You love working inside your Linux desktop, but at the most inconvenient times you’ve got to reboot into Windows—whether to open a tricky Office file, try out a Windows application, or even just play a quick game. However, with some free tools and a Windows installation disk, you can have Windows apps running right on your Linux desktop and sharing the same desktop files. It’s relatively painless, it takes only a little bit longer than a Windows XP install, and it works just like virtualizing Windows on a Mac with Parallels Coherence—except it’s free. Here’s how to set up Windows inside VirtualBox, and then get Windows apps running seamlessly inside your desktop.

Before getting started, make sure you have enough space on a hard drive for a Windows XP installation (meaning at least 5 GB) and enough memory to make two systems worthwhile.You can follow most of these steps if you want to try running Vista inside Linux, but your mileage might vary, of course (and check out this tip on making Vista’s networking work).

If you’re curious what the end result might look like, here’s a screenshot from my quick installation. I would’ve loved to have gotten iTunes running, but I didn’t have time to wait for all the post-XP-installation patches/upgrades to install to show you. (Click for larger image)

First off, we’ll install VirtualBox. For most, that just involves heading to their package manager and installing all the virtualbox pacakges from the repositories; in Ubuntu 7.10 (”Gutsy Gibbon”), for example, you can use this terminal command

sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-modules-generic

If you don’t see VirtualBox in your installation program, the app’s downloads page has packages for just about every major distribution. After installing, give your username permissions to run VirtualBox,(substituting “su” on some systems):

sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a [your username]

Restart your system for good measure, and now you should see “InnoTek VirtualBox” in your application menu—it was in “System Tools’ in Gutsy. Get your XP CD ready and fire up VirtualBox. Choose “New” from the button menu, and then give your virtual system a name (WIndows XP usually works for me) and choose “Windows XP” from the bottom menu, then hit “Next.” Decide how much RAM you’ll dedicate to it in the next window, hit “Next,” then, assuming you haven’t done this before, hit “New” and follow the prompts to set up hard drive space for your virtual XP system. Make sure that partition is selected, hit “Next,” then hit “Finish” to set up your new XP space.

Back at VirtualBox’s main screen, see if the “CD/DVD-ROM” menu is highlighted. If not, click it, and then check “Mount CD/DVD Drive,” “Host CD/DVD Drive” (and make sure it points to your system’s CD drive), and check yes for “Enable Passthrough.” Hit OK, select your XP image from the left-hand column and hit “Start.” You’ll launch into the hopefully familiar XP installation routine; follow it through until you’re at your Windows desktop.

Now you’ve got a working Windows inside a resizable box, but let’s take this further. Remove your XP CD from the drive, head up to the “Devices” menu and choose “Unmount CD/DVD-ROM.” In the same menu, choose “Install Guest Additions.” VirtualBox should prompt you to download the Guest Additions ISO file, then select it to be mounted. This creates a virtual CD drive in XP, which you can get to through Start Menu->My Computer (it might take a moment to show up). Double-click the “CD drive” and follow the prompts to install the extra tools. Reboot once you’re done for good measure, and restart the XP machine.

Once that’s finished, you’ve got a “Seamless” option available in the “Machine” menu, or by holding down the “Host” key (Right Control by default) and hitting “L.” Either way you run it, it drops the big window and deposits Windows’ bottom taskbar on your Linux desktop. You can also ditch the main VirtualBox window at this point, if you’d prefer.

The Start panel’s default bottom position can be a problem for GNOME-based systems, since you’ve already got an app-switching bar there. I recommend either moving your Start or GNOME menus to the left or right-hand sides, or setting your Start menu to double-height, which puts the Start button just above the GNOME bar. Either way, make sure you un-check the “Keep the taskbar on top of other windows” option on the Windows toolbar, or you might see a few graphical glitches. Otherwise, pretty neat, huh?

Now for the final piece: Synchronizing your Windows and Linux desktops. If you’re running in Seamless mode, hold down the “Host” key and hit “Home” to bring back the virtual XP desktop. Select the “Device” menu and choose “Shared Folders.” You’ll be prompted to choose a folder from your Linux system; select your Desktop folder (usually found at /home/your username/Desktop). Head back to Windows, launch a command prompt (enter “cmd” into the “Run” dialog), and enter the following:

net use x: \\vboxsvr\Desktop

If it worked, you should see an X: network drive mounted in your “My Computer” window.

Now for the final touch: Synchronizing the two desktops. In XP, hit the “Run” dialog and type in “regedit.” Make a backup first (File->Export), and then navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Explorer -> User Shell Folders. Double-click to open the properties on the “Desktop” key you’ll find there, and enter a new value of (without the quotes) “x:”. You should see the change immediately—everything on you put on your Linux desktop is shown in Windows and vice-versa—handy for storing downloads grabbed in Windows.

If you’d rather do without the Start menu/panel integration and just want a few custom apps to open in their own windows, check out a helpful guide at Linux.com to getting this set up with some free tools and VMWare Server, which, while not quite as user-friendly as VirtualBox, is still a pretty nice package.

Got your own Windows-inside-Linux set-ups (besides Wine, which is another thing entirely) you feel like sharing? Have any suggestions/tweaks to this step-by-step? Share it in the comments and help two disparate operating systems find some harmony.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker.com, is looking for ways to spend the precious minutes he’ll save every day by sticking (mostly) to one OS. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

Small adjustments to your food consumption can lead to huge savings, according to weblog The Urban Vegan. Instead of buying lunch at work, pack your own. Freeze anything that you don’t want (instead of tossing it out), and then save the food for another day. Stock up on goods that are on sale at the store. If you’re able to, grow your own fruits and vegetables. Use cloth napkins instead of paper. Focus on investing for the long term and not only for the near future and you may reap some huge monetary benefits when you consider the value of the dollar in all of your decisions. What are your favorite food financial tips? Share them in the comments.

25 Money Saving Kitchen Tips for Frugal Vegans [The Urban Vegan]

If you’ve been hard at work in school and haven’t had the time to study for an exam, then perhaps you should set aside time the night before to cram for the exam. Depending on what type of learner you are, you may feel comfortable cramming by rereading your course notes, reviewing summaries in college textbooks, recording critical information into a tape recorder (or computer), or applying memorization techniques. Quiz yourself to review the information you’ve retained. Sure, it might be better to space out your studying over a few days, but if that option fails, cramming might be your only option—and these suggestions should get you on your way. What are your best cramming techniques? Let’s hear them in the comments.

How to Cram for a College Exam [DegreeDirectory]

Create greeting cards in a flash using Flickr photos with webapp Phreetings (which quite appropriately stands for photo + greetings). Simply enter in a search phrase and watch as hundreds of images come up. Drag the image of your choosing into a separate pane. Enter a greeting phrase and choose a color scheme. Phreetings will generate a random URL that you can then send off to your friends. The process takes all of 30 seconds and it addictive to use with the number of thumbnails that come up for your choosing.

Phreetings (Photo + Greetings) [via GeekSugar]

While hotels are used to catering to the shady sides of society—there’s good reason that rooms are void of blacklight fixtures and stocked to the gills with plenty of cheap towels—they are not used to appeasing eco-conscious thieves. According to Montana’s page on energy efficient CFLs, “building owners, hotel operators and office managers complain about people stealing the CFL bulbs right out of the fixtures.”So what can be done about the problem?

According to Montana: “There is no easy way around this, and it is a real issue. Hey, these bulbs are popular!”

If only the allure of low energy illumination devices weren’t so close to the cockles of Man’s heart, maybe we could hope to find a moment of order in this crazy world we live in. [Montana via ecogeek]

On Friday, I moderated a fun panel at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami (see photo above). The basic premise was to try to come up with a compelling web app in 40 minutes. There were a lot of good ideas, but the best ones centered around communications and how to use technology to get around the frustrations of e-mail and phone calls. It was clear that the panelists think these communication modes that we rely on every day may very well be in the process of breaking down. (CNet’s Caroline McCarthy, who was covering the conference, notes this as well).

A lot of the ideas were about getting around current communications bottlenecks. Leah Culver of Pownce came up with a white pages service that uses SMS text messages to look up phone numbers. Blaine Cook of Twitter suggested creating a call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies and put them on hold until a human answered. In other words, you would specify what department you want to speak with at a company, and the software would call and go through the phone tree, and digitally push all the right buttons until it got to a human operator, at which point it would ring your phone. I thought this was brilliant.

But the app we ended up spending the most time brainstorming was one that Digg’s Kevin Rose dreamed up to help him manage his e-mail. He can’t keep up with it all, and wanted to come up with a way to stop offending people who he never gets back to by sharing some of his e-mail data with them. The concept was a site that keeps stats on your e-mail usage that your friends can check to see how far behind you are in responding to e-mails in general. (”It’s not you, it’s me”).

The stats would show your friends things like how many e-mails you got today, how many you’ve responded to, average response times, etc. When you look at the site, you’d get a deeper view, including alerts on who you are responding to and who you are not (but should be) based on your past e-mail behavior. The way it would know how to prioritize your e-mail would be to figure out your social network based on who you email a lot (similar to what Xobni does for Outlook). It would create alerts like: “Email Mom!” We ended up calling the app Mail Model, per Matt Mullenweg’s suggestion (other name suggestions were Mailr, which is already taken, Mail Stats, and Don’tBeAnEmailJerk.com).

I am not convinced this would actually be a viable service. If I think you are a jerk for not responding to my emails, getting a notice that I am No. 300 in your queue is not going to make me feel any better about you. But I thought the panel was instructive because it points to a problem that is starting to effect everyone, not just Kevin Rose. It’s not just that people are having a hard time keeping up with email. It is that email is having a hard time keeping up with us and our insatiable need for constant communication. If an e-mail falls below the fold, which in my case on Gmail is the last 50 e-mails, it is pretty much lost. And anything more than 48 hours old is a dead conversation.

Why doesn’t email work anymore, and what can be done to fix it?

(Photo via White African)

Holy crap! Cosmopolitan Magazine—never mind why I was reading it—has just published an article saying the Apple Store is the hottest haunt to pick up dashing young chaps. That means hordes of the Cosmopolitan Magazine reading public are off to their local Apple Store to search for trendy geeks like you. It makes no sense to us either, but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, lad. This may well blow your mind, but here’s the situation; you may get to talk to a hot girl. Shocking, we know. Checkout Cosmopolitan’s reasoning about the Apple Store after the jump.

“The draw: Most guys are natural gadget lovers, and with sales of iPods and MacBooks skyrocketing, more men than ever are stopping by Apple boutiques. The vibe at the stores is conducive to man meeting too: You can check your email among cuties, take a free workshop on anything from Photoshop to podcasting (a great opportunity to strike up a conversation), or just survey the, ahem, good-looking merchandise.”

Now, put your OS loyalty aside and skip on down to your local Apple Store, take a few good jokes with you, and you might just get a chance to show off your real Penryn processor…you know what I’m saying. (N.B. Avoid jokes like that.) [Cosmopolitan via androidapps; image via insanely great tees]

Sure, we have heard word of lithium ion batteries being possibly implemented in a Prius before, but Mercedes-Benz is going beyond concept speculation with its S400 BlueHybrid, which promises Li-ion HEV action to be hitting the production lines by 2009. At present, that makes the S400 BlueHybrid the first Li-ion HEV with a set mass-production time frame.

Current hybrid vehicles use nickel-metal hydride batteries, but the lithium-ion alternatives are known to offer greater efficiency, as well as a better overall weight-to-power ratio. The problem with integrating the Li-ion technology was in securing their stability—they became far too hot to be a viable option in a hybrid vehicle. Fortunately, Mercedes-Benz has 25 patents it is confident solves the dilemma of battery overheating, whether they stay on target for 2009 is another matter, but we certainly wouldn’t doubt them. [CNET]

Sarah Lacey, the now host of Yahoo Tech Ticker who is perhaps well known to TechCrunch readers as being the person who was suppose to have thrown a drink on Michael (she denies it), interviews Michael in the video above as well providing a brief tour of TechCrunch HQ.As the rank outsider on the TechCrunch team (Americans can insert foreigner there, both in nationality and physical location) I’ve always found the way Michael runs TechCrunch fascinating, particularly as someone who has been involved in the blogging community for a long time (years before Michael discovered it). It wasn’t that long ago that running ads on a blog was frowned upon (hey Dave), then later blogging for a living was something very few people did, and even then, it wasn’t great money.

The tour through alone is worth watching, even if they did turn the lounge (couch) around for the interview. Laguna (Michael’s dog) greats Lacey at the door, and you get some feeling for how the Crunch empire exists.

You can also see Michael’s response to the question “Are You an Arrogant Ass?” here.

(thanks to Agentbleu for the tip)

Survey results released by We Media/Zogby earlier this week show that more people turn to the internet for news than any other source.

The survey found that nearly half of all people in the United States (48%) cite the internet as their primary source of news and information, compared to 29% for television, 11% for radio, and a dismal 10% for newspapers. There was an age difference at the lower end, with only 7% of people aged 18-29 getting news from newspapers, vs 17% of those 65 and older.

67% of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news.

It should be noted that the survey did not break down the types of news sites respondents were reading online, so by no means do the results equate with the death of the mainstream media (ie they could well be reading mainstream media sites online). The figures do suggest that some forms of offline news reporting may well be headed to the Deadpool over the next 5-10 years, at least in the United States. It will be a long and slow death, but as newspapers and radio slump into lower and lower single figures, it’s a given that the presence of both will shrink; we’re already seeing massive across the board downsizing now in print media.

(in part via Reuters, image credit: Brian Solis)