It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve already been plugging away at this for more than two hours. My only goal this morning was to get VMware up and running. Sounds simple – it’s literally a two minute process under Windows. You run the installer, and you’re done. Should be straightforward, right? After all, this is a pretty expensive application – it ain’t OpenOffice, and if OpenOffice can manage a simple install, then this should, right?

Wrong. At the moment, the installation program is telling me: “The path “/usr/src/linux/include” is a kernel header file directory, but it does not contain the file “linux/version.h” as expected. This can happen if the kernel has never been built, or if you have invoked the “make mrproper” command in your kernel directory. In any case, you may want to rebuild your kernel.”

Yeah, right. I may just wanna spend my Sunday morning doing that. Then again, Mr. VMware, I may ***NOT***, because I shelled out $90 to Xandros so that I wouldn’t have to bother with stuff like that, and your installation program should be able to get by. After all, I’ve already had to go download the source code, lay it out in a way that VMware prefers (because it didn’t recognize a lot of the directory names), and go back and forth with the install program.

When they say Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. And come to think of it, “they” includes ME. I’m not giving up, though: I still get the feeling the payoff is coming. Three or four years from now, I’ll be glad I did this, because the OS will be mainstream, and I’ll have the same ground-up knowledge that I gained by walking Windows from the DOS/Win3 days til now.