to continue in Hubble’s footsteps, when Hubble’s mission is over.
At the moment they’re busy juggling around the projects the science community wants to do on Hubble. Obviously things that depended on ACS’s two lost channels can’t go forward for now. But other research will fill in the gaps and when the new instruments are installed many things that were postponed can go forward I’m sure. Even with the loss of most of ACS, Hubble will still be very, very busy between now and SM4. We all still have much to look forward to.
Walking home from work today, I was noting all the things that had been trying to bloom just a couple weeks ago. We had this very warm snap for a couple of weeks here in Baltimore, and now it’s below freezing again. I passed a honeysuckle bush that was covered in blossoms, all shriveled and wilting now in the bitter cold. I felt sorry for them. There you are, a little bud sleeping. And one day the warmth and sunshine wakens you, beckons you out, and you open up, extend your color to the world. And then it starts getting cold. Hey…where’s my summer…??? But you don’t know that there is no summer here. And then the ice comes.
Good interview of Peterson in the Portland Mercury…
Ex-Ex-Gay
Peterson Toscano: A Survivor of the Ex-Gay Movement
For 17 years, Toscano identified as a "born-again, conservative, evangelical, Republican Christian," at odds with his orientation. He now travels the country to educate people on the dangers of ex-gay programs, and how he was finally able to reconcile his faith (now as a Quaker) with his identity.
If his show ever comes around to your neck of the woods you just have to see it. It is amazing.
Bernd das Brot [Bernd The Breadloaf] is a star on the German children’s TV network KIKA. He can best be described as a German Muppet in the form of a loaf of bread, and he hosts the show with his two comrades, Chili das Schaf (Chili the Sheep) and Briegel der Busch (Briegel the Bush). It’s a "variety" show with skits and music and lots of additional (human) actors, musicians and dancers. Bernd and his friends were, I believe, intended to appeal to children; but soon their popularity grew with teens and young adults and became a cult classic that still airs on KIKA — at a time of night when most of the Kinder should be sound asleep.
I first "met" Bernd in the summer of 2005. Each year, I bring a group of American college students to Germany for a study abroad program based in Düsseldorf. I was resting in my apartment one evening, channel surfing, and I stumbled onto Bernd’s show. I was instantly hypnotized. What on earth was this madness, and how could it be happening in Germany? But as it slowly dawned on me that Bernd was the German Everyman (or Everybread?).
Unlike his friends Chili and Briegel — who are unremittingly upbeat and happy and excited about life and their adventures — Bernd is a manic depressive. Here is a bread whose main tag line, used repeatedly in the skits is "Mein Leben ist die Hölle" ("My life is hell"). He admonishes his audience that he’s had enough, he’s going home, and you, the viewer, should as well! "Geh nach Hause!" says Bernd in his resonant, gloomy baritone. He hates us all and isn’t ashamed to admit it. He is the dark night of the German soul anthropomorphized as a bakery item…
A 40-year-old former substitute teacher from Connecticut is facing prison time following her conviction for endangering students by exposing them to pornographic material displayed on a classroom computer.
Local prosecutors charged that the teacher was caught red-handed surfing for porn in the presence of seventh graders. The defense claimed the graphic images were pop-up ads generated by spyware already present on the computer prior to the teacher’s arrival. The jury sided with the prosecution and convicted her of four counts of endangering a child, a crime that brings a punishment of up to 10 years per count. She is due to be sentenced on March 2.
I had a chance this week to speak with the accused, Windham, Conn., resident Julie Amero. Amero described herself as the kind of person who can hardly find the power button on a computer, saying she often relies on written instructions from her husband explaining how to access e-mail, sign into instant messaging accounts and other relatively simple tasks.
Read the entire article, clickthrough to its links. You will find that in this case, as in so many others, the jury believed the police over a computer forensics expert and the testimony of the teacher. Said the expert:
This was one of the most frustrating experiences of my career, knowing full well that the person is innocent and not being allowed to provide logical proof.
If there is an appeal and the defense is allowed to show the entire results of the forensic examination in front of experienced computer people, including a computer literate judge and prosecutor, Julie Amero will walk out the court room as a free person.
You know what? I’ll bet that prosecutor kept anyone in the jury pool who was a computer professional from sitting on that jury.
"Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached."
–Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
I’ve been getting very tired of having to shut down Linux and boot into Windows, every time I just wanted to run my checkbook program. That one little program is pretty much all that’s tying me to Windows now for my own personal use. Between the Macs and Linux I can pretty much deal with the other hassles of living in Bill’s World. But there is just no good replacement for that checkbook program I use that runs on Linux and that’s surprising because I don’t ask much of a checkbook program. I just want something to reconcile my bank accounts with the statements and, most importantly, print standard wallet size checks. Yet there is nothing out there for Linux that prints those kinds of checks, something both Money and Quicken have done since the MS-DOS days.
So that leaves me stuck with my old checkbook program, which is Money 97. Yes…I’m still using Money 97. I like the user interface, and it just works. But not in Wine, the so-called Windows emulator API for Linux. And that doesn’t surprise me because I don’t think anything I’ve ever tried to run in Wine has ever worked. But recently I was tasked to investigate VM technology for possible use in the software test center where I work. As I did so, I began to think VM technology might be my answer…at least until a viable native Linux alternative to my checkbook software popped up.
A Virtual Machine is a program that emulates hardware, and upon which you can (theoretically) run a different Operating System within the one currently running. Until the Intel based Macs came out recently, Macintosh users could use a product called Virtual PC to run Windows in, and thereby the Windows applications they needed that simply didn’t exist for the Mac. You have to have a license for the "guest" OS you’re running, and there is a performance penalty due to the overhead of running inside an emulator. But it makes running two different OSs at the same time on the same physical machine possible.
VMWare offers two free products that will run on Linux: VMWare server and VMPlayer. But the server wasn’t really the kind of desktop setup I was looking for, and the free VMPlayer will only run pre-made VMs. I did a little looking around though, and found some websites that will allow you to download a kind of VM template for Windows…an empty VM that’s ready to install the OS in. I tried the one on www.easyvmx.com. It limits you to a 640×480 desktop, and puts Windows in it’s own isolated disk image based file system. But it allows network card bridging (your guest OS can have its own network address). You just fill out a few items in their form and then you download your ready to run VM. I gave my VM a 10 gigabyte disk image to play in, and 1 gigabyte out of my 4 of core ram. I figured even if it was locked into it’s own private file system, I could still share files via the network.
I decided I would run my copy of Windows 2000 inside the VM, since there is no software branding on 2000. I assumed that XP would regard the VM as a new machine, and it only allows you to re-install it on two new machine configurations before you have to call Redmond and explain to them that you’re not a pirate. I’ve already used one my XP license lives due to a motherboard failure on Mowgli so I didn’t think I’d be able to install XP at all on VMPlayer.
VMPlayer installs via your usual Linux rpm package, and it set up without a hitch on CentOS, which is the Linux I’m running here at Casa del Garrett. The VM I downloaded from easyvmx came in a zip file that I unzipped in my home directory. First you have to run the VMPlayer config script, vmware-install.pl which makes you agree to a license, and then confusingly asks you many of the same questions that the form on the easyvmx website does. After that’s done you can run the VM by simply entering “vmplayer (vm).vmx” where (vm) is the name of the .vmx file in your easyvmx VM template directory.
When it first comes up without the OS installed it tries to boot, first from the CD player and then from the floppy. So you install your guest OS just as you would if you were installing on a naked PC. So far so good. My Windows 2000 install CDs boot from a set of four floppy disks. VMPlayer was able to boot from them and then install from the CD without trouble. When it comes up, it does so in a small 640×480 window. When you click inside the window your mouse and keyboard work with the guest OS. But to get back out of it you have to hit control-alt. You can also hit alt-g to enter the guest OS.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get my network card to work with it, and that was a deal breaker. Without networking I’d have been reduced to shuttling my checkbook files back and forth via the floppy drive or the CD, assuming I could get CD burning software to work on it. Still not sure what the problem was since from what I’m reading VMWare seems to work just fine with nearly every network card out there. Worse, I also couldn’t get it to work with my printer, which I would have needed to print checks from my checkbook program. The VMPlayer kept complaining it couldn’t access the LPT port. I figure my default print queue was holding it open. I might have been able to access the print queue alternatively via the network, but I couldn’t get networking to work. So I was hosed.
So that left me with either springing for VMWare Desktop ($190), or another product, Win4Lin (currently $70). The reviews of Win4Lin looked promising, and this Wikipedia page gave it a pretty good looking pedigree. Even better, Win4Lin claimed to integrate the guest OS with the Linux file system directly, something VMPlayer wouldn’t do, so I could easily share files with it without needing the networking, if I couldn’t get my card to work with it. Win4Lin pro sells for $70 currently. The web site claims the price is only good through October of last year (the normal price is $90), but I was still able to buy it at the sale price. They offered a money back guarantee. It looked promising so I decided to take a chance on it.
Win4Lin’s requirements page practically screams at you that they won’t support anything but certain Windows bootable CD-ROMs (oddly…all Win2k bootables except SP3)…yet when I read the documentation it looks like it will install a Guest Windows OS from bootable floppies too, as well as directly from an MSDN library disk…which could be really handy because the only other way to install Windows from an MSDN disk on a naked PC is to make bootable floppies.
But based on what I read from their requirements page, I looked around for ways to make a bootable CD from my MSDN CDs. I found this page, which gives you a good set of tools and step by step instructions. Except it was only after following those instructions and creating a Windows 2000 CD with service pack three on it that I discovered that SP3 is The One Windows Install CD That Win4Lin Does Not Support. Dang. So I had to go back and make another bootable CD without the service packs.
Win4Lin installs via an RPM, just like VMPlayer, and needs certain kernel development packages handy on the host machine to allow its service module to be built on the fly. The documentation leads you through installing these on your Linux box on a wide variety of different distributions, but it seems as though all it needs is the kernel development package and the GCC compiler, so I can’t imagine any distribution that wouldn’t be able to run this. The rpm installed on my CentOS system without a hitch. After the rpm is applied, you run a configuration program which sets up the VM and its service, asking you some questions along the way about how much memory and how big you want the system disk image to be, and whether or not you want it to access the Linux file system.
Then you run a "load Windows" program which gobbles up your bootable CD into a disk image. They advertise a simple “one-click-to-Windows” setup, but I chose to do each step myself from a terminal window. When I ran this part of the install it worked for a while and then complained that it couldn’t read my Windows CD. So I put in a different one and ran it again. This time the software complained that a Windows CD had already been “installed”. Hmmmm. I tried the optional command switch that allows a reinstall of the Windows CD, and the process started back up again, and after reading the CD for a while gave me the same error message it did before. So just for kicks I just went to the next step, which was to run the Windows install off the CD image Win4Lin had theoretically just gobbled up. It ran without a hitch. I’m guessing that for some reason the disk image program just wasn’t handling the end of the CD correctly.
The "install Windows" program runs the Windows installer off the disk image it just gobbled up, and then promptly shuts down the VM, and puts a link on your desktop. Double click on the link and a new window comes up and you can watch Windows booting inside of it, just as if it were booting on a stand alone PC. Win4Lin gives it a nice 1024×768 desktop window right out of the box. I’ve not tried fiddling with it to see if I could change anything. There is a full screen mode too, which I’ve not examined yet.
Moving the mouse cursor into the window made the VM and its guest OS active, moving the mouse out made my Linux desktop active. The first thing I noticed was that the keyboard sometimes got confused as to the state it was in when I went back into the VM from the Linux desktop, and appear to be locked up. It wasn’t, it was just in the wrong shift state for some reason. I eventually discovered simply hitting the alt key whenever that happened would clear it up. Hitting Shift F12 while inside the VM window brings up a menu of special keystrokes you can send to the guest OS, such as control-alt-delete, and the cut and paste functionality.
Networking worked right off the bat. I could bring up IE and it went right out to the network without a hitch. Charmingly, Win4Lin had somehow made their home page my browser’s initial default home page. I reckon that happened via some OEM switch they used during the install. Win4Lin does not support network card bridging, so my guest OS had the same network address as the host. But it all seemed to work just fine.
Integration with the Linux file system in Win4Lin works like this: Windows is installed on it’s own disk image file under your /home/winpro directory. This becomes your Windows ‘C’ drive. But Win4Lin also puts in a link to a “//HOST/home/My Documents” directory it creates (if it isn’t already there). In your Windows explorer this looks like your usual My Documents directory. But it’s on your Linux file system as a normal user directory. You can put symbolic links in that directory to other parts of your file system as needed, and they show up in your Windows explorer as folders under My Documents.
If you install Windows off a disk image that Win4Lin has gobbled up, that image also shows up on your Windows explorer. So any time you change your Windows configuration and it needs to fetch something off your install CD it’s always right there. I suppose this is why they want people to install Windows their way, and not directly off the install CD.
You add your printer by adding it as the network printer: //HOST/host-printer, and then specifying the Apple LaserWriter printer driver. This is a generic postscript printer driver that talks to your default Linux print queue. Following those instructions I was able to get Windows talking to my old HP Laserjet from within the VM without any trouble.
Then I installed my old version of MS Money. The autorun CD feature on Windows works just fine on Win4Lin. You put the CD in and, on CentOS anyway, the CD auto mounts and (since I’m running KDE) a Konqueror browser window automatically pops up, as usual. But if the Win4Lin VM is up, the Windows running inside it detects the inserted CD too, brings up an explorer window on it, and the autorun feature starts if present. The Money install went off without a hitch. Then I ran the check printing setup, and printed a test check. It came out exactly right.
So I was in business. I decided to bring my Windows 2000 instance fully up to date. I installed IE6, and then ran Windows update to bring it up to it’s final version. Redmond won’t be producing a version of IE 7 for Windows 2k. But the last version of IE 6 is enough to get me past another couple of Linux/Firefox annoyances, such as my UMUC online web class site, which oddly keeps insisting that the current version of Firefox doesn’t support Javascript 1.5, on Linux, but when I run it on the Mac and Windows it’s fine. When that was done I had an IE I could run from within Linux for those occasions when I was hitting on a web site that only worked right in IE. As a test I logged onto my UMUC web classroom able to navigate around it without any problems.
After I had IE6 up to date, I could install the latest Windows Update active-x control and finish updating Windows. That was when I realized something else about running Windows inside a VM. What’s nice about Linux and MacOS is that doing a system backup is a fairly straightforward process, compared to Windows. There are no hidden system files or delicate registries…it’s just a matter of copying files from one place to another. In the VM, the Windows system disk resides on a disk image file and that makes it a simple matter to back up and do a system restore of Windows if necessary. I made several safety backups of my Windows VM image file as I went through the process of applying all the Windows 2000 service patches, until I had an up to date (or as up to date as it will ever be now that Redmond has pretty much stopped supporting it) Windows 2000 installation.
Then just for kicks I tried installing iTunes for Windows. You can share your iTunes library on your local network, and when I’m running XP on Mowgli I can listen to my iTunes library on Bagheera, which is my iPod’s authorized computer, through the iTunes instance I have installed on Windows. I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to my iTunes music while running Linux too. iTunes installed in the VM okay, and after I poked a couple holes in the CentOS firewall for its ports, it detected the shared library on Bagheera. But nothing would play. Nothing. Not the DRM’ed music nor the non-DRM-ed stuff I’d ripped from my own CDs. iTunes would just sit there, with not even the track elapsed time counter moving. As a test I tried directly importing and playing a local mp3 file into it and it still wouldn’t play. I don’t know if that’s a Win2k issue or one with the VM, but I ended up uninstalling iTunes. Oh well. I can still plug my iPod into Mowgli’s audio input jacks.
The soundcard is gracefully shared between Windows and Linux. I could get Windows media player to play some mp3 files in Windows and XMMS to play those same files in Linux. I didn’t try playing them at the same time, I just wanted to know that playing one wouldn’t stomp all over the other. It didn’t. The desktop sound effects in both CentOS and Windows worked fine while the VM was up.
I installed only the basic Sun Java VM, not the SDK. Then I installed my copy of Office 2000, mostly just for files that only Word or Excel would read. So now I pretty much have everything I need to keep running Linux nearly all the time, without needing to swap hard drives back and forth whenever I suddenly need to run a Windows only program.
Windows runs without any noticeable sluggishness on Mowgli inside this VM. Mowgli, let it be said, is a 2 Ghz AMD Athlon 3200 64 bit machine with 4 gigabytes of ram. I installed all this on 32 bit CentOS though.
It works. So far, I’ve zero complaints about it, and I’m a bit amazed. This was really very simple to do with this VM product.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
