VM Player - Disk space - Shrinked

The disk files created for the Virtual machine in my PC constantly grew in size until the whole of the host drive was used up.

I could not possibly find what would have gone wrong, because inside the virtual machine, the disk space utilized was not compensating to the usage of the host disk space usage.

Things I have done to get the disk space usage within limit.

1. Open VM Player, select the virtual machine, Click Edit Virtual Machine Properties.
• Select the disk drive and from the utilities dropdown list select "Defragment Disk"
2. After starting the virtual machine, open the VM tools and go to "Shrink", select the disks to shrink and shrink.
• Problem I faced while shrinking was, there should be enough space available in the host drive for the shrink to happen.

Video/Audio Problem - Google Talk

I was not aware about how to change the camera/microphone options in google talk. Because of this, even if I plug-in my USB webcam in my laptop, I wasn't able to use it, but google talk was only detecting the integrated laptop webcam.

Recently I found in google support forum, that the settings can be changed to configure the camera and microphone.

How I did it is, in gmail go to Settings > Chat.

Make necessary changes in the set of available devices and click Save.

Bingo!

VM Player - Freeze Intermittently - Problem

For the past couple of days the VM player that I am using was getting frozen for 15-20 seconds. This occurred at a frequency of 1 Hr everyday. I did not have any idea what had gone wrong, until I noticed the previous week the LAN configuration at my work had changed. It gave me a clue that the problem is due to the network, but why is my VM player in need of a network connection, when all I need to access resources locally.

I started troubleshooting the issue, around the clue that the VM player needs network access, but what for I was not clear. Some of the candidates that were considered for further investigation were
Local Folder Map
Internet Access

The local folder map was stroked off from the list as I found it did not have anything to do with the recent LAN change.

The next candidate was Internet Access, and it was the right candidate to put my effort to find the root cause of the problem. In the preferences of the VM Player, I had opted for software updates. I unchecked the checkboxes that made the VM player to check for updates and finally the VM player performance problem was fixed.

Ubuntu 11.04 - Slower like Windows

I have been using Ubuntu 10.10 for a while and literally never logged into the other OS installed on my laptop(windows Vista) for quite some time. Ubuntu 10.10 was very pleasing in terms of speed, stability and UI.

When the beta release of Ubuntu 11.04 was available I could not stop myself from upgrading. I had to downgrade the OS within a few days to Ubuntu 10.10 because of the performance problems in WiFi connection. I am looking forward for the Ubuntu 11.04 to be stable and faster, to upgrade the OS on my laptop.

The UI changes in the latest release is a very good improvement from the previous version. That is the feature I liked the most in Ubuntu 11.04.