Packagekit annoyances, Virtualbox, and software in development

My notebook, a Lenovo 3000 C100, is my main computer at home. In fact it's the only computer I own at home. Because it is my only computer I run a LTS (Long Term Service) version of Ubuntu Linux on it. Now I like to try out shiny new software as much as the next guy. I could go to work, buy a machine, and use it as a Linux development machine, but I'm trying to reduce the number of computers we have in the house, not increase them.

My solution is a pretty easy one, Virtualbox. So I fired up Packagekit. For those of you unfamiliar with the term Packagekit, it's simply the Add/Remove software program at the bottom of the Applications list in Ubuntu 8.04 - 9.04 (9.10 has replaced it with Ubuntu's Software Centre). I made sure All applications was selected in Packagekit and searched for Virtualbox. The result was only 1 file, a bit strange since I know there are dozens of Virtualbox files, but I accepted that single result and installed Virtualbox. When I started Virtualbox and attempted to install a client OS I learned that Packagekit simply isn't sufficient for installing some software, a guest module needed to be installed, a module Packagekit doesn't make available (but Synaptic, System > Administration > Synaptic) does.

Synaptic package manager saved the day when Packagekit didn't work quite right for me. I've noticed this a few times, particularly when it comes to any software remotely server-ish. So use Synaptic or the command line apt-get when you can, they don't hide software from you (as much).

With Virtualbox installed I proceeded to install Ubuntu 9.10. I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu 9.10 - for me Canonical broke a lot of things, power management, some graphics drivers got worse, and GDM2 blows chunks. This is why version 9.10 good as a virtual machine, I can compile software on the latest non-development version of Ubuntu and get some of the functionality of applications I couldn't in the 8.04-LTS release I regularly use.