Oops, Almost

So my Linux endeavor has been fun today. At one point I did get VirtualBox running with an updated Windows XP showing a [choppy] Netflix Watch Instantly movie. The difficulty has been 3 fold here:

• My copy is from 2002. There have been three service packs since then and a metric ton of updates. Running Windows Update over and over is not fun.


• Getting an OS to run inside another OS puts all kinds of fun drains on my old-ass computer's already limited resources. (we're talking single core AMD 1GHz and less than a half GIG of RAM).


• I keep making space an issue. The first time (start counting) I installed Windows, I went for 2 GB of space, but I checked the "grow automatically" option, thinking it would grow beyond 2GB. The truth is that it would start at 8KB and grow to a max of 2GB. *sigh*. So then I went for 10GB, I didn't plan to install anything beyond the OS, and even bloated Windows is like 2-3GB, right? No! It's more like 5 GB. And I still wanted to install C# Express along with SQL Express and those are another couple of gigs each. So now I'm on round three and it's in a 19GB block, which hopefully will be enough. Hopefully.

Meanwhile I was also trying to point my /home directory to a separate partition which came in handy when I had to trash the partition where my OS lived. Doing the pointing was pretty easy (just a mount command really) but then when I rebooted, Ubuntu was complaining about the permissions and owner on the directory and some files it wanted. I tried my chmod and chown, and they "appeared" to work in that I got no response back, but when I listed the directory, no change had been made.

I'm now convinced that the problem is that my partition with my data that I mounted is a NTFS (Windows) partition and it doesn't really have a mechanisism for owners and permissions. Some things are just dumb.