Update: Here is the automated way to install 32 bit Firefox (and its clones) as well as Flash, Java, Mplayer and maybe other plug-ins (new are added as you read). Kudos to Kilz.

When few month ago I upgraded my desktop PC’s memory to 4 GB, I installed 64 bit Ubuntu since my 32 bit Windows could only use 3 GB, which is a little tight to run several virtual machines. I’ve already tried few times to switch to Linux as my main OS but never really succeeded. This time I decided to try Ubuntu which is more friendly to desktop users. I should say that I’m working with Linux on servers for quite a while (I first started with Oracle on SUSE Linux about 6 years ago and had to administer Linux Servers) but whenever I switch to Linux on desktop - my productivity drops.

I should say that I was much more pleased with Ubuntu compare to my earlier attempts with SUSE or Red Hat options. Software management and installation is much easier with as long as it’s provided within one of its repositories. I’m perfectly fine to install and, if needed, compile something manually but in the end it becomes a nightmare to make sure that things keep working and not impacted by other installs or upgrades. Ubuntu almost solved it.

The problem I hit yesterday was with Flash 9 Plugin (I was trying to open Google Analytics). I couldn’t get the plugin provided by Macromedia to work with default Ubuntu Firefox. Apparently, the plugin is only working with 32 bit Linux/Firefox. I tried to install standard flash plugin from Ubuntu repository (libflash-mozplugin) but it wasn’t working — just crashed my Firefox.

After some research I found Firefox2AMD64Flash9Java link that suggested to install 32 bit version of Firefox for that purpose. I followed this page’s idea (the instructions are a bit loose and reference older versions) and successfully installed 32 Firefox and Flash 9 Plugin. For Java Plugin I installed ia32-sun-java6-bin and linked the plugin from there. Looks like it’s working pretty well so far but I really hate these productivity stoppers.

I should mention, perhaps, that I was able to setup read-write access to my NTFS volumes using ntfs-3g driver and vice versa - I setup Ext2 IFS for Windows enabling my Windows environment to read and write Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems.

I should also say that it took me quite a bit of time to install VMware Server on 7.04 Ubuntu. I had to patch some files and it took a while to find the way to do it. Now you can use instructions from here. There is some information that latest Ubuntu kernels have some special optimization speeding up virtual machines but I wasn’t sure if it’s enabled by default with VMware server. Anyone has more info on those KVM, VMI and Para-Ops and VMware for Ubuntu?

Actually, I have issues with VMware performance compare to Windows host. I compared virtual machine running only 10.2.0.3 CRS (no Oracle instance) and on Windows it takes about 15-20% of one core while with Ubuntu it consumes about 50% of a single core. Inside the virtual machine, there are only slightly visible init.cssd processes (1-2% in top). In both cases it’s not normal and there is something special about this CRS running inside VMware guest. It just worse on Ubuntu than on Windows. I will do some more research on it and, probably, a blog post will be in order.